Robert to Robert and Anna

We had a family thing. Covid times and the focus kept changing right til the last minute. Mum’s ashes, a goodbye to her house that sells at the end of the month, our sibling historical stuff all bubbling away nicely.

I had written this thinking about how I felt, trying to put into words, on the day.
.

Ever since the first anniversary of Mum’s death on April 8th I’ve felt a strange heaviness, an undefinable sense of almost futility, a sort of spreading-outness, like trying to carry water in a sieve. I feel an absence, of something gone, like the cooling towers at Didcot, or as if Wittenham Clumps had been leveled and scraped flat. And a blast wave, almost in slow motion enveloping and flattening me too.

My 64 year old rational self finds it hard to understand this sense of spreading outness. After all , I say, she had a good death, was spared the worst, went before life became an intolerable burden. She had a good life.

So it would seem I am not sad for her although those last years were no picnic and her life had its troubled times and themes.

Is it me then that suffers her loss? Gone my touchstone, the eternal flame, the charging point and measuring rod of my life. Gone that deceptively simple presence here on earth.

Someone said about their mother, ‘It is 18 years now since she died and I still cannot believe I will never see her again.’

I could say her presence must be imprinted within me, that neuron pathways like mountain streams have carved out valleys in which now cool waters no longer flow, that the landscape of my soul is struggling to adapt to a huge climatic shift.

You read of people returning to their homes in the Blitz to be confronted with a nothingness where home once stood. Maybe it is like that. We get on with our lives, wash clothes, move stones, cut wood, plant seeds but every now and then unknowingly we stumble down a road and for some reason look up, bemused and then astonished to realise anew the old house is still not there and that all that holding familiarity and love is irretrievably gone.

Because life continues we are lulled into forgetfulness or false bravery: ‘it’s not so bad, see, now she’s gone,’ we mutter. ‘Good life, good death,’ we say and trundle on until we find ourselves in that street again. Seeing not other people’s homes but the space where ours used to be.

Maybe that’s what graves and headstones are for. To remind us not to look away too long; to keep us from being shocked anew each time we walk down that street; to hold in memory both the life lived and the hole it left, to place a marker and to make a place for ritual in the dry valleys of the soul.

(One writes these words and thinks: ‘Do even I believe this? Does this capture what I feel? But maybe that is all we have to go on; the words attempting to translate the feelings into something more comprehensible. )