in these uncertain times we have enough to worry about. The most important thing to worry about it staying safe and well and keeping others safe and well. Worrying about rent, mortgages, businesses etc should not be part of our burden now. I think the governments, around the world should just press pause, from the beginning of march and reboot, when this is all over, so no more debt accumulates, adding to people’s already enormous burden of keeping well.
Watching the program on RTE,:Redress, breaking the silence, I was very sad, angry and upset for the victims. I wrote down words some had used and put them into this poem. For all people of abuse, institutional or otherwise, Keep fighting, keep surviving,
How can I describe this ‘state’ that I am in? It is easy to articulate words, adjectives, but that is not the entire picture. It’s more than that. For one little word ‘Grief’, means so many different things. This one syllable word does not translate my ‘state’ of being.
At times, it is all consuming. A feeling of sadness, deeper than any crevice or hole and the possibility of crawling out seems improbable, unlikely and impossible. It is seismic, insurmountable, paralizing, yet ‘life goes on’. That is what they say, and usually, they are right. Life does indeed go on, but does the grief go away or does that go on too? Yes, night follows day, time continues to move, people move and the world rotates. Grief too rotates and I am at the centre of it. I am the axis for it. It changes me, or do I change it?
I am in the black hole and I don’t see you, I don’t hear you. I don’t see or hear anyone. I am remote. I am in my thunderous, swirling hurricane and I am spiralling deeper and deeper. I lock myself away. I curl up in a ball, I am foetal. I am helpless. I need an interaction, a distraction. I need transient nourishment. The pain is too much. I am starving with the hunger of needing and wanting you. I drink in the numbness. It soothes me. It entices me to its open arms and cradles me. It understands my pain and for a while, it takes it away and I am peaceful, blissful, for you are with me again and we are in each-other’s arms.
I see and hear you as you come into view. I get so excited at the recognition of you. It’s the most wonderful, warm feeling and it envelops me. I know you feel it too. I see it in your face. I watch your eyes light up, as do mine, and we embrace. We hold and try to cling on, but then in a cruel twist of fate, you are gone again. I am alone again, alone in my grief.
Oh people around me tread carefully, offer me the usual platitudes but I know they are getting frustrated with me. I see it in their eyes, I hear it in their voices. Their patience is waning and wearing thin. They expect me to just accept it, this loss, but I cannot, it is beyond my capability to do so. This grief is a thief of time and presence of normality and ordinary regularity. I want that too, more than anything, more than they want it. What do they know about it? They say they understand, but they don’t. How can they? They didn’t experience this loss.
All I have now are my thoughts and feelings of you. My memories come and go. My mind is distorted, somehow it forgets and regresses and then it remembers. That is when I wish I wasn’t here either. I just want to be there with you. Everything is clear and calm and easy there. Nothing makes sense here. I try to reason, to rationalise, but it’s just too big to fathom and understand and that is why I crumble and shout and scream. I’m afraid, I am terrified of ‘what next’?
How can I move on, just like that? It is not that simple, it’s too complex. I cannot get used to it, your absence. I too wish to become absent, nothing else matters. I will just submit to it. I invite it and long or it to come and get me. I wait submissively for the rotation, to bring me back to you. It is only there that I know who I am. When I am back there with you, that is normal, that is home, that is me, in my proper ‘state’. I recognise myself there and I remember who I once was before this decrepitude enslaved me. I see me clearly with clarity and I am, once again, intoxicated with happiness. I, somehow made it back, and for a while I am not grieving. Then, without warning, I disappear abruptly, with wanton abandon and again, find myself surrendering to grief.
physical or emotional, pain is pain. How we manage it is our choice. Do we need or want to be fixed or do we want to discover, by ourselves and manage ourselves, to see who we are all by ourselves?
