Loss so deep

It was not possible for me to turn the computer on yesterday.  I find that on the weekends my loneliness and sorrow can run very deep, and lately I am seeing how I invalidate my own process and depth.  The reason is that I find in society there is an expectation that things will be done and dusted quickly (that includes grief, most of all), we are encouraged to look for a cure or ‘fix’ and move on without fully and deeply engaging and there doesnt seem to be much of a forum for addressing the depths of a dark night journey that can actually go on for years, at least in my experience.

However, despite this, my feeling is that many many many of us go through that dark night and as the global situation with our rampant externalisation and failure to look inwards and engage with any depth increases so do we pathologise those who are feeling darkness, sorrow and pain and started their young lives as acutely open and sensitive.   Could it be,as native and indigenous peoples have observed, that those of us who suffer in this way and at first turn to alcohol or drugs to numb are doing so because we are more acutely attuned to darkness and abuse in our society as well as our technological split from nature.  As Krishmanurti said once, “it is no measure of sanity to be adjusted to an insane society”!

The truth is that there is great beauty in the natural world, and at times in the human made world as well but it is also true that nature is also full of sorrow and endings and death and that when we engage in this process of shedding we too will suffer for a time and will, as human souls, need the comfort of others as well as their understanding.  But when we go through this kind of thing and are surrounded only by those who would rather not ‘go there’ or know we do suffer if we take on board the diagnosis of ‘pathology’ and we suffer even more being left all alone in that place where recognition, affirmation and comfort would salve the acutest pain.

I experienced suicidal thoughts once again on the weekend.  They included the idea of where i would go to purchase the right kind of tubing to connect to the exhaust pipe of my car.  It is quite a while since I have had these kind of thoughts… I have never yet  acted on them.  I find Sundays are often the worst day when I feel the depths of being alone most acutely.  No one has reached out to me for a while now, following Mum’s death and people have been ignoring my calls and messages or writing back to say they are just ‘too busy’ to write back.  Then there are the promises to meet up which you just know will only occur when hell freezes over!!!  My cousin cancelled a meeting on Saturday to go to the coast for the day.  The truth is, part of me was happy she could go away and just have fun time at the coast, preferable to being with me and having to talk about death but the point is where then can I go with the feelings locked up inside me?  Answer towards myself and engagement with my own heart, and yet I felt too the part of me longing to live free.

It was an horrifically hot 38 degrees celcius here over the weekend and so not much possiblity of going outside without being burned to a crisp.  The plants I had nurtured for months were burnt to a crisp too and maybe that was some kind of reminder of how painful it was to be all alone in the hospital ward with my Mum’s dead body after my sister and brother left me alone there just under 5 weeks ago. I got Mum’s few possessions together on that day, a toothbrush, toiletry bag, her pink brunch coat and cashmere cable knit cardigan which sits on the stool at the end of my bed now.

Anyway I have digressed.  I am always glad when tears burst through as they did on the weekend when I listened several times to the poem Ying Ying wrote for her beloved dog Max who died which I shared in the post prior to this one.   Reading the lines :  ‘You are gone’ … And ….’ You are not coming back’.  Broke my heart open in my body so wide I really did think I was going to tear open in half.  As Ying Ying writes in the lines before the poem “I did not know my small body could contain so many tears.”

I am aware that in feeling and opening up to this latest grief it is not just the grief of this latest loss I am feeling but all the others gone before.

The other words that really moved me when I listend to them being articulated were these :

I am the vast ocean that releases power to your soul.

I do imagine the soul as an ocean within us, in fact our bodies as we know are 90 percent water with so many substances that float around and communicate to cells in this ocean as well as organs and tissues, carrying as I was reminded today listening to another book on CD electrical impulses and charges the greatest of which is love.

People say that love doesnt hurt but I dont think those people know what it means to have deeply loved a soul so much; to see and know their core sufferings and struggle in living.  And its not just the suffering of my Mum I speak of here but of my older sister who ended her life in care and died in 2014.  I knew these deeper aspects of my Mum so profoundly and today in therapy Kat and I were speaking about the inner force that tries to annilate me and kill me off with its constant judgement and criticism (and appears perhaps most painfully in suicial ideation) and of the struggle my Mum had with not being truly seen or wanted growing up, a struggle she passed on to three daughters.

I know how hard Mum worked to be seen, to ‘make something of her life’, how ignored she often was,  being such a fiesty go getter it was what everyone ‘admired’ about her but did they see the deepest lonely part of her that somatised such pain and grief towards the final years of her life and sent her on a constant round of dotors in a quest for relief of her chronic pain?

I don’t want to say more at this point as my head is literally bursting and my knuckles are aching with truths and feelings and burdens of knowing I feel I have had to bear inside as a huge weight over years (editing this the idea spoken of by poet Robert Bly comes to me : ‘the shadow is a long bag we carry along behind us’  – or inside of us?).

So much of what goes on deep within us lies hidden in tissue, cells, bone and marrow and ‘in our waters’, and it is those waters that I feel circulating my own body and sending shock signals and impulses that bring at times contraction, pain, elation, joy, sadness, happiness, insight and clarity, and at times deep deep dark despair that on lonely days finds me questioning if I really want to go on.  And yet also know that some part of me does and comes to life when I fully feel and acknowledge the depths of my desire to die on some days.  And, part of me knows however hard it can be I must choose life for as long as I can work to express at least one percent of this journey perhaps my life does have meaning.

After therapy today I took myself to Mum’s old neighbourhood, the milk bar where I had some lunch and read from a book of quotes I have been compiling over the past years I have been back in my home town.  I would like to close this blog with them.  Some are from authors, poets, psychologists, Buddhists or other writers, some are mine.   I hope they speak to you too.

When winter comes

I may fear the dying

The trees shed their leaves

And so are we meeting experiences

Which strip us to the bone

We must not fight this death

It is the price we pay

To cross over

Into new life

And to know the value

Of what is lost

(personal realisation 3:45 pm 26th April 2013)

 

Do you not see

How necessary

A world of pains and troubles

Is to school

An intelligence

And make it a soul?

John Keats

 

Harvest your

Deeper life

From

all of the

Seasons of

Your experience.

John O’Donohue