I came across a beautiful article which chimed with me. I too have found myself suddenly breaking into heaving sobs while cooking or driving or ironing. And I realise that I will turn 54 in December whereas my cousin will always remain 53 - well '49' if you asked her.
I add the link here and pick up some resonant passages below.
So, what is it saying? Do something with the grief - turn it into something positive. There will come a time for that I am sure but, right now, my question is 'what for'? What is the purpose? Something to think about, though.
I was heartbroken and angry but horse riding and medieval poetry revealed the quest I was on
This April, I will be older than my elder sister Nell. She died of cancer in December 2019. She was 46 when she died, two years older than me. This year I will be 47. Nell will always be 46. Writing “Nell died” still disturbs me as it did in the months after her death. She was my older sister. She wasn’t supposed to die. As little girls we learned to talk lying in beds beside one another. We sat in the same bath water, shared the same toothbrush, wore the same knickers, fought over the same toys.
I was undone. My bright world turned dark with a physical, emotional, spiritual pain that overtook it. I felt ripped open and often all I wanted to do was lie on the floor and scream. I have five children so I knew I wouldn’t take my own life, but I fantasised about vanishing into the place I’d come from, before I was born, and finding my sister there.
“How are you?” kind friends said, and I didn’t know how to tell them the truth, which was heartbroken, demented, bereft, insane and very, very angry, so instead I said fine, I’m fine, and they would reply they could not imagine what I was going through. I felt alone, quickly learning that society really doesn’t want heartbroken, demented, bereft, insane and very, very angry people walking around, although believe me, there are many of us, all around you, since the people we love are dying all the time.
I needed actions that matched the enormity of my feelings, because there was a cathedral collapsing inside my soul every day, and I wanted to know how to express it.
The other place I found solace was in poetry. In Gilgamesh, perhaps the oldest poem in the world, I read: “Death lives in the house where my bed is and wherever I set my feet, there Death is,” which was consoling, since wherever I set my feet, death was there, too. The older the poetry I read, the better I understood that these massive, difficult sensations going on inside me while I was also making a cheese sauce for lasagne, or pulling wet washing from the drum, were feelings women and men like you and me have been experiencing since the beginning of time.
Our society might struggle to provide us with the language of grief in everyday life – I cannot begin to imagine what you are going through – but writers in the Middle Ages had all the words for loss.
Losing someone you love very much and are closer to than anyone else alive, is lonely. No one can feel what you must feel but you. We are left with a life we do not want – since the person we love is dead – but the brutal fact is that this is the only life we have. For a long time after Nell died, I wanted to stretch backwards to return to live in the time when she was alive. I wanted to do this but, of course, I could never get there again. So grief is agony, but after some time I realised this big, unwanted feeling could also be something I could use in a different way, by using it as the impetus to create a life that’s more vivid, because of my experience of becoming acquainted with death, not despite it. This isn’t easy. It requires daily practice to make it happen. It’s also something that will happen to everyone. In our lifetimes, we will all be changed by death. We will all lose people we love who we thought we couldn’t survive without. This is an inescapable fact of life. Our society may not have the language to help us navigate this, but as individuals, we can find our own beautiful, odd ways of getting through it.
Horses, poetry and writing my book were where I found this, but as more time passes since Nell died, the more I learn about these beautiful ways we heal through mourning and the extraordinary and normal places we find comfort. Since his daughter, my sister, died, my father has practised his guitar and sung every day. He now sings at open-mic sessions, and I know this is an expression of both the way he misses Nell, and his love for her.
I also see the teenage boy who is a friend of my son’s, who shapes his grief for a friend killed last year on a motorbike, by sitting meditating on the riverbank where they fished together; the mother who lost her child to meningitis, setting up a charity that will save thousands of children; the friend who is moving forward from her partner’s death in embroidering stunning, multi-coloured tapestries. There are so many ways grief teaches us new ways to live.
And I find solace in the idea that a good life, a vivid life, might be one in which we are, like those knights, called out on our own quest to reimagine and recreate our lives after great loss. Because if you asked Gawain whether his life had more meaning in the safety of court, or out alone as he rode towards the Green Knight’s castle, I think he would reply he was most alive, out there, on his quest. I chose my knights and their poetry to take me across the plains of loss, because they were the symbols that made sense to me. I wonder, what would you choose?
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