I was walking Cromwell this afternoon. Well, I say walking but that's a bit of an over-statement, shuffling along with Cromwell would be a fairer description. Poor bugger hasn't had a proper walk since 31st October. Mind you he's taken it quite well and I swear that for a non-sentient creature he has got a very good understanding that I'm not able to do “business as usual” at the moment. Maybe it's that bond between dog and owner thing. He senses I'm not fighting fit and I'm not just being a lazy cow. Dunno, one for the animal psychologists out there.
Anyway, I'm shuffling around and as is my won't my brain starts to think............... I return to something I put in an email earlier today. I wrote “ain't no words”. Unusual for me, it's rare that I can't find words for something. Might not always be good words or worthwhile words. Often just a lot of self-indulgent words but there is usually something.
Perhaps it's because of the time of year – one is closing and another beckons us forward. Maybe our souls assess the past year and make a judgment call on what we will carry onward with us and what gets left behind. Whatever, words did come they just weren't the ones I was expecting.
This is letting go.
Wednesday 21st January 2015. Inside, she'd known this was coming for a while. The previous few days had passed in a black blur of disintegration and despair until there was just a lightless void. Is there a colour beyond black? If there is she had found it over those days. Comforting? No, it wasn't any comfort but it was her truth, it was where she felt she belonged. Love and light were as far removed as they could ever be and those feelings felt like lies and impossibilities. Things that had no bearing on her life or in the emptiness of her heart. There was nothing, just an embrace of the void. Here nobody else existed. No pain, no rejection, no isolation. Nothing. And she liked it. The walls of this place she found herself in were far stronger and thicker than any of those she had built over the years. These walls worked. Hindsight (if you are lucky enough to gain that luxury) is a wonderful thing. Later, she could clearly see how the void had descended and stole into her life. October 14 and December 14 had been times she had been looking forward to with anticipation and it's true, no small amount of trepidation but she was going to Kidderminster, Hebden and then Nottingham. Places and events where there was little of the everyday viciousness and callousness that marked every day. Oh sure there was a little bit, she wasn't sure that a nirvana existed anywhere in the world where there wasn't at least something............ She never did quite work out how she had managed to force herself out of the house and into the car. In fact as far as Nottingham was concerned, until she was through the Dartford Tunnel she didn't quite believe she was going. Thing is those 2 weekends should have been enough to warn her, should have been enough to tell her “What, you're seriously thinking of not going to this ? Girl, you're ill. Deal with it or it will destroy you”. Hindsight told her that but in the moment she couldn't hear that voice. Nobody ever does do they?
So that Wednesday afternoon, she was sat at her desk in that shambles of a company office, where her skills, experience and abilities were ignored and denied. It had been so difficult to keep going, the 9 hours she spent there each day had ground her down just as everything else had. But kept going she had. Somewhere inside she was aware of the fact that there really was another deeper place to fall into but she refused to hear it. She didn't want to. It was too late for listening. She'd managed to hold it together until just before 5.00pm. Suddenly aware, she had found herself coming to at her desk from an empty vacant place her mind had retreated to. Looking down she saw she had been raking the inside of her foream with her nails. Vicious red weals scored the skin as if a wild animal had attacked her. It didn't surprise her although she did think it a bit weird that she hadn't felt herself doing it and there was a bit of mild disinterested curiosity at how that could be. She spent a minute or two just staring at those weals stretching from her a wrist for a few inches up her arm as if trying to enter her blood and make their way to heart. She knew what they meant. She knew that she had reached the time. Abruptly she rose from her chair, took her coat and left. Her colleague called out to her but she didn't really hear just registered someone somewhere calling, like one of those old AM radio transmissions that you can't quite tune into.
Other than stopping at the corner shop to buy enough alcohol to fell an ox and a packet of cigarettes the drive home didn't exist. Shut down had already started. Coming through her front door she dropped her bag and opened the first tin. By the time she had walked through to run a bath it was empty, once the tap was running the next one was started. That didn't last long either and another one was half way done as she went back to the bathroom to see if it the bath was ready. She checked the side of the bath and the blades were still where she had left them the day before. As if they wouldn't be, who was there to move them? A few minutes more and there would be enough water. There might have been another tin as she randomly started to undress, a blouse, a boot, a scarf ? She never did know what came off or if she had drunk even more while she did it. But now the bath would be ready and she was more than ready. There was no world, no people, nothing. All disconnected from her. She stood outside all of it and just wanted to be in that void forever. She was done with it all. Looking back it was like slow motion, she turned from the front room, through the backroom to the kitchen – the bath was only 2m away and she headed towards it. Then something got in the way. After she wondered if it had been the imagined voice of her son but no, it wasn't that. Maybe it was her own desperate voice somehow able to escape the blackness and call to her but she never believed that either. Truth is she still doesn't know. Actually, she doesn't want to know, she's just grateful to whatever it was that made her grab her phone as she walked into the kitchen looking at the bathroom door.
But grab the phone she did and she found herself screaming down the phone to her Mum, “I'm coming home, now. If I don't get out of here now I'm dead”. The next few hours are still mostly missing. The most ridiculously packed bag you can imagine: odd socks, toothbrush, knickers but no bras, dog food, t shirt but no jumper. Within a few minutes she was in the car with the dog and her stupid bag. How she never got pulled over by the police on the way was a miracle – foot down in bloody rush hour? You can't do that in Kent and especially not when you gotta go on the M20 and operation stack is in place. However she did make it and there she was at her parents. Her Mum opened the door and all she could do was collapse into her arms crying and sobbing like she never had done ever. Strange really, after all she had gone through she had never imagined that there could be such deep emotion still there to come out. But there was and going home to the sanctuary afforded her by her parents unconditional love she found the place to release it.
Thursday is also a bit of a blur, uncontrollable sobbing, the shakes, the doctor, stuff …....................
Friday came and her Parents gently but firmly insisted on going out somewhere, just for the actual fact of going out. They lived on the Kent coast just a few miles from Canterbury which was a city she'd always liked and so with no plan, no particular place in mind they went. Not sure of her ability to cope she had not wanted to go but she did want to be somewhere with no intense personal connection, just to breathe somewhere else.
They wandered the streets of that old city for a while, no direction, no destination just wandering. Round a corner and there was the cathedral, “Shall we go in?” asked Mum. Never one for religion although she had her own definition of spirituality she agreed. The three of them went in and a service was just finishing. The ushers asked them to take a seat for a few minutes, take and soon they would be able to wander the cathedral. Handing them a leaflet the usher invited them to sit on chairs in the back row. Sitting on the chair at the end of the row, as far removed from other people as she could get, she opened the leaflet and blankly looked at the map inside. She felt a deep deep chill come over her, the skin on her arms broke out into goosebumps. There on the map was a label for The Crypt. Without knowing why (and she never questioned) she knew she had to there, and she had to go alone. The service finished and she told her Parents she was going there and she would see them in a while.
She remembered shaking all over as she made her way to the staircase that led to The Crypt. Descending the stairs all natural light disappeared and the sense of leaving the “earthly” realm was overpowering. Reaching The Crypt itself, a place for quiet reflection and silent prayer felt like entering somewhere truly other-worldly. Pure white candles lit the space and fed it a warmth and comfort that nowhere she had ever experienced before had come close to. There were ante-rooms around the edges but in the centre of the space were pews and chairs set out, at the far end of the space was some kind of altar with roped off chairs in front of it. Eschewing that area she took a seat in one of the rows, there the crying came again. She barely made a sound but the wracking sobs were felt far deeper inside of her than any crying she had ever done before, not even finding out the hearing disability that had affected her son was as deep, as overwhelming as this. But no sound, that's what she remembered after. She sat there, hands clasped together so tight that the knuckles went white. Just crying. After a while her Parents came down to check on her, telling them she was ok but wanted to stay there a bit longer she asked for a pound to buy a candle and light it. Giving it to her they hugged her and went off. She approached the candle stand, put the money in the box, lit the candle and went into the roped off area in front of the altar. She saw the candle holder and placed her light into an empty slot. Sitting down she found that the crying she had just done was nothing. The real pain and release was now. Hands still firmly clasped together the tears became rivers, the sobs deeper and harder but still so quiet, so very very quiet. She found herself praying to whatever it is that's out there. Please give me the love I need, I promise I will try and give back that love. Not just for me but for everyone who needs it, for every lost soul, for every one of my sisters who needs it. Please let there be love. AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN. Over and over that litany was repeated until something changed. Something answered her. Not in words, not in actions but she knew she had been heard. Something was listening.
The time passed and slowly she came back to herself. For the first time in that Crypt she looked up and around herself. Finally she took notice of the altar that she had been sat in front of. Other than the fact that is was there she hadn't been aware of it. Raising her head her eyes took in what was there. Deep down in that warm candlelit womb below the stone edifices that spoke of the glory of her son was an altar to his mother.
She heard. In her guise of the Virgin Mary, she heard. She loved and she reached out.
She sent that love, she sent an Angel.
She saved me, that Virgin Mother, that Goddess, Give her whatever name you like, I don't know what her true name is. I see her in Keren and that is why there were no words to describe how much I love her in that email earlier today. Some things are indescribable. Some things you can't understand, some things should just be taken on faith.
Love.
That's all there is. That's all I take with me from 2015 into 2016.
