I was trying to settle to sleep last night and I still had my phone on and suddenly I felt my body being pulled around and this often happens when someone is trying to contact or send me a message. It was quite late and the message was to tell me that my friend Christine is close to death. It was such an alarming messages as I know how much she has been there for her family and all she went through in the past few years with leaving her home in South Africa to come to be close to her daughter only to have a falling out with her son in law whoa to be honest is a bit of a control freak and there are addiction issues on both sides of the family. The long and the short of it was that due to the dispute all over some sweets they no longer honoured their commitment to help her to settle here in the south east and she only then had her son to call on and so she went back to South Africa for a while to be with him and they then moved to Perth. I know they left Christine who is older alone minding the children a lot and she was not well on the last big trip they did away leaving them all alone in a big cold house because they were being stingy with the heating and she was developing stomach issues during that time, the text said her condition had been ‘rapidly deteriorating’. The last conversation I had with her involved how they were trying to diagnose her with ‘depression’ and get her on medication and now to get this text to say she has a suspected malignancy was so difficult, plus she is 3 hours away by plane.
I woke today surrounded by that feeling of emptiness and death and I am glad to be up at 7 and watching the Sun rise, knowing at the moment I have my own health, but that said last night I felt very scared as my own stomach was not in a very good state yesterday at all. The triggers from the stage show about Johnny Cash meant I didn’t go to see my sister which in a way was good, as I let myself rest at home as much as I could and got myself out for a late walk/run around the block with Jasper. Even as I am writing this I feel my tummy quivering. My body could only relax after I read and responded to the text. I asked for details to be able to send Christine some flowers but they haven’t replied to me as yet.
I was thinking this morning of two lines from the opening song Tex Perkins sang at the performance of The Man In Black last night.
“I keep a good watch on this heart of mine
I keep my eyes wide open all the time.”
I thought then of the wound loss leaves and of the state of an ever on present alert of hypervigilance in the trauma survivor. This is depicted very powerfully by the Jungian analyst Robert Johnson in a talk he gave on the legend of One Two Man. I believe it comes from the Native American tradition but One Two Man is an orphan and his grandmother raises him and due to his own trauma and loss he wears a hair shirt with an eye on every hair that provides ongoing surveillance of his surroundings.
This brings up to me the concept of self care and the need for protection for those of us who may have been emotionally abused, abandoned or neglected. We need all of our sensitivities to alert us to what hurts and due to the hurts we sustain and may not be able to mention (or even actively thwarted from expressing and addressing) but at the same time some of us then have a hair trigger for hurt. Keeping a close watch on our heart is important but when does the need for safety and protection get over done? I guess it is up to all of us find the answer to that within the depths of our own hearts, souls and minds.
I am really glad that I was able to be so moved by the performances in the show on Saturday night. At the point in the performance where Tex and Rachael speak of June Carter falling ill and suddenly dying to due complications following heart surgery, I really started crying. I know that our grief connects us. I know that I am now in the ‘trauma zone’ period of my life which spans the period September to January. My accident at 17 took place in the second week of September and I was in a critical condition very close to death for three days following that. I got out of hospital on Christmas Eve which was the night my father was taken back into hospital for the final time in 1984, 5 years later. Dad’s diagnosis of cancer was given at the very end of October. My sister’s haemorrhage followed my accident by only 5 months and she lay in a critically ill condition for many many weeks and to be honest that time is a blur because every night when Mum and Dad went to the hospital I sat at home and started drinking surreptitiously from the wine cask on the top of the fridge.
I have to own that that was the way I coped. In the presence of even more trauma I retreated. I stayed in my self protective cocoon. I did eventually start my teaching degree but as many know I took myself off the following year. Things following my sister’s aneurysm were very unstable and she became psychotic. I only found out in recent years how bad she was when one of my nephews told me how she was acting out. But what happened in other people’s lives is not my fault and neither perhaps should it concern me as much as my own life, but sadly I was captured by all of those years of trauma. When I finally got sober in 1993 I had the chance to explore it all, but it really took about 6 years for the feelings to begin to unfreeze and unravelling my story has taken 20 more years. It has taken what it has taken.
I suffer all the time thinking how much better I could have handled things but the truth is I did the best I could at the time. My husband I reached for a new life overseas but sadly the power of tragic family bonds was too much. I felt very hurt by what the caretaker said to my friend on Saturday night, that she was some kind of hero for still being my friend. I thought of how when Mum fell in the final days leading up to her death in December 2017 following the seizures my grand niece had on a visit with her dad which replayed all the trauma of Judy’s aneurysm, it was I who called Alan the caretaker as I just felt something was up with Mum. I asked him to go check on Mum because I was worried and it turned out that Mum had fallen, it was my sister Sue who went to Mum as I had been in emergency with my nephew the previous night and was overwhelmed. It was my sister who had to make the decision to call an ambulance. I did not go to the unit. Mum was put in to hospital and died about 7 days later.
