Tag: grief

On tables, absence and loss

A few months ago, I turned 40. In the run up to the day, I was fairly ambivalent about it. It was just another year, and I am doing just fine thank you very much.

But a week before my birthday, we had a series of events that caused the bottom to fall out of our world. War and loss marked our lives in a way that it never had before.

And – in the margins of all this chaos – I started to mull about life before 40.

What struck me most was the absence of those I lost along the way to 40. Grandparents, friends, family members. And it wasn’t just their absence – people come and go in life – but the permanence of their absence, of death.

They were fixtures of years of our lives, and now they are gone. Permanently.

They leave behind a version of themselves – ghosts, fragments, memories, stories – that we can treasure. But they’re not here.

The war has made me want to talk to Grandad about the Blitz, sitting once more around that Orchard St dining table. The loss has wanted to take me back to long hours and late nights around backyard tables of my 20s. It has all made me miss a version of myself who didn’t have these losses.

Because that’s the point – this permanent loss seems to compound with age.

The impact of those who were here… but now are not. Of dining tables, of backyards, of playgrounds.

But the more you think about it, the more you realise that we are actually also born into this absence.

Our own parents carry their own absences, compounding over time. We will not know their losses and absences except as shades; as stories. Their own dining tables, backyards, playgrounds and memories of loss.

And, in the same way, my own children will not know my ghosts. They can never know Grandad. They can know about him – and they certainly will. But they cannot inhabit a memory of him as I can. That absence is my own.

As we sit around my own dining table, laughing over family dinner, my beautiful boys do not know what they do not know. They can never sit at that Orchard St dining table as I did. They will, in time, have their own absences. But they can never inhabit that Orchard St table.

And that, itself, is its own absence. And it is mine.

Ten Consolations

The house was filled with the echoing sound of silence. 

She had been here, but now she was not, and the sound of her absence was louder than her presence ever was.

I stumbled across the notebook weeks after she’d left. It was on the nightstand. 

It was smaller than my palm; her familiar handwriting calling out:

“Ten Consolations”, it said.

The words stung me. I didn’t want consolations. I wanted her. 

As I flicked through the pages, each pen stroke, each word, each consolation was a strange reminder of this woman who had shared this space with me for so long.

“Leave the kettle half full”

“Name your favourite spot in the room”

“Befriend the wren in the garden”

Each one, a simple consolation.

No ten-point plan, no staged approach, no gifts. Just a smattering of ten things; one to a page. 

A list, almost a jumble of collected thoughts… For me.

They read like instructions, but they weren’t really; they almost read apologetically – like she knew I wouldn’t like this, but had to tell me anyway.

And, so, on that first day, I filled the kettle halfway. I could still find the faint ring where she set her mug, a brown smudge on the benchtop.

Filling the kettle was almost like a nod to a ghost I still refused to believe in, but I duly filled it halfway as a gift to a future version of myself who might want tea. 

And, in time, I did want tea. And the kettle was there, half-filled, ready for me. Its whistle answered the silence. 

On day two, “wear your favourite shirt even if you’re not going out”, I almost had to wrestle it on. I wasn’t going out, and that shirt was for big days. Big days these were not; they were days for silence. 

But she was right. It did feel good. Wearing the shirt made me wonder why I didn’t wear it more often. I wondered what I’d then wear tomorrow. Did that mean I was relegated to my second-best shirt?

On day three, “write a note to a friend” helped tune out the silence for an hour while I put pen to paper and wrote to a friend. In time, the note went unanswered. Day three thus became less a consolation than a compounding of my grief. The silence grew in the corners as that day wore on.

On day four, “name your favourite spot in the room” felt odd, until, leaning back in my favourite chair, it seemed somehow more familiar. I was both in the space, and the space was in me. By naming the comfort, I was in control, and the consolation softened the silence, for a while.

The days continued, and the rhythm and thought of the consolations being outworked seemed to be constantly on my mind. Each day, I would fill the kettle halfway, open the journal, see her writing, and set about the task she had given me.

Not all of the consolations stuck. On day five, “play with a squirrel” started strong, but the squirrel declined my invitation, and I returned to the silence with my dignity mildly dented.

But a few grew legs and grew with me. “Smile at a stranger” did not heal, not really, but it did make me stop noticing for a moment.

Others gave me physical activities to busy my hands, and thus share with me the grief that otherwise gnaws, the sheer silence, and kept the dark hound at bay.

For a few moments, “befriend the wren who lives in the garden” would still the silence within, its song helping me put words to the unthinkable, unutterable calamity before me.

And in time, on the final morning, I reached the last consolation; the one I had not understood at first: “make a list of all the ways you were loved; however small”

I sat, with my tea, in my spot, and made my list.

I made it in the journal, under the handwriting of the very woman I had loved. I wrote of the life we’d lived in that house; of the moments we had shared; of the way she had loved, and the way I had been loved.

For a moment, the silence receded in full.

Each line carved into the page also carved a memento into my heart. 

By the time I reached the end, the notebook seemed thinner in my hands. It was still there. She was still there. But something of its substance had gone.

So I stood. I stepped from the place I’d named, the tea I had made and the silence that enveloped.

And I followed the sound of the wren I had befriended, perched by the window.

The sky was not blue but it was also not grey. It was almost waiting. And with it, I waited.