Somehow the loss keeps happening

An exploration of time, felt as a pulse, rather than a period

When the big bang happened all those billions of years ago, could we ever have imagined what it set in motion. What is still happening today, unfolding, collapsing, expanding, and creating. I’ve been thinking a lot about this sense of happening. About whether something happens in the moment it occurs, or whether it is happening in its becoming, it’s evolving. If, with this logic, it’s still happening now?

When someone is born, we wouldn’t say that they happened in that moment. No, we’d say that their whole life is what happened. And maybe their death too. And probably the impact of their death. And the way their loved ones did, or did not, know how to be with it. And how that influenced their children, their work, their relationships.

When someone asks me –

“When did your Mum die?”

What I want to answer is this –

My Mum died this morning when I felt the gut-punch loss of missing a dear friend’s wedding to support my Dad in his new family commitment. My Mum died this winter when I was pregnant, and then not a few days later. My Mum died two years ago when I left a man I loved for a life with a different horizon. My Mum died when I met a new love and started towards a different dream. My Mum will die tomorrow when I look at the news and reach, with futility, for her steady anchor.

My Mum has died hundreds of times, and she will die thousands of more. But this isn’t what people want to hear, dear reader. They want to believe the smiles, the progress and how I’ve made everything beautiful again. They want to say how well we’ve all done; how brave I am.

I am brave you know,

and I bet you are too. 

I bet you’re brave in ways that are completely invisible. In the ways that you wake up and keep moving through a world turned upside down and back to front. In the ways you open your heart again to possibility and friendship and love. On some days, I bet it’s brave to have walked to the supermarket, to have got dressed at all. On other days, it’s brave to have felt the warmth of the sunshine on your face, to allow yourself the whisper of a softer tomorrow.

When someone asks you – When did your loss happen? When did your person die? When did you receive the diagnosis? Make the move across countries? Leave the relationship? Cross the threshold? I bet they never think you’ll say that somehow the loss is still happening. You’ll find it hard to express that the loss is alive right here now, but that somehow life is happening too.

How life feels more like a pulse than a period of time. Events, memories, hopes and longings all contract and expand as one felt experience. Life is happening here and now, but also then and there. That loss isn’t just something you lost, it’s something you lose, repeatedly. And that somehow that’s okay, because of course we don’t just love once.

‘When did your love happen?’ would be a bizarre question. ‘When did your love begin?’ would make more sense. But we get asked all the time ‘When did your loss happen?’ while inside we want to scream ‘You mean, when did our loss begin?’.

“She died eight years ago”

–I reply.

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Becoming The Poem – poetry that has moved me this week

Go Slow

Go at the pace of the mosses and the trees; slow enough that green tendrils begin to sprout from your fingernails and lichen swathes your eyebrows.

Go so slowly that your roots spread and uncoil and writhe down through soil and rock. Be the slow medicine that this too-fast world needs.

Give yourself time to unfurl like a fern in the forest, ready to catch the sweet rain, the starlight and the passing butterflies.

Go gently. Remember, you have pushed through many long, hard days to get here. No wonder you are tired.

Take fallow days. They will be among your most productive times.

Wander the wild, overgrown pathways which lead to the places in you where thousands of bright, tiny flowers open each morning to the sun in the meadows as vast as the sky.

And when the time comes to show the world your beautiful colours, let the gentle seasons of your life work their own slow magic, and bloom.

- Caroline Mellor