Journeys, Grief, and New Beginnings
Thoughts on death and other subjects
The new year came, went, and now we are half way through the third month of it. Outside, it is raining; a cold, wet rain that makes my flat feel damp and grey. We’re lucky we don’t have mould here, what with how chilly the walls can feel after the onslaught of sea spray and drizzle. The sky is shrouded in murk.
If there is one thing that has always been true of Ireland, it is that we know the rain, and there are a million and one different descriptions for the precise type of rain we can experience at any moment. It is currently a wet rain.
I know how it sounds to the uninitiated. All rain is wet, you say. Duh.
But here, a wet rain is rain that gets through your layers, down to your bones. It seeps in through the protective shell of warm skin and chills your core to ice. For homes, it oozes through walls and insulation, making you shiver under your blanket throws and jumpers. The heating struggles to keep those cool fingers at bay.
I still love to hear it on my windows though, and in all actuality, I have always loved the rain, no matter its form.
Last night I read, and finished, Jenette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died. I’m not going to review it, other than to say for me it was a fairly solid 4/5 stars with an accessible writing style that switches from juvenile to adult half way through the book with good reason. I’m glad she had the opportunity to write this book. Difficult family dynamics always seem hardest to write about, no one wants to be seen as a betrayer.
There was a line in it though that gave me pause. I mean, there were quite a few lines, but this one felt personal. I’m paraphrasing but it went something like this:
People felt they could relate to my mom dying because they had a cat that died
This felt unreasonably painful, especially as someone who does have a cat who died a few months ago. A cat who was my whole world. A cat that meant everything to me, and who I mourn every single day.
My mum is still alive. I have never gone through the grief of losing a parent - especially not a parent who has endeavoured to control every moment of my life, whose leaving left me unmoored and afloat with no life vest or buoy to hold on to, but I experience death a lot. In my other job, the non art related one, I work as an end of life HCA. I love this role, and it has taught me a lot about holding space for people, but also about holding space for grief in all its forms. The thing is, about that line in particular that felt like such a personal attack, we automatically assign value to grief, and worse, to other people’s grief.
Yours isn’t as bad as mine because x, y, z.
It’s worse when it comes to animal companions. There, we don’t quantify human relationships, and automatically that dead cat becomes lesser than someone else’s dead mother. And maybe for some people, that is true for them, but for others, like me, it is demonstrably incorrect.
Perhaps it is because I have never had the affinity for connection with people. I have friends I love and cherish, and I have a deep capacity for empathy, for situational understanding and justice, but I am an observer of people more than a participant. I find it difficult to relate, I don’t know how to carry myself, I struggle to engage. I have never had this problem with animals.
With animals, I have an inherent understanding. I have always been able to gauge body language, subtle changes, intent. I have felt an intense protectiveness, and need to keep their environments, and them, safe. I feel the pain of a loss every time I see a creature felled by the roadside, or worse, every time instagram feels the need to show me some poor thing harmed by human callousness. The love I feel for animals is at times overwhelming, painful, and always present.
I love my human companions, but every time one of my people die, my brain has a much easier time understanding it. Reconciling it.
With Bear, every day I feel like I’ve been shot.
Like part of me has been hacked off. Something is missing from my core.
Grief is tricky. In all my experience of death, both as an observer, helper, carer, participant, and ally; I have come to understand that grief never leaves us. Instead, we reassemble ourselves around it, making space, like plants that grow up through the cracks in walls and pavements. There is a hole now where that companion used to reside, and where they still reside, and we now have to patch the edges, water the undergrowth, and wait for plants to sprout.
