11. Oct, 2018

Hollow heart

I’ve picked up the pen on more than a few occasions over the past few weeks and must admit to putting it straight back down. Why, you wonder? Well, I keep asking myself, “how do you write about emptiness?” Because, that’s how I feel…empty…and I mean no disrespect to my family and friends, but I am at a loss to describe how I currently feel after the recent loss of my mum.

The reverberations of grief bounce back and forth across the canyon of my heart. I would prefer a surgeon place his scalpel upon my chest and slice through the layers of flesh and fat, peel it open and dissect my heart without the aid of anaesthetic than feel the searing pain of the loss of the closest person in the world to me.

I will, on occasions sit down and tap away at my computer, or handwrite a blog and the words will just spew forth with the force of projectile vomit, but this one…nothing about it seems natural and easy, yet I am being compelled to write in the hope that it will help me feel…that on some level, the natural anaesthesia of grief will begin to wear off and in time the healing process will begin.

I have researched and read through the stages of grief and if such a phenomenon is to be believed, I am still in denial. My mum hasn’t left me for eternity, she is just away, and will, in time return to me, (who am I kidding right?) but on the other hand, every experience I am currently having is telling me otherwise.

Ripping apart and clearing out the family home of sixty years is a devastating loss of a different kind, yet another process to grieve, but this is one I can’t deny…because every time I pull up outside my family home, my body reminds me exactly what is going on.

Over the past eight years or so I have experienced panic attacks on a frequent basis. My heart will race and I begin to tremor and shake and my chest will constrict so much that I feel like I am suffocating, but nobody really knows this, it is not something I have ever really admitted or talked about, I had an attack witnessed by my family in the minutes after my mum passed and the last one only yesterday as I cleaned out my old room. The room my mum happened to spend her final days in.

I have so many happy memories of the house that sits high on a ridge overlooking the beautiful city I grew up in. At night the city shimmers like the milky way on a cloudless night, but like every childhood, not every day was rosy, and although I can’t remember in detail the bad ones, my body won’t let me forget them.

My childhood on the surface seemed unremarkable, although mum and dad did their best to make their marriage work, it ended in separation when I was 12. So, for me, the process of digging up the past is full of contradictions, with reminders of good times and some not so good times being unearthed in the ruins of a family home currently being stripped bare. And to tell you the truth I never thought it would be so hard. There are so many relics left behind of a life lived, while at the same time the fine silky dust sitting in a box atop a dresser, destined to be returned to the earth is a sobering remembrance that she is no longer home and will never again return.

So, tell me, if I don’t have the heart to just toss away everything that meant so much to her, how will I ever be able to scatter the remains of someone I loved so completely?

We have been so consumed with the busyness of the processes surrounding mum's death, I don’t think I have really had the chance to grieve her loss. My hollow heart, so full of love for her when she was alive now seems like it has no purpose, the echo of each drum beat seems lost to grief.

I received a beautiful card today from a wise and very special friend and in it she said “the grief and sadness of losing your mum is not something that recedes with the passing of time but I hope that each day brings you closer to peace” and with those words the dam of denial burst and I broke down and sobbed, and I sobbed until my nose literally filled with so much snot I couldn’t breathe. But I am thankful for the release and for the love and reassurance she has shown me during this difficult time.

Hollow, empty, unfilled, vacant, void, are just words, but their meanings are profound when it comes to matters of the heart. I sometimes wonder how I can go on without her, I try to imagine a future where I will never be able to talk to her again, and forget that I am in it. I am living it! In a way it feels like I am stuck in a bad dream and am desperate for someone to wake me, but I can’t be roused. I reach out to touch her hand, but it vanishes before my eyes... because she has, and all I have left are memories of a love so special and so grand I will never again experience in my lifetime. It is up to me now and me alone, to find the peace she would want for me…if I could only ask her how…