Ring ring

August 20, 2010

My mobile phone rang today
I answered
“Could I speak to Mottsu?” someone said
“No” was all I said

Someone introduced himself, from a vineyard in the Hunter Valley
A marketing call

“Mottsu died about 6 years ago” I said
“I am so sorry” someone said

“Thanks, you couldn’t have known” I said and then explained that Mottsu didn’t have a mobile phone and I could easily that we had signed mailing list with his name and my number – we had holidayed in the Hunter a year before he died.

More apologies, more consternation and more reassurances and we hung up.

I felt dull. The whole sequence was quite surreal and I couldn’t help remembering the time I had been shaken by the realisation he wouldn’t call me. I hadn’t imagined someone would call him.

Weird (especially given my musings in the previous post on remembering).

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t. Mark Twain

By admin | Posted in Life after loss | Tagged , | Comments (2)

Days for remembering

August 18, 2010

Memory days are perfectly ordinary days when thinking about Mottsu sort of sneaks up on me. Some days just remind me of him, quiet rainy ones in particular.

Rainy days evoke memories of Mottsu, maybe because I love how the rain falls and quietens a day. Everything shushhed, like the sound of car tyres on the wet road. I think those are days when you huddle in closer with someone, share an umbrella, shelter together. Rainy days and Mottsu and I would slip into a cinema for the afternoon. Rainy weekend evenings we’d cook, bake, roast, time in the kitchen warm and safe, nurtured. Together with nowhere else to be.

Memory days, are different to anniversaries and birthdays, or special occasions. Days when you perhaps have anticipated the remembering of someone who’s no longer here but you can just feel them present. They are days I feel more alone – if it’s possible to be more alone than everyday regular alone. Importantly I feel wistful more than bereft, and that’s comforting to recall.

He is quietly remembered and I am grieving differently. I like to remember him well.

By admin | Posted in Grief and grieving, Mottsu and me | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Who of us knows how to die?

June 6, 2010

I visited my Mum in hospital today, she is in bed 6 of her ward. After a couple of hours and as I was leaving I stopped to chat to Val in bed 5.

Val is going home tomorrow, she will be under the care of a palliative nurse who will help moderate her morphine levels. Val is not quite ready to knock on heaven’s door, but she is walking up the steps.

She has no illusions about what is happening to her, and she is afraid of dying, she said. I agreed it must be scary, I would be scared.

The thing that hurts her most are the tears in the eyes of her children when she talks to them, she said.

Val’s children love her they can’t witness her death without tears in their eyes. We can only do what we can do, and they can’t help the tears.

Who of us knows how to die? Who of us can witness the slow death of someone we love without tears in our eyes?

I reached for Val’s hand and we clung together with warmth, caring and fear.

By admin | Posted in Grief and grieving | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

I wanna hold your hand 2

June 1, 2010

Charlotte sent me the link to this clip (long ago) in the midst of my panic about Hero – she reminded me of the power of holding hands…

I recommend watching with the sound ‘off’, the people watching get annoyingly gushy. I’ve warned you…

Holding someone’s hand works for (the Beatles) Charlotte, hedgehogs, otters and me.

By admin | Posted in Look after yourself | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Stress and distress in the rose gardens

April 24, 2010

A different day, a different cafe, and another coffee.

Just as I wrote of ashes, and New Zealand I read a relevant little snippet in the paper today.

Wellington is New Zealand’s capital city. The rose beds in that city’s Botanical Gardens are affected by being selected as the place to scatter ashes.

The roses are distressed, the gardeners are distressed and let’s not forget the mourning scatterers and their distress. Human ashes aren’t good rose fodder, it seems. Sadness hangs over the Wellington Botanical Gardens.

This all makes my not scattering of ashes appear as a prudent course of inaction.

Well that’s what I am telling myself. I think the newspaper story found me just to tell me that.

I need to allow myself to not scatter for a while longer.

By admin | Posted in Reported in the news | Tagged | Comments (0)

These boots are made for…

April 22, 2010

Coffee in a local cafe this morning.

I was wearing my red Dorothy shoes, only to be outdone by the guy at the next table.

Red boots.

The waiter commented.
She loved the red boots.

The boot-legged guy agreed.
He loved his red boots.
“I want to be buried in these boots”, he said.

I sighed, remembering my uncertainty about how to bury Mottsu. He left no instructions.

He died with his shoes off, left them on the river bank. The police gave them back to me. I don’t know where they are now, and anyway they weren’t the sort of shoes waiters would comment on.

Faced with needing to organise funeral and burial, with no instructions, I was confounded not know what he would have wanted. Maybe Mottsu didn’t care at all, which isn’t to say he didn’t care.

He cared enough to leave a will, and that uncomplicated potentially complicated things.

