Dangerous, or not

When the knock came we were deep in discussion about the traumatic loss of all that is familiar, all that is dear, suffered by refugees.  My friend was focussed on all the gifts that refugees bring and receive, the opportunities for mutual enrichment.  I was more aware of the personal cost, of loss, trauma, hazard.  Not denying the gifts and opportunities but feeling that the cost of exile was literally unimaginable, not truly calculable until it was too late.  That this loss was an unacknowledged trauma that shapes coping when unaddressed.  It was at that exact point in our conversation that the knock came and I was ordered to leave my home within five minutes.

The support I received on that first evening (and indeed since) was spectacular.  Ensconced in a friend’s spare room within a couple of hours I felt deeply held, lucky, blessed - reflecting in every conversation how minor was this upheaval in the scale of things.  There was no war, no violence, no actual damage or danger to my home or me, not even the loss of familiar support systems as I was staying only five minutes walk away.  The only thing that had changed was my most immediate surroundings, all the small domestic intimacies gone, boarded up, locked away to be restored at some indefinite point in the future.  The only trauma was the sudden  shock of a whole slew of familiar ‘choices’ being taken away at a moment’s notice.  I fell asleep that first night counting my blessings, blessing all those who had flown to my aid and all those less fortunate.

I slept deeply and woke three times shaking, body wracked by deep sobbing as images of ungrieved losses surfaced.  All those people, places, houses that had held me, shaped me, accepted me exactly as I was, allowed me to be me.  All those times I had cried and mourned a little at parting then picked myself up and got on with life, coping as best I could.  The third time the shuddering sobs woke me I was deep in the ancestral trauma of the moment my father found himself out on the street at age fourteen with his younger brother, orphans evicted from the family home.  I wept the tears he never could, grieved the fate that had marred his life and shaped my own.  

In the morning I woke refreshed and grateful in a sea of unknowing.  Small wonder projects such as this call to me.  Some of the main themes of this project covered here with a female interviewer who I find mildly irritating.