Published on 12, July, 2020
I feel very strange today. Disoriented. Lost.
I've tried all day to do some writing, but it's like trying to squeeze water from a lump of wood. I've tried to do some reading, too, but that's still refusing to come back to me. There was a time when I always had my head in a book. Now... it's just a jumble of meaningless words. I went out for a short walk earlier, but I was glad to get back. Too many people hanging around in the warm evening, at the end of the weekend - skin burned from a day on the beach, a bit drunk, looking at phones (as usual), talking loudly, eating take-away. The rubbish on the pavements and in the gutters. Cars passing endlessly. No sense of anything for me to latch onto or find meaning in.
On Thursday, it's the first anniversary of my mother's passing - although last year, the 26th was a Wednesday. I'll set time aside on both evenings to sit quietly and remember her. I've taken the week off work for the occasion. I've got nothing special planned. The way it's feeling, each day will be pretty much the same. I don't want to do anything special, anyway. Just be by myself. Me and the cat. This time last year, we were all together in her home, sharing those precious moments as she began her final decline. Where has that year gone?
On days like this, it really feels like simply going through the motions of a life - because that's what I have to do. Go too far along that road, of course, and it can easily start to lose its meaning. And I don't think I've found the meaning of it yet. Maybe there isn't one. Just be here, for a while - a span of years - and then pass on.
I feel more alienated from society, in many ways, than I have before. I simply no longer understand the things that seem to preoccupy everyone. I no longer feel any of the urges or excitements that I felt when younger: the sense of something new waiting for me just ahead some way. I no longer even think that I'm interested in trying to fulfill the ambitions I once had: to travel, to publish books, to seek new truths or experiences, to find love. I've been through many of those things already, and they haven't given me any sense of satisfaction or fulfillment. I can't seem to shake off, just lately, that underlying sense I have of things gradually winding down, like an old clock someone's forgotten to wind. The ticks are getting more drawn out by the day. The hands are slowing. Maybe exhaustion is catching up with me.
Sorry to be so downbeat. I just needed to put something down in words.
Anyone else get to feel this way?
I've felt that disconnected feeling. Fleetingly and, on some occasions, longer. I'm not sure what causes it most of the times it's happened but I do remember feeling like that for a longer period after my father died many years ago. I think it's natural to feel like this after losing a loved one because that's certainly a time when we question everything about life. Question what is important and, against such a huge loss, realise that all of the things we fill our lives with are not as important as we thought they were.
I too remember listening to people talking about their 'problems', parents yelling at their children, seeing others shopping or rushing about their business and thinking ... For what? What is the point of all of this? Why can no-one see that all of these things are just pointless time-wasting, time-filling, irrelevancies? Set against the loss of someone we love, all of these things are indeed irrelevant!
I think what helped me at that time, after losing my father, was thinking about the joy he had from similar 'irrelevancies' though. He used to enjoy tinkering with things, mostly cars and engines and anything mechanical. They didn't always result in finished, working articles but he gained an enormous amount of satisfaction from taking things apart, exploring them, enjoying them for what they were to him. Enjoying them in the moment. Enjoying the process itself. It's one of the things I think of when I remember him, one of the things that defined him, and I often picture him working away at some rusting, oily piece of metal and I smile. I'm sure your Mum had her passions too, things that gave her joy or comfort or a purpose. These perhaps, as my father's love of mechanics did to me, seemed fairly mundane at the time but feel keenly lost now that the person is gone.
Our own likes, loves, passions and everyday joys are exactly as mundane, yes, but also exactly as important. Every small thing that defines you was a wonderful part of what she knew of and loved about you. Perhaps the way you settled down to read in the evenings, perhaps the radio station you chose, a million little irrelevancies that weren't at all irrelevant to her. Grief and loss don't have a time limit but gradually I saw that all of these things weren't irrelevant at all. They're all tiny parts of life, minute atoms of joy or sorrow that might not mean much on their own but, taken all together, they make up a minute, a day, a life of experiences. They're not irrelevant. The meaning in them is simply that we are here to experience them and that's worth just as much as all of the little 'irrelevancies' we remember about them and which are so much more important now. A tiny part of them lives on in us, that deserves