All the Fives at Fifty Five
love, grief, new year, bingo, living on.
The first day of January 2024 dawned, drifted and had given way to to the early hours of evening darkness when writing this post. For the second time in my fifty five years, I voluntarily went to bed before midnight, deigning not to see in the New Year or wave a somewhat melancholic goodbye to the year just spent. Choosing to sleep through the slide of midnight.
We were a quieter household of three, with the older children off doing their own farewells and welcomes to the Old and the New. I marked the passage of time much earlier in the evening at a family meal, which came on the back of some lovely companionship and gatherings pre and post Christmas. Our youngest woke me and wished me joy for the coming year not long after midnight for which I was glad.
It seems like a long year this one just spent, the long and the short of it sometimes plays havoc with my attempts of reasoning.
Joy seemed to burn a little bit brighter, moments of real connection seem more frequent, more easily accessed. A fun birthday celebration that involved bingo for no. 1 daughter procured this blogs working title, I did not expect to enjoy bingo half as much as I did!
Simultaneously, at five years to the day and nearly to the hour of when we unknowingly hugged out our last goodbye, this year past, seems heavier with the weight of his absence. I have a feeling that this is the way of it, the way it will be, on this day with every passing year. Five years, a half decade seems like such a substantial amount of time, it is the whole lifetime lived of some small people I know. I have grown more used to John’s absence from family gatherings, we have become more adept as a family I think, at acknowledging his absence and his presence. I revel when a memory of him resurfaces, bringing him back to me in the moment. I rely on my family to say his name, bring him out and into the wide open shared spaces in the living on of our lives. John and I lived geographically apart for all our adult life’s, so there just aren’t people in my friendship group, in my place of current living who knew John as a person in his own right, people who miss his ‘‘being” around the place, and sometimes I long for those chance conversations that might begin with a …Do you remember? or I was thinking of John…..
I have wondered this year (I can do a lot of thinking in one day) how do I write about an exhaled sigh, how do I write about a fearlessness that I have fastened to the possession of my sorrow when I am pulled by the draw of the tide. How do I write about the pull of the small powerful atoms of joy that make up my life? How do I write with nuance about anything?
How do I convey that daily time has now arranged itself again around a typical twenty four hour clock but my calendar will for ever be fashioned to a calendar of his days? How do I begin to write again about the things that occupy my headspace that are not directly related to John’s death and my grieving being. How do I trust myself to be honest and true ?
I do not have the answers yet.
I walked up the mountains on the first day of this New Year in the wind and the rain and hail with my head literally in the clouds, as you do when the sea has her own timeline for your first swim of the New Year and it’s not today, I had the space to think of John, to settle my own spirits among the elements for just a while, to be wet and bedraggled and moving and alive and to think “ How do you not?”
I also had the idea that I would honour the looking back which probably has always come easier to me than the looking forward, it is a part of my emotional makeup and part of whom I am. I doing so I free myself to be a bit more present to my now.
So below are short extracts from my previous blog posts published around this time of year with some minor corrections and adjustments.
I wish you wherever you find yourself at the beginning of this New Year, enough of what you need, some of what you want and a bit extra to allow for access to ease, joy, hope and most of all love in some moments of the coming year.
Extracts from: Writers Block - Jan 4th 2019
“It turns out I have a Tardis of a brain which is happy to accommodate as many grief- laden thoughts as I can produce and well able to vie for elbow room with thoughts automatically produced by daily life.
So what, if I was unwilling to process them through writing? There's room for them all! Yes, there is but I started to feel that I was unravelling, in an abyss like rabbit hole, with only a knot of loss to keep me company.
Subconsciously, I think that I felt my scribblings were a way of expunging my feelings of grief, subverting them and that by my writing on them I was somehow diminishing them and casting those feelings aside. Cheating them even. That is the problem with travelling even a little way down the rabbit hole; it is hard to see, let alone clearly, in the dark.”
“Not one single vowel or consonant has lessened the pain and the sense of loss caused by the death of my beloved brother, but they have honored that pain as validly as any day of overwhelm does.”
Extracts from: A Year and A Day - Jan 25th 2019
“I had made my plans to be in bed and not ring in The New Year as far back as June. New Year's Day 2019 would mark a year to the day since I last had seen my brother. He had been in Waterford to partake in an early celebration of our Mam's 90th birthday on Jan 1st, 2018.
That was the last time I got to speak to him in person, lay eyes on him and get a big brotherly bear hug as we said Goodbye outside the Majestic Hotel in Tramore. A casual "See you later in the year" kind of goodbye. I missed his visit home in April as I was away. Disappointed, as I was that our trips clashed at the time, I was full of bitter regret after his death to have missed his last visit home.”
“It also was the first new calendar year that he would not be alive to enjoy. There is something bleak about time bringing you further away. Below is an excerpt from something I wrote in my cream hardback in early June. It still holds true.”
