I suppose it makes sense that I should start my Substack with a story about the loss of my mother. It has defined me, thus my writing, since it began. It’s probably what drives me to write at all; this compulsion to to crystallise thoughts, feelings, stories, in time, before they fall away into the abyss. Writing about her, for her, alongside her - writing at all - keeps her alive, as well as every little bit of life around me I can bottle while I’m here.
Today, February 10th, at 10:10pm, mum’s death celebrates its 21st birthday. Celebrates is probably the correct word in the upside-down world of grief. Early on I decided that each year on her birthday I would celebrate her life, be happy, and that on the anniversary of her death I would be sad and cry. To my great annoyance, each year picking flowers on September 3 I would fall to my knees and weep, and on Feb 10 I’d stare into a candle and feel nothing.
I’ve never felt in any position of any authority to give any teachings on anything, but now my grief has reached majority I suppose I’ll make a speech. Over the years I have learned things, and shared them when needed with friends. Where they came from is a blur, gathered from people and books and god-knows-where, settled into me by osmosis, drunk from a rock.
The Work of Tears
For every grief we are assigned an exact quantity of tears, is the line in my head. I have no idea where it came from. A Japanese writer? A friend? Did I make it up? The belief goes that the number is decided. We don’t know what the number is, we will only find out once we have cried the last tear. We may be assigned a small cup, a river … but we must cry them. We can save them up without releasing them, but the number will never change, and if we hold them too long they will turn to stone inside of us.
Perhaps if we’re cryers we’re assigned more tears than a non-cryer. For example, I was probably assigned more tears than my siblings, because I’m the dramatic one. I suspect that my brothers have not yet cried their required quantity of tears. I may be wrong.
There was a day, long into the sadness, perhaps about five years, or ten, or fifteen … The tears came— probably unpredictably— possibly on her birthday— and I bent down and let them come. Or was it that I was lying in bed with someone and the tears came, hot and painful, those ones from deep deep down that wet your pillow in a sheet, the tears aren’t individual, they are a hot, hot sheet. Out came the hot sheet and somewhere in the night, or in the day, a deep fatigue arrived. Perhaps I fell asleep, I don’t remember, but I do remember the feeling. It was an arrival at another level. That’s the only way I can describe it. It was a peaceful sensation, a kind of relinquishing.
From that day on, tears would come, but they were never the same. They came from a different place. I can only describe it as more stable, less dangerous, less wild, less terrified, less nauseatingly sad. And that former place of tears would never henceforth be accessed. The bridge was crossed.
Now I can see that each tear I’d shed, though it felt useless, stupid, pathetic, a waste of time, was actually an important job being done. Every tear was bringing me to this new place. Not a place of forgetting, or ignoring. Just different.
You will Never, Ever Get Over It
A dear friend in fresh grief recently, and a lot of shock, begged me:
‘How long will this take to get over?’
I told him, perhaps cruelly, that he will never get over it. That this is the beginning of his new life. I told him this in the hope this would end the pointless fight within himself to ‘get better’, ‘move on’, and to start acceptance from here, right now; that in some shape or form, the loss of his loved one will be always with him. Or perhaps, the more positive way of looking at it, is that his loved one will always be with him. We want to ignore, flee, forget the pain, but it doesn’t go away, it just gets worse when we try. Because to ‘move on’ or ‘get over it’ or ‘get better’ would mean slicing away that person from the core of who you are.
It does get easier, as time expands between yourself and the event. Shock subsides (not always a good thing), painful memories dim, the edges of things soften. My friend won’t remain in the same heightened state. But he is changed. Life will not go back to what it was.
After mum died I was going very badly. I needed to talk to someone independent, but didn’t have enough money to see a therapist, and they were having cheap student consultations at a local natural therapies school. When I told the young guy my mum had died and I was struggling to find a way through my feelings of disorientation and panic and sleeplessness, he began sweating and ran out to grab his manual. He came back and opened it at the page ‘Grief’, thumbing through the varieties.
‘Right,’ he said, looking up. ‘You can expect it to take 6 months to get over that.’
The absurdity of it was so powerful I smiled. And I’m grateful to that poor, pimply guy forevermore because he had illuminated something huge. I would never get over this. To even suggest it, to put any time frame on it, was insane. My mother would never go away, though she was gone. I was in this for life.
It sounds like it was a very sound, rational moment for me, but this is all in retrospect. I’m pretty sure I left the Southern School of Natural Therapies howling, and went and drank myself under the table at the Labour in Vain before vomiting all night on my carpet like a cat. But deep down was a sense of relief to know there was no escape. With love comes pain. Better to find ways to manage it than make it go away.