I am still grieving my Mum. I am still grieving the loss of my Dad in many ways and I am still grieving the loss of my own opportunities in the wake of Judy’s bleed. I ended up at business college and then sending telexes in the basement of a huge emotionally cold Research School of Biological Science, it was so far away from the artistic or humanities based career I would have chosen for myself had my father supported me rather than tell me ‘an art’s degree isn’t worth the paper its written on” and “Deb is far too bright just to be a teacher.”
My lost years spanned from 1983, the year Judith was returned to us with a one way ticket, and a battered brown suitcase all remaining of her many possessions, to 1993 when I got sober and then there have been the following 26 years of trying to wrest back what I can of a life in the painful aftermath of it all. I have realised now I must surrender. I cannot fight with my history any more. I sick of beating myself up, its just not kind. I do deserve the rest of my life to care for myself and to be taken care of. I don’t know if all the promises I have been made of support by Scott are going to materialise. I will be better placed to know by later in the week should the military get everything in order with his retirement. That said I know now I have to create for myself the best possible life in the aftermath of it all.
There is a part of me that would love to board a plane and go be with my friend who is probably dying. But the truth is I think my friend is a kind of mirror for me on some level, its something that occurred to me a lot in the last few months of knowing her. My friend Christine is also an empath, she is a kind, kind beautiful person who was all heart and soul and was shat on in the end by her son in law. I know enough about his history and his alcoholic brother and the way the parents treated the children to know why he had to hide behind his illusions of control and actively sever my dear friend from a loving relationship with her own daughter, all over one silly sweet. By now they could have all been living close to each other in a far warmer part of the country that is not as remote and distant as Perth, but sadly the connected loving life of forgiveness is not what seems to be panning out a lot of the time.
My friend will always be in my heart and I sensed something so deeply when I left the markets several weeks ago crying after seeing her there in an almost delirious state. I don’t know if she surrendered to her son and brother’s desire to get her medicated but something happened to her spirit, I think she was ready to go because one of the final things she said to me that day was “I just want a quiet warm room somewhere with a cosy blanket”. What she has now is a hospital bed and as I see her I see my older sister who was born the same year, 1946 in the care home and over those final days in the hospital in 2014 before she died.
Death surrounds me with the Sun today just a few second away from my first house Pluto at 7 degrees 29 Virgo in the first house, Mercury at 7 degrees is close behind it and in day or so the Moon will be with us. We are in the dark of the Moon today still and its something that occurred to me last night when I felt that tiredness and sense of emptying which often accompanies the period which embraces ‘the dark of the Moon.” I was born in the dark of the moon with moon 9 degrees behind my Sun that is 18 hours before the New Moon in Aquarius which in that year, 1962 was a solar eclipse. I feel often that the Sun of myself has been eclipsed by the Moon of my maternal ancestral past and critical placements were in Aquarius when my great, great grandfather left Cornwall with my great, great grandmother and their first three children in 1874.
Pluto too is planet of death, loss, transformations, sheddings, endings and ultimate rebirth at a new level of awareness. My life seems to have been dogged by its darkness, but such darkness is not the end. It is the birth place of the light too. “Stay in the dark place until your light burns clean.” These words just came to me as I sat here typing today and felt those shedding tears washing my soul clean and clear, bathing it in love.
Wisdom through suffering and purification through the ordeal by fire. Other words that come to me that Liz Greene writes of Moon Saturn Pluto. I noticed too when I looked at Johnny Cash’s chart on Saturday night that he too had the Moon Saturn aspect but in a square aspect. It shows the hardship he went through in his earlier life and the compassion and suffering he endured as well as his struggles with addictin are also shown by a stellium of planets Mars Mercury and the Sun in Pisces between 1 and 6 degrees opposite Neptune in Virgo at 6 degrees. What a weird case of astro synchronicity that we went to see the show as the Sun transited Cash’s Neptune which conjoins my Pluto just as his stellium straddles my own Chiron in Pisces. Is it any wonder that Cash’s pain resonated with me so deeply yesterday? God I love astrology. I love knowing that these mythic themes of loss, longing, suffering, joy and struggle and transformation affect every single one of us and interconnect us. Astrology does not remove any of it, but to me it helps to make sense of the journey. Yet as I just listened to these lyrics it occurs to me that we cannot forever live inside philosophy when its the warmth of an engaged and loving human presence has the most potential to bring us fullness at least for as long as warm blood floods our veins.
I look up to the stars
But heaven isn’t holding my hand
Hoping I can make it to the end
All I want is enough to believe
Emerging From The Dark Night 