" There is no bargaining with death. No honed negotiation skills to be brought to bear,
No squaring of this circle in my life. I feel that each day’s passing takes me further away from you. Each breath drawn is one without you.”
Extract from: Shooting Stars on a Timeline – Jan 13th 2020
“My mental math’s of mourning continues. Dates, times & numbers are incredibly significant to the fabric of my grieving. My life before and my life after. My internal clock tick tocks along keeping company with a persistent timeline that spans all possible tenses. A timeline that has kept running in my head since May 12th, 2018, and keeps track of his absence while simultaneously remembering dates of our lives.”
“Time passing has ensured that the permanence of his death is made more real. His death is not some temporary exile from our living breathing selves. There are no possible permutations to this permanence and that is so hard to sit with.”
“Sometimes I think of it (grief) as yet another invisible blanket that I wear, sometimes tightly and heavily enveloping my being and other times more loosely draped but ever-present, nonetheless. An intricate blanket, woven with memories and in part from my tattered cloak of protection and stitched together with love. I am more accepting of its continuous presence, more adept at honouring it. It is fluid and variable, it can be unpredictable, overwhelming, or manageable and it is mine.”
Extract from: Letters to You - Jan 2nd 2021
“Dear John
I'm not quite sure what to do with myself today. It is three years since I last saw your face, felt one of your legendary hugs, on a night when life was how it should be. All of us gathered in celebration, gathered back then when we were so sure of each other's continuing existence as we took our leave of each other outside the Majestic Hotel, with our casual 'See you later in the year' sort of Goodbye. One thousand and ninety-five days later how I envy that other self that was me. That three years have flown by on untethered gossamer flights of time is hard to reconcile with the many slow passing hours of grief. Time is certainly just a construct bearing little resemblance to the weight of the hours and the days and the weeks that I've counted in the time without you”.
“I must trust that again today and for the coming years' tomorrows I can shape the space for love and grief, longing, and your death into the living of my life. Missing you will be a lifelong occupation; it is part of who I am now. I will never stop wanting it to be other than it is. A complicated weave of breathing on, placing one foot in front of the other, one more stroke swam. Your absence will always be a but that rides on the coattails of joy, no longer extinguishing joy's spark but ever present in the moment. Why or how can it be other?”
Extract from: How Deep is Your Love - Jan 3rd2022
“I never thought I would have such a longing to buy socks. Instead of socks I find myself gathering a mélange of small items and bringing them from the outside in because they speak to me of John.”
“In every fibre of my being I was certain of John being there if I needed him. I was certain of him being here even if I didn't need him.”
“I will forever, associate January 1st with John, it is a significant date in my calendar of living. New Year's Eve has always had a special place in my heart which has had a nostalgic bent to it since I was a small child. As a child I grasped the "Idir" ness (or in between- ness) of date. New Year’s Eve catapults me to memories of the Cork Road and memories of people who have lit up the way I have travelled. New Year's Eve is also a day of great celebration, marking as it does the birth of my eldest daughter, twenty-one years ago. Great sadness does not negate great happiness or vice versa.”
“So, I do not begrudge the sea, her show of power and strength, her surges, and her swells. I have emptied myself into her time and time again this year past. Time and time again she has replenished me when I sometimes falter or stumble through my life on dry land. I am hopeful that she will allow me to swim out the old year and swim in the new year with a refrain of Auld Lang Synge sung with love to that place between the sea and the sky. The place I look when I need to hope there is a where, a somewhere, where John is peaceful and whole. The horizon, where it makes heart sense to send love to John from here to my hopeful there.”
Extracts from: Love a Work of Art - Jan 25th, 2023.
“We exist within our own spheres of living, radiating living links outwards, weaving complex wondrous spiral art patterns, that form the unique, intricate, and over lapping Venn diagrams of the people of our lives. There is such beauty to behold in their forms.”
“Teddies that encapsulate my ‘not quite knowing of’ just about everything; of life, of death but help me hold onto all that is mine to hold. All that came before and comes after and to carry it with me. The shared love and the shared grief, the solitary love, and the solitary grief. The childhood and young adulthood lived under the one roof. The re-tethering of ourselves, all four of us to each other over the years. That 'way back when time'' that was and continues to be built on, time upon time and time again with love, friendship, admiration, respect, memory, and the occasional dollop of a younger sister’s adoration. Teddies that bring the clarity of thought, that the undertow to my breath that still occasionally, catches me off-guard as it rises from belly pit to throat is just my current of love and sometimes it hurts”.
If you knew John and shared time with him at some point in your life and you find yourself reading this, please do feel free to share a memory, a recollection, a tall or small tale, a song or place that brings him to mind. in the comments below. I would love to read them. X J