Believing in magic really fucking helps
At my friends’ wedding they had a close magic guy who took our rings in his hand and then opened his hand and our rings were all joined together. I believe in magic. And I also know it’s not real. But I know I couldn’t have found a way to live alongside mum’s disappearance without some form of magical thinking.
In Paris or Die I tell this story in detail. In the depths of grief, I hit a blackness where I couldn’t see the point in living without my mother’s presence on the planet. Everything was coloured by her, and the loss of her, I was haunted by the very sun shining, angry at how life could just go on around me when it had stopped forever at 10:10 on the 10th.
I felt that I was a very bad person. That I, a frivolous and stupid actor, a narcissist, should be alive while she, a nurse, a researcher whose entire life had been dedicated to improving the lives of others, should die so cruelly. I felt she thought my choices in life were dumb, that I was a pursuing a career I had no talent nor prospects in … I felt she would feel that, though I had tried, I wasn’t doing enough to help my father and siblings with their grief. It was a dark time in which I found myself so exhausted by constant self-torment all I wanted was to go to sleep and never wake up.
In a last-ditch ‘healing’ session, I fell into a half-sleep and mum, in the form of a young girl came and put her hand on my chest and said:
I love you
I’m proud of you
You’re doing good
I knew it was my deeper consciousness coming up to rescue me. But the magical thinking I needed in order to survive this grief told me that mum came to save me, to share with me the exact three things I needed to know to combat the tormenting voices that had plagued me since her death, and may have destroyed my life going ahead.
From that day on my life changed, and I still feel those words wrap around me at times of doubt.
Rushing back to the therapist to ‘see mum again’ didn’t result in any more visits, but the guy told me she had given him a message to pass on to me, that she is very happy and at peace now, and that she ‘works with the light’.
It’s ridiculous, of course. But who cares? It helps me immeasurably, in times of pain, to see mum in the sky, bathed in light in her angel robes (I should note, I’m not a member of any particular faith or religion), surrounded by women, babies, sending new ones down to us, sleeping on clouds, happy, peaceful and proud of us down here, of me, sitting here writing, trying once again to capture her. I can feel her laughing at me describing her angel robes … ‘seriously’?
It doesn’t matter. I love this picture. Suspension of disbelief. Sometimes, to go on, we have to suspend our disbelief.
In great pain, it doesn’t matter any more what is real or not. Whether you are right or not. Whether you believe in ghosts, in magic, in angels and spirits and fairy goblins and flowers on graves that your daughter plants that have no business on her rocky plot and yet days later have exploded because grandma loves them and is saying thanks!
Death is a finality the mind cannot contain. The impossibility of it, the injustice, all that’s wasted and unsaid … it will help, if you can, to place the person somewhere beautiful in your mind. To stop feeling sad for them. Because they are okay now. Their pain is gone. They’re playing golf with new knees. Drinking Old Fashioneds in their favourite bar.
Sometimes at 10:10 on the 10th I imagine the 10s might line up and bring her back, even just for 10 minutes.
No luck yet.
This will make you stronger
Mum said these words to me when she knew she was going to die. It astonished and appalled me. How could this - this pain - watching her in pain - watching her disappear - make me stronger? There was such conviction in her voice. I knew she had watched her own father die of lung cancer at around the same age I was, so she knew what she was talking about. I needed to know how - why - this would make me stronger - but I never got the words from her. Over the years I wondered at them, as I dipped and failed and made bad decisions and hurt myself and others, and felt weak weak weak, damaged goods, not ‘stronger’ - how could she have said that, stronger?
I guess now, after 21 years, I can see it does make you stronger.
Because you’re here. You’ve had no choice but to be.
Is that what you meant, mum?
I’m not sure I’m stronger.
Perhaps I should not have included this point.
The Patchwork Doll
Somewhere in the blurry weeks post mum’s death, someone told me:
You will cobble together a new mother figure with the people around you.
Screw you, I thought, I want no patchwork fucking doll.
But look around now, at this 21st ‘celebration’, all these faces, all the women - and men - and children - and animals - and trees - and seas - who have given parts of themselves to me over these years; look at the ones who have formed the head, the torso, the limbs of the doll, to whom I cling with all my might, and who bring the warmth and beauty and kindness and wisdom and humour and intelligence and depth and fun of mum, but in ways I could never have imagined.
I love you doll. Thank you doll.
*
Here it comes.
10:10.
Close my eyes.
Perhaps if I publish this …
Thank you Jayne. The loss of mum is about to approaching the terrible twos toddler phase and I have a few more of those tears left xxx
Thank you for your words Jayne. I too am in the grief club. Turning 22 in March, so like you in the milestone year. Until I read this I didn’t realise I’d created my own patchwork doll. This idea is so comforting and I’ll keep it close. Your grief has made something very beautiful.