Mottsu wasn’t religious in life, so no church ceremonies. He had no expressed preference about burial or cremation. I checked with his parents and confirmed cremation as the plan. Today, I still haven’t addressed the issue of what to do with the ashes. I need to do that, one day.

Mr Ed went with me to collect them from the crematorium. That was a relief, someone else organised it, I just had to follow along. The box (Mottsu would have filled a couple of urns) is still in the cupboard where Mr Ed stowed them, at my suggestion. I wonder if it is bad feng-shui to keep ashes in a cupboard?

I recently listened to someone from New Zealand but living here, same as Mottsu, saying he would have to be buried in New Zealand. It was important, really important to him. I hope that if a place of burial was important to Mottsu he would have said so.

I’ll sort out the ashes one day, I believe he rests in peace regardless.

By admin | Posted in After suicide | Tagged | Comments (0)

The real me

March 22, 2010

An email I received today from an executive coach was signed with a quote at the bottom:

“Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, ‘This is the real me,’ and when you have found that attitude, follow it.” William James

Its in the the same vein as Joseph Campbell’s questions about finding what works for us as individuals.

Easier said than done and its worth searching for those things that allow you to be really you – I mean allow me to be as much really me as I can be. You do need to find you first. I’m working on that part: I am finding me, so far so good… (admittedly I am a little lost at times).

By admin | Posted in Recovery | Tagged | Comments (0)

Somehow I became a runner

March 17, 2010

It’s an Art Hotel and there’s no gym. Milan at the front desk advises that the Hobart Aquatic Centre is 3-4 minutes walk away and gives me a map. “Just go up Davies St and it is over there” he says, vaguely waving his arm over his shoulder indicating a southerly sort of direction.

I walk out the door in my running gear and head away from the harbour towards the nearest main road and walk along looking for Davies Street. I’ve been working in the Hobart office and my colleague, Katey, knowing that I recently started running, suggested I might like to enter the Hobart City to Casino Run this weekend. It sounds like a good idea, I’m here and I have been planning to try a 10km event in a couple of weeks. I am not a confident runner, the Hobart race will be good preparation.

Tonight will be training my first session on a running machine. It takes me 3 or 4 minutes of walking to establish I am on Davies Street and, according to my map, heading in the wrong direction. I call into a bottle-shop and buy cigarettes, anticipating the pleasure of a cigarette post run.

Cigarettes and running are both post-Mottsu habits. It’s complicated.

The nameless guy in the bottle-shop point me towards the Hobart Aquatic Centre, telling me I need to use the pedestrian underpass and cautioning that it can be a “a bit dodgy” this time of night. It’s 6pm.

It is $12 for a casual pass and a green hospital id tag is fitted to my wrist. The running machines are daunting, but my whole life is daunting, the machine has lots of options for gradient and speed settings. I set a flat terrain and opt for manual speed control. The machine demands to know my weight but I am coy about revealing it. It wants to calculate how many calories I burn, I just want to run.

The machine records time, distance and speed, regularly flicking it’s Led display to my workout statistics, meaningless. I run in cycles of 10 minutes and then walk for 2. The sliding surface takes a little getting used to but I settle into running at 8k/hour and walking at 6.6. In my head I plan covering 6 kilometres but the machine decides it has had enough and slides into a cool down before I am ready. I get confused about the distance and the simple addition of the first burst and this subsequent bout gets hard to do while feet are pounding. I feel I should have covered more distance for the effort. I decide to stop fooling myself and count the distance run not the distance I wish I had run.

When I’m done and the machine has forced me through another cool down cycle I can hardly walk. My legs are expecting the floor to slide along at the speed of the machines and I experience a strange skating feeling. Finding my way back to the Art Hotel is easier than the original journey and I feel great, now confident about finishing in the City to Casino on Sunday.

My mind is made up I’ll play it safe and stay injury free by running the 5.8 km course rather than the competitive 11kms course. It’s only two weeks until my first planned competitive run so I convince myself not to over-do this running business.

While showering my decision is affirmed, I feel tension in my upper left leg, I’ve stretched a muscle, as far as I can tell, my bum knows I have exercised.

Sitting in the clear autumn night I enjoy a glass of chardonnay, while scribbling in my journal and smoking a cigarette.

The clock in the Hobart town hall strikes 8 as I wait for Katey. Despite the wine and cigarette I feel athletically accomplished and enjoy my post run endorphins. There’s a still and velvet black sky illuminated by lights reflected by the harbour. There’s a dull constant background hum of traffic passing on nearby Davies Street. I’m content and contained and not bothered by the Friday joviality of passersby. I am going to do the fun run, my first. It’s possible, my bum will recover. I can do this…

The bin on the nearby rubbish bin warns “Don’t waste Tasmania” and I have no intention of doing that I am making the most of Tasmania, and the most of me.

I recommend running,preferably without the post-effort cigarette but even so…

By admin | Posted in Life after loss | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Anniversaire

March 15, 2010

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title. Virginia Woolf

Today marks another year as past. I’m hoping that by using the French term in this post’s title that it sounds less like I am counting. I’m counting – of course I am.

At the risk of sounding like someone giving an Oscar’s acceptance speech, there are some people I’d like to thank:

I’d like to thank my parent’s for these genes that contain a resilience I would not have imagined possible. Someone will probably tell me resilience isn’t inherited, goodness only knows where it came from. I am very lucky and very grateful to be who I am and just where I am.

Thanks again to my parents for the weepy genes. If I couldn’t love, it wouldn’t hurt.

Thank you to others in my family and Mottsu’s family, who might wish they could disown me but have hung in there for the journey.

C Robin, my brother, one of the first on the scene. Always will be.

My friends who have stuck out the last years with me, thank you for all the dinners shared with your families, the conversations and the joy of good friends. The refuge of your lounge rooms, a bed with breakfast. I am nourished by your unconditional friendship.

Thanks to the same friends who sat around waiting for me to come home from everywhere I went off to alone, when I couldn’t bear to be home.

Thank you too to the one’s who didn’t make it this far, the strains of friendship, the burden of me and my experience. I hope we each remember the other well.

Thank you to the Qantas Flight Attendant who thrust a wad of tissues at me during a particularly teary flight. All gestures of caring have been gratefully consumed. Funny how that particular event stands out…

I am grateful to the therapist who asked me to be clear about what I wanted from them, having to finding clarity through my fog has helped.

My brilliant neighbours, who take my bin in when the responsibility of looking after myself is too much for me to manage.

The friend who came to take Wally to the vet for his last visit, and then dug the hole… I know too many beautiful people.

Thanks to Bill who assured me that Wally would die, realising my worst and most realistic fears.

Thanks, Orange cafe staff, who have looked after me and the roundelay of friends who have sat with coffee at their tables season after season. Laughing and crying, occasionally tipping.

Thanks to the guy, the friend, who hosts this web-site, and asks nothing in return, and the dear people who ‘read’ me.

My big eared listening friends deserve a big hug from the ‘dumper’ in me for letting that dumper part dump away. Endlessly. Thanks too to the hardship suffering friends who shared their experiences with me. Generously.

A special thanks to the little girl next door who doesn’t quite comprehend what happened to Mottsu, she doesn’t even remember him, and she politely asks about him, direct questions that seek to understand. She makes him real and remembered – remembered by me that is.

The friends who have taken my calls, fielded the emails with me wailing, thanks for being there. I know you’re there and I hope I can be there for you (even if I have dropped the ball. Forgive me). I love you for telling me I am OK when I have been least OK.

Thank you to all the people I can never repay. Too many special people who have bestowed great gifts of caring and love.

Thanks to all the dear people who know where the ashes are stashed and haven’t pressured me, even gently, to scatter them or place them somewhere more appropriate. One day

Thank you time for passing. I asked the clocks to stop, thanks for not listening.

My heart is full, today empty and full.

By admin | Posted in Life after loss | Tagged | Comments (0)

Dreams come true

March 13, 2010

My sister has a theory you attract that which you fear. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, espouses a similar view, that you attract what you wish for. In both instances you receive what you believe, assuming that in the case of fears dread is a form of belief.

Who knows what to believe ?

It is easy to pooh pooh (as Madeline said to the tiger in the zoo). I would pooh pooh the thought of attracting what you fear except that there was ‘that’ dream…

Long ago, when Mottsu was here, I was haunted by a recurring dream. I dreamed the same dream for years, at least five years. I dreamed this dream a number of times before I realised it was being replayed regularly.

Funny, but not ha-ha-ha.

In the dream Mottsu had left me. Within the dream realm I recognised that I had been left, sometimes it is all about me. In dreams at least, I didn’t ever perceive that in leaving he had left altogether. He had left me.

So, as I was explaining, in the dream Mottsu had left. He had gone and (in the dream) I didn’t know why. The experience was distressing, I was distraught not understanding what had happened, why he had left… I cried and cried. My overwhelming memory of the dream is inconsolable sobbing.

Me weeping.

Some nights I would wake myself with a half formed dream wailing, a dull bawling noise. A strangled scream. Some nights Mottsu would wake me, rousing me from the nightmare and I was consoled by his presence.

When he did leave my haunting dream became my life. Of course I remembered the nightmare amid my daytime weeping, while living my worst dream.

We know more than we know we know, dreams provide an account of what is happening in one’s life that you’re not conscious of. C.J. Jung saw dreams as a window to the unconscious. Framed that way, I think depression may have caused Mottsu to leave me, long before his physical departure.

I don’t know.

By admin | Posted in Depression experiences | Tagged | Comments (0)