A stormy day

It was a stormy dark day as she alighted from the Underground dragging her heavy bags behind her,  everything was a blur, and her vision was clouded, could passers by have any idea of how lost she was, what a wild sea was crashing around her, and of the darkness she had left behind.  For it was less than a month since her father had been buried, she never got to see the body as her brother, with his penchant for cleaning up what he regarded to be messes had swept in to organise all the formalities.  The entire experience was really all too mixed up and unprocessed with the cancer diagnosis only happening six weeks before her father’s heart finally gave out in the early hours of a Thursday morning while a doctor tried to perform an emergency tracheotomy on his throat.  The news came in a phone call at her work at the Research School of Biological Sciences.

Grief is shock, death is trauma and so is grief.  Grief is the tear or the wound that can be buried beneath flesh, there may be many silent griefs and tears or thorns which we have contained or received within which lodge within our tissue and remain embedded for years, so that now on her brother’s birthday less than a week away from her father’s these images of her young adult self come to mind and she is at one step removed from the scene but not unmoved by the enormity of it.

All these years later it finally feels as though it actually happened not to someone else, but to another self.  One she has been learning to leave behind over years and years and years of therapy and grieving.  And it seems even strange for her to write these words which in their own way seem to contain a kind of coldness or distancing.  But maybe it isn’t that at all, for the grief she has embodied now, and maybe, just maybe, grief when processed fully actually transforms and free us to be in life in a new way.  Perhaps over years and with the shedding of tears and fears, it becomes something no longer so wedded to us as a second skin but more like an overcoat we can choose to take on and off leaving on the back of the door when we wish to go out into life and once again embrace the sunny day.