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"Be still and let me love you where you are."
One of the last novel scenes I rewrote was my main character
waiting for the return of her lover, kept company by the ghost of someone
she's lost, the memory of her teenage self, and Death.
The scene unfolds like this:
āWhat do I do, if he doesnāt come back?ā
āYou go on.ā
āI wonāt.ā
āYou will.ā I slide onto the floor, back to the couch where she sits.
āWeāre all going to die.ā
āNot you. Not yet. Not like that.ā
āWeāre all going to die,ā she repeats.
I glare at Death, the human absence in the armchair, one last time and
close my eyes. A new fucking tiredness tugs at the stitching holding me
together.
āIf I die, will he go on?ā I ask.
āWe all go on,ā she says. āHow, is the real question.ā
I could not have written that last year.
I had to first experience the kind of loss that makes you question the how and then work out the doing part, as your Promethean heart is shattered each morning when you wake, having forgotten as you slept, that someone you love is no longer there.
* * *
In October last year, a week before Hallowe'en (Beltane), on the eclipse threshold, I lost someone I had unexpectedly loved. For a fiery nine and a bit months we loved and healed fiercely, but quietly, and then he was gone.
To wake up one morning and someone who had been there, for them to suddenly not be there ... it was a grief I wasn't prepared for (I mean, are we ever actually prepared for grief).
Yesterday, I listened to Lidia Yuknavitch's The Abyss Both Playful and Devouring: How To Be A Writer on the Edge in Six Allegories*. The first state she talked about living and writing through was grief, and how writing in fragments, of what is directly in your field of view, is one way to begin to open to words.
I nodded in recognition.
* * *
For six month, after I lost him, I wrote what I called 11 before 11 as one of my grief rituals. These were 11 fragments of the world around me and within me.
I could pour all my feelings into these disjointed lines of poetic observation each morning. They held me.
When I read back over them, the 26 notes in my app, and the seven entries in each, they are more honest and vulnerable than my actual journal.
My anam caras read them each day. It felt good to be able to share this part of me, with two of the people who knew the before story. But I wrote the notes for me, never for them.
In these notes, I wasn't trying to make sense of the world, or my feelings, or the changes, or what was gone, or how to go on, I was just there in the world.
I entered into an intimate relationship with the shape and nuance of the sky. I tracked the arrival of summer through the changing colours of the streets I walked, noting the colours too didn't quite know how to exist in the world either -- the cooler than usual spring messing with the timing of the blooming. My closest confidante became the sun and how it fell on my bed.
* * *
As I write this, I realise now, it was only when I stopped writing these daily notes that I returned to my novel and began work on the next draft.
***
Depth work is as much about inviting in and sitting (often uncomfortably with) return as it is going deeper into an idea, a state, a process - whatever the shape and the container of the depth work. To return and find ourselves both changed and unchanged is a sobering and confronting process.
From late October to late April, each morning I stopped and returned to my tenderness, my heartbreak, my grief. Not to wallow in it -- but to be present with it. They became love notes to him. They became love notes to myself.
To remind myself: he is gone, but I am still here.
It was one way to work out the how of what comes after.
* * *
11 before 11 #2
1. The grey has returned. Tears from the pre-Dawn thunder storm, continue. At least this is not a flash flood.
2. The new doona cover has gold elements ā more autumn than spring. I just couldnāt find the sunflowers I was craving. Maybe I should have gone with actual colour?
3. I didnāt think of all the links. Of all the associations. Of all the places. Only the things I knew would hold over, thatās Iād recognise: like peanut butter on rye; the sunset; and dozens of others habits and touchstones Iāve already locked away to keep me safe.
4. Maybe Iāll be able to face rye toast with peanut butter later?
5. I didnāt plan for the after. Of the ways I fell into the space of him and he held me. Now I fall into the space of me and have to ask others to catch me when itās too much. Or escape beyond where itās trying to touch me.
6. There are no dancing shadows. Even the trees are still in bed waiting for the rain to pass. Or maybe they canāt dance in raincoats.
7. The floor is smooth under foot. It took three goes over to get it this way. By tonight it will be gritty again.
8. A deep cleanse is aligned with this eclipse. The catharsis in my Virgo moon that comes with doing. Clearing. Cleaning. Organising. First my bedroom ā this sacred space I created for us. Maybe Iāll do the wardrobe next. So all the skeletons can fall out easier.
9. The bottom of my eyes look like blow fish. With any luck no one will notice them.
10. The peace tea will settle the rattle. The buzz. The un-peace inside me. Thatās pressed all the way up against the calm.
11. I am a paradox. For I have gone but I am still here. And he is gone, but he is still there. I must tweak the thread. Feel the thrum of him from down its length. Try not to imagine him chain smoking away his grief at the end of the pier.
If you'd like me to forward you the link for Lidia's really beautiful and nourishing hour talk, hit reply and I'll send it to you. She also talks about writing through exhaustion -- something I know many of us are intimate with,
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