Death

My mum (and my sister’s) died 25 years ago this January. Not quite half my life time ago, but too long. It has been too long since we had a chat.

I would love to have asked her how she did the menopause. How I was as a kid and for her to meet my kids. I sometimes get a pang when I see a mum and  a daughter out shopping, or walking or sitting, and wish we were doing that.

33 felt too young to lose a mum. But, of course, for many, the loss comes much earlier. I have just spent the day with a friend who lost her mum in her early twenties. Other people I am close to have lost someone this year who has a daughter in secondary school.  It is always too early to lose someone we love.

My first love ended his life when I was in my early twenties. I didn’t talk to anyone about it. No one really asked. I just got tough, ate too much, went to India, meditated, did therapy and got on with life. Stiff upper lip.

Models of grief

When mum died I had been volunteering in a children’s hospice for two years. I wanted to meet death head on. Who/what/where IS this thing that took love away?

There I learned a lot about grief including Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s 5 stages (Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), Worden’s four  tasks of mourning which are similar, Stroebe and Schut Dual Process Model where you are said to oscillate between being ‘loss orientated’ (i.e. grief stricken) or restoration orientated (getting on with a new life), Dr. Richard Wilson’s model of the Waterfall of grief where death feels like tipping over a waterfall, into a whirlpool, sucking us down, disorientating us, until finally it spits us out and we carry on downstream. I learned that kids ‘puddle jump’ from one emotion to the other, feeling each intensely but often briefly, which adults can struggle with, and I learned that a loss is like a hole in your life which never gets re-filled, but life builds up again around it.

Theories did help. They made me feel less mad. But when I was wailing on the kitchen floor, I still felt like I was losing my mind. I made the same sounds I made giving birth. Birth and death. Primal.

I painted the front room bright orange on a day when I couldn’t stop crying and so didn’t go in to work. I only learned after (after the room was no longer bright orange) that in Egypt and Mexico, orange is the colour of mourning.

‘Closure’

But back then, all those models I think led me to think that mourning would end. That there would be closure. Remember that word? ‘Closure’. Everything tied up in a neat package. Death, divorce, separation, all ending neatly and forever in closure.

That was 25 years ago and not only having lost first love and mum, and been divorced and separated and the recent and continuing transition to not having children living at home full time, I know that closure is bollocks.

Grief gets you any time, any place. Listening to anything by the Eagles or the Hothouse Flowers and wham, there’s first love again. Christmas is filled with mum for me and as for this current grief, every time I open the door and the cat alone greets me, there it is.

As Jim Morrison said in Five to One; ‘no one here gets out alive’.  We’re all going to die, and if we are lucky, we will live long enough to lose people we love. As Gertrude tells Hamlet (Act 1, scene 2) ‘Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die,/ Passing through nature to eternity.’

So why are we still so bad at death? We don’t talk about it, so many people don’t plan for it, our rituals are paltry. Increasingly you can opt for no frills cremations – just send the body off and by return get a box of ashes as if all that is needed is body waste-disposal without the community that ritual brings. We don’t know how to talk to people about bereavement, what to say, how to be.

As my lovely teacher at the hospice said, something like ‘don’t worry about saying the wrong thing and making things worse, it is as bad as it gets and the worst things is to cross the road and say nothing.’

So, I’m saying stuff.

And I’m feeling hopeful that theory is developing.

Continuing bonds

I teach for the Open University and through them I came across Klass, Silverman, and Nickman’s continuing bonds theory. It is, what it sounds like. An acknowledgement that relationships continue after death. Of course they do. How can they not? My mum made me who I am today. I miss her still. I talk about her. I wrote about her in Farmotherlands, I wonder what she would say or do. We share the same genes for goodness sake. She continues. My relationship with her continues. There is no closure and I am so glad, because to close the door would be to shut her out and to pay the price of crying once in while is fine.

So today, when I was walking with my friend, we talked about her mum who died all those years ago. Why wouldn’t I? I asked about the rest of her family and so of course I asked how she was with her mum.

Connected

And if the bonds continue then we can allow our connection to our ancestors, to mum’s mum, my dad’s mum and generations back, without whom I wouldn’t be here and I am grateful to be here.

And if the bonds continue then we know that we will one day be ancestors and for me this means considering what I am bequeathing the generations hence. Not my books (although there are a lot of them!) or my money (of which there is less!), but what kind of a world, what kind of memories, what kind of values? It leads me to check in with myself that I am living in line with my values and that my values still fit. It makes me want to spend time to build memories, not money to buy stuff. It makes me want to do whatever I can to make sure that future generations of my kids and yours get a green, healthy safe planet to live in, so instead of doom scrolling, I put my back the wheels I can touch, nudging, collaborating, whispering, planting seeds and fertilising, wherever I can make my small corner of the world a little better than I found it.

And of course the bonds don’t just continue with the human world, but the web of life, my dog who is a damson tree, my cat who is by my side waiting for me to move the laptop so he can sit on me. Bonds to place, my garden, that apple tree, my childhood home, the bluebell woods we walked in. There are threads woven into us by every daffodil we greet in the pale spring sun, every chestnut that shines in the golden autumn light.

The bonds bind us everywhere, to everything, we are all connected, living or dead, animal, human or plant, here or there, now or then. Webbed in silken strands.

Vibrating against each other. Connected.

I am glad.

xx

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x

 

 

Farmotherlands is my award winning collection of poems about nature, farming, community and family. You can buy a copy here.

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Julie

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