inquiring parent

Grief hits at odd moments, like on a sunny day when I walk down the hill towards home and remember a similar day that I met her coming up. She  was coming to greet her children as they arrived home from school and couldn’t walk far because of the pain. I still believed then that she would get better, and I think she did too.

Another day I leave the kids at school and as I walk back I remember seeing her ahead of me on a morning years ago, I remember running to catch up, I remember the turn of her head as she waited for me, the way she cleared her throat and gave a little laugh, the quietness in her voice when she spoke.

Grief brings memories that seem almost alive, that make it almost impossible to believe she isn’t. One of our children says something cute and I remember how we used to laugh in pleasure at those little sayings, at their sweet ways. I dig in our garden and pull out the beautiful weeds that she told me were poisonous. I can’t remember how she advised to dispose of these weeds, and I can’t ask her now. Then I see her gentle smile. The image expands to become her standing in jeans and a loose tee-shirt, hands in her pockets. The memory is filled with warmth, the pleasure of having known her. Images flow through my mind daily: hundreds of images: sometimes nothing more than flashes, sometimes little movies. Some of these images aren’t even memories, but my mind constructing pictures from what people have told me of her last days in hospital. I wasn’t there: I had a virus and, still thinking she would recover, at least for a while, I didn’t want to infect her.

Months ago I read an extract from a novel, Shadow Child, by Libby Purves in which the main character has lost her son in freak accident. This character goes to the various places her son used to go, and her son is dead there too. I can relate to that; it makes no sense, yet death defies sense, defies understanding. Yes the person, the body is gone, and yet something of her remains.

My daughter googles her name and finds her website, and tears flow down my face. This isn’t sadness, and I don’t know what it is. To see her name still in cyberspace touches how I feel, touches the sense that I sometimes get that she too is still somehow in the air around us, in the flowers she planted last spring, in the park where we first met when our children were small. As my daughter chatters on I start  to write this tribute to my friend, Alison, who died at the beginning of the summer.   Quiet, accepting, brave: these are words that come when I try to describe her, and words can never give the essence of who she was.

On Youtube is a video of a man doing ‘The Work’ on his sister who he thinks should get over her daughter’s death, and at the end of his inquiry he reaches the turnaround and falls silent. After a few moments he says “Wow, I thought I was over it.”  Byron Katie replies, “You can’t get over love.”

(This is a link to the video referred to above.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiJsXcyN_u4&NR=1