Its warm and sunny with only a breath of wind when I arrive home to Jasper after therapy at 2 pm.. He is waiting at the top of the deck because on the day Simon walks him he has already had some of his love and attention needs met and it truly fills my heart with happiness to see the joy and excitement with which he awaits Simon’s arrival on Mondays, its hard to get him to stop barking and jumping all over Simon to shower him with doggie affection and doggie hair!!.
Therapy was kind of peaceful today, earlier this morning listening to one of my favourite songs to open my heart Cherish the Love I just felt the grief pouring out of me.. It came in a wave after my visit to see my sister at the hospital yesterday. She looks so pale these days and was waiting for me in the lunch room as I did the circuit of the place trying to see where she was. We sat outside under the shade of the trees in the little garden by the pond and made what conversation there was.. My sister talks about ‘news’ it rarely goes deeper than that, though I do ask about other things,, we talk of a bit of current affairs and what shows we have been watching, she shared about her young son going with his wife to view the baby ultrasound as she has recently fallen pregnant and later make a cup of tea.
My sister told me yesterday she feels no change from being in there since July, and I felt my usual silent helplessness in the face of her feeling so down.. All I could say was ‘maybe you need to accept where you are’. But then in the ensuing silence I felt tears fall with the recognition of how much I do love her and how sad everything about our family so often makes me. I tell her about the book of Julie Rieden’s I am reading on little Hans, the Jewish boy from Czechoslovakia who was saved from the Holocast and how I wish Dad could be around to talk through so many things with.. No emotion registers much and for today it must be enough just to be with my sister. I don’t want to analyse anything any more on a rational level. She is my sister, she is where she is but so often I do cry with wishing it was all so different for her.. When she walks me to the door after nearly two hours she thanks me for coming and I give her a hug and tell her she is my sister and I love her.. But this morning I thought of hard things that went down when I was going into retreat from life and how hard she tried to pull me out of it and how much I resisted and after all, is this not all about grief.. grief over my Dad, grief over my sister who was so sick for so long, grief over my broken marriage and hers, grief over so many things..
I am not even aware of the grief I am blocking til after on the way home from the facility I stop by the shops to get somethings for dinner and buy a packet of brownies and devour one on the drive home, this is around 5 pm and maybe not the best time for so much chocolate and sugar. Maybe I am just hungry for some life and sweetness, but listening to the song earlier today the sadness came along with the feelings of love and powerlessness. I am aware they are always there under the surface but that I am also more able to laugh and joke as well these days, and after all my sister too, is a huge fan of comedy..
I told Kat this morning I am coming to the realisation that I need to see all that has happened in my life, not as some kind of aberration or ‘mistake’ but just part of my soul’s path that led to here… I thought of how, knowing what I know now I would never have left Cambridge in 2001 or 2005 to come back home again… I would have gone on to live my independent life there and possibly not been able to be with my older sister in those final years, nor able to sit by her bed on the final night of her life, holding her hand and telling her I loved her. Possibly my life may have been emotionally poorer for it, nevertheless it feels like such a waste at times, the drugs they had her on to calm her down, the terrible aneurysm that took her down in 1980, the last disastrous relationship with the wounded veteran who ended up abusing her later and then abandoned her. Sometimes the darkness of life we live just seem too devoid of love and true life, but its the way it goes in this broken, at times deeply wounded world. Kat tells me my task now is to come alive and that she sees this happening more and more, she also shares that she was upset my friend was so cruel about my brother last Tuesday even if he is blocking our inheritance, I see it comes more from a kind of emotional escapism than an active malevolent thwarting but still it hurts and seems to be an outplaying of his own emotional neglect projected onto Sue and I… Kat says I have to remember I do have power and I am not a victim..
I also read the beautiful quote from the Dostoevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov that a valued follower The Flow Into Words shared with me a couple of weeks ago :
“I think everyone must love life more than anything else in the world.’
‘Love life more than the meaning of it?’
‘Yes, certainly. Love it regardless of logic, as you say. Yes, most certainly regardless of logic, for only then will one grasp its meaning. That’s what I’ve been vaguely aware of for a long time. Half your work is done, Ivan: you love life. Now you must try to do the second half and you are saved”
And I thought of how often the meaning is revealed in the flood of tears which give insights to us that lay far outside the narrow perimeters of logic. To say it another way “the heart has reasons which reason does not understand.’ Or yet another way of saying a similar might be this : “life is surely a mystery, full of hidden paradoxes.”
Kat said today I was probably born hoping to ‘fix’ my family and as a child who was so much younger it seemed to me that they inhabited a world so very different to mine. But my family were not meant to be ‘fixed’ and neither was I, we were all born for our unique soul journeys and it is only now that I feel I can understand my parents had their unique journey too, one that only partially involved me. These days someone noticing what I need brings me so much joy, lately its the barista at my local cafe who two times has remembered he forgot I take one sugar and called out to me as I have been waiting or walking away with my coffee.. And last week I was able to fight with Scott over demands he was making that erased me, to let him know I won’t stand by and just be invalidated or ignored, that my needs and feelings do matter and I cannot just keep endlessly giving when it empties me out. For me these are major achievements (possibly just taken for granted ‘givens’ in the lives of those NOT affected by emotional neglect.) And being noticed means a lot to me, due to the fact I was so often ignored.
I am also learning what makes me happy.. Today it was the purchase of a very lovely book by comedian Bill Bailey full of chapters on different subjects like trees and music, the use of color in the art of Chagall and dogs that I bought from a city bookshop. And not only that I am learning TO ALLOW MYSELF THAT HAPPINESS, learning to say Yes to those things that wake me up and make me feel most alive, knowing I am worth it and have value as a human being.
Separating myself out from others pain and issues is taking time. I still feel the longings of my ancestors calling to me on some mornings when I am uncoiling out of my ancestral tendrils, and realising the resonances with the life of a man, Scott who by some strange stroke of fate came into my life four months and 6 days after my mother passed. I may never be able to bring him home, just as I can never heal the pain over the fact Thomas died never seeing his father again and I can accept, too the distance my older brother and his family keep from us all as a continuation of a stream of behavior that recurred with my father leaving his home in 1938 and never looking back.
In the end life lives itself and we are the ones who must come to terms with it all, call it the outplaying of fate or lack of consciousness or emotional blindness or survival drive in the flow of evolution, who knows.. I may not have achieved much in the external world but to have carried all of this ancestral trauma and tried my best to bear witness while fronting up to live and love a day at a time has been an achievement.. And this afternoon I can find rest in the silence and sunshine as Jasper snoozes dozily by my side. For these gifts of life I am grateful.
Emerging From The Dark Night 