In the ancestral shadows

I wrote this post last Saturday which was an intense day when I felt a lot of my Mum’s pain.   I posted it for a moment then took it down as it felt like I was being a bit of a suffering martyr in it (or at least that was what my critical voice said.)  I know I can never compensate for the father loss wound in our family that occured due to my grandfather’s death from war injuries in the early 1930s but I know that absent father theme plays out over generations in our family.  My marriage and my two sister’s marriages never survived.  Anyway I am posting this because it came from inside my imagination and its better not to suck it back in.  I will post it just in the spirit of openness.  I can see my own illusions that I am able to heal a wound far far bigger than me.  Its probably a form of grandiosity.

In the ancestral shadows I feel you here Bluey Watching the granddaughter you never met Give healing love to the daughter you left too soon And might you not also be the one Bidding me stay close?

I feel the squeezing on your lungs From the gas that hit you Full throttle in the trenches You returned from the Great War Deeply scarred And we will never fully know How much you suffered Under a veil of silence So that is why on Anzac Day last I found it so hard to breathe Cellular imprints do live on Think it mad of me I don’t care Some soul facts are true and defy rational explanation

On this remembrance day I remember you Bluey Though we never met Some force guided me 90 years on To the small town you laboured in Just before joining up in 1915 I did not know that place And on return at Christmas I read it on your war record I feel you were calling me and there you were watching from the shadows It all felt so eerily familiar

I want you to know I feel you Just as I felt TWT my far distant great great grandfather crying out today for his Mum From deep within my cells I heard him there in the base of the caduecus His cries were not for naught It is a wound we all carried And which I bear testament to

And this pain of remembering of losses is a gift to show me how precious and deep those blood connections are And how powerfully when severed they haunt us  Longing for lost love echoes along all through the years Until we turn and face the truth Disguised so deeply in our soul Hidden under layers of obscuration and forgetting

So today I thank you for this realisation For this remembering And I let you know Your suffering will not be for naught Tonight I will be there remembering you