We can only find our own truth : but sometimes it is hard to find

Tough start to the day. I was called over to Mum’s unit that my sister is taking over to look through all of her things to see if there was anything else I wanted yesterday afternoon. I had a pain in my head the entire time I was there, I had to cut short a walk with Jasper that I spent listening to a radio interview with a paramedic who spoke of attending many attempted suicides at a notorious headland in Sydney, called The Gap… after speaking many people back from the edge while rescuing others he and his paramedic partner had to deal with so much emotion and so many desperate people. The saddest part of the true story he told (and has written a book about) is that a few years back his paramedic partner took his own life after his partner left him. The synchronicity was not lost on me that my sister tried to take her life in 2013.

There was not a lot of Mum’s things I wanted. I had helped sort so much other stuff last year or the year before (its all a blur now as due to successive hospitalisations my sister was not able to deal with much of it) and took some things but now things just seem like a sad reminder of a mother who struggled to be there. I took a few items of kitchen ware, a pot mitten shaped like a cow’s head and several of Mum’s birthday books, one was full of the nature photographs of Australian photographer Peter Dombrovski’s that I gave her for Mother’s Day in 1993, the year I got sober and just a month before I met Jonathan. I actually put it in the bag to give to charity today, my sentimental urge to want to keep lots of Mum’s things has passed, I truly wish now to move on with my life but today I am feeling a well of sorrow and emptiness so deep at times.

I listened to one of my favourite Bryan Adams songs earlier, When You Love Someone. I cried a lot while dancing to it. I truly loved my other older sister who ended up in a home and could not bear for her and Mum to be the only family here, so I came back in 2001 as you all know, sacrificing my forward move in England. Its a source of deep sadness for me and a lot of regret, not all things are black and white, and a depth of emotional maturity allows us to have mixed feelings, I guess when it comes to complicated affairs of the heart. Some say to cut off but I am not great at that. I chose to come back because of the deep love I had in my heart for my mother and my older sister whose own family were estranged turning around a deep ancestral patterns. I don’t care any more if people misjudge and say I was held slave by evil ancestors, I just know my great great grandfather suffered a lot in his alcoholism and it got passed down along with deep wounds. I didn’t chose to be born into this ( or maybe I did who knows ) but I have had to bear so much and as a deep thinking person make as much sense of it as I can. In then end what I write here is intellectual understanding but what readers don’t see is the agony of the process I still endure on an emotional level working it all through and working for psychological separation. That said others go through similar stuff so I am not alone.

There is such a profound depth of sadness inside me for my unlived life right now. The taking of this last tooth has been a huge thing to go through, my physical reserves are a little low at present. Still finding ways to self nurture. I draw close to my soul in silence and hear all kinds of things, especially in those special hours between 4 and 5 am when I woke last night. The spirit world is very close to me then and I feel the wholeness of my journey that gets eclipsed at daylight. I am aware that we live on all kinds of different levels at different times of the day.

Sadly for me I see the unaddressed energies of the past pulled on me for understanding. Choices I made, I could not see the impact of or true meaning of at the time I made them. I see with more empathy now how my last partner found our family difficult and was upset after I spent time with my older sister in the home in her drugged emotional maelstroms, my heart ached for her and I wished to ease her pain, and sometimes I could when I sat and took her hand, but she was gone from this embodied life so so so many years before death took her from us. I got a call one evening on the anniversary of Dad dying to say she was not responding and when I went over and sat with her she came back at the feel of my touch and the love I gave to her… She needed that NOT FUCKING DRUGS. But the next time they called the ambulance and that was the end.

My other sister is living now. Death seems to have loosened its hold on her. I saw a packet containing a lot of drugs divided into daily portions in the top drawer of her dresser the other day when she showed me how it opened and closed. I myself have never take psychiatric meds though I did hear the other day that they have found a certain anti anxiety medication very helpful for breast cancer survivors. Sometimes lately I think I should not have foresworn all medications in the past, it was only fear of what I saw lithium do to my other sister that terrified me. But somehow I cope.

I do feel the hold of my family beginning to loosen. My brother and sister and the other executor are now dealing with the estate to get things finalised so we can both be independent. My sister asking me around to see if I wanted anything was a kind move. I am still a bit apprehensive about our journey to the coast in a few weeks, I know I will be very emotional. It is a lovely house but I want to move on now. I really do. Her family have done a lot with it so its only right they have some more access to it and I am even willing to pass over my share, they will reimburse me for it, so its not a problem and I will be able to go there at any time. If I had a partner it may be different but being there only brings up all the happy and difficult times with my ex partner and for me the place is still full of ghosts. I am not running away but I feel I need something new and present. I never thought I would say this. There is an ache in my heart as I say it. I just never really felt I belonged in this family… it makes me sad and maybe its not a fact, just a feeling. but there you go. Somehow I am feeling my own journey as a soul is calling me in a very different direction, but I will always keep an open mind.