I went over in the freezing cold to meet the caretaker of my sister’s building to get a key to her apartment from him earlier today.. This is the same unit complex that Mum lived in for 31 years after Dad died and it felt very surreal to be going to there to water my sister’s plants and get a novel she had at home to take to the hospital when visiting tomorrow.
While there I picked up a photo of my father that must have been taken in the final years when cancer had already begun to eat into his stomach. The shirt he is wearing is too big for him around the collar and his face looks so unwell, there are big bags under his eyes and he seems bowed down by a weight, despite this he has a gentle crooked half smile on his face.. I thought of all the trauma he witnessed in the final six years of his life commencing with the accident in which I nearly died in 1979. I thought of how six months later he was yet again a nightly visitor to the hospital where he sat with m mother holding the hand of my sister who was in a coma by then. Of how he never gave up on her as the doctor’s said (believing it to be true at that time) that she could not hear him and would likely never walk or talk again. I thought of the pressure my brother put him under in the business they had started over all of the money they borrowed offshore and of how they were let down by an advisor.. Dad carried all of this stress silently, unspokenly, deep inside his body and his heart and it eventually killed him.
I then thought of my sister working so hard over past months to get Mum’s place sorted and renovated to her wish.. I thought of how it might be for her to have only that and exercise and not a lot of friends but at least one good friend, but of how so often the conversation with this friend doesn’t seem to touch on anything at all internal. Before leaving I took a little piece of Delft pottery my sister wanted me to have from the collection of pieces from Holland that sits under a painting of lilies my Mum bought about 10 years ago. I went to get a coffee and something to take home for lunch which I have just eaten and yes the tears came as soon as I got home, in time they subsided, that wave moved on and left me peaceful if a little melancholy.
While there the caretaker who knows me well and knew Mum for over 7 years before she died was asking me how much I see of my nephew. I told him that we don’t really know one another well, as I left to go overseas after Dad passed and when he was growing up I wasn’t around much and how he only knew of me and my struggles second hand and how I distanced when I got sober from family gatherings where there was alcohol around critical annivesaries.. I remember the Christmas I refused to go the coast with Mum and Sue and his family. I ended up suffering epic nosebleeds spending most of the four days with my head over the kitchen sink passing huge clots of blood. I thought of how, before they left Mum and I went to the supermarket and she paid for my food and a bunch of flowers before driving off, I nearly got sideswiped by someone who knew my Dad and this all leading up to about the 29th anniversary of his death. It was around this time my sister collapsed in bed and my nephew and his wife came in and screamed at her for ‘ruining Christmas’ then sent her and Mum home on a bus.
Lately I see how much ignorance there is.. I also see how important deeper insight, understanding and forgiveness is.. How little others, including family can know of our inner life. I think of how each person in the family in being born at a different time, develops in a different way, is more or less closely bonded to parents and siblings.. I thought of how long it can take us in recovery to begin to see the bigger picture of a complex family history of trauma, dissociation and loss. I also thought of how important an open minded attitude of love is to all the painful circumstances even if it takes years of anger, pain, confusion, loss and resentment to get there.
To me the truth of my life lies in my history and in the depths of my soul, it involves facing my entire history both personal and collective as well as understanding how both interface (the personal and collective) it also involves facing wounds, ignorance, buried knowing, vulnerabilities and blind spots..
These words resonated today (again taken from Tian Dayton’s book The Soul’s Companion :
Dorothy’s search for the wizard ended in the discovery that he was only a man behind a curtain, with all the needs and frailities that she, herself, had. I can make my journy endless by seeking God or self outside of me in people, places and things, or I can shorten it by turning inward and looking for them where I am most likely to find them. Exactly how I get there is of little import. It is the being there that matters, my willingness to know that my search begins and ends in the same place, within me.
This is the grand atonement, the being in touch…
D. H. Lawrence
I think while writing this of how often I ran away seeking myself. I thought about how my injury finally brought me home. I thought of both the emptiness and the fullness, the times I see the great void of those years of trauma stretching out so far behind me, of the happy times that came for a time in my marriage, of the great sadness and isolation I fell into from 2004 to 2016 before meeting Kat my therapist and undergoing breast cancer. I thought too of how sometimes even as dark as it is how much love and light and healing I feel around me, like a warm fire of spirit that glows as I feel and know the love and pain of my ancestors deep in my soul. That is when I turn to the keyboard and make a tentative attempt to capture some of the mystery here in my blog.. If anything is this my purpose.. To write about it? To bear witness?
A while ago while eating lunch the following words came to me.. I will end this post with them.
Emerging From The Dark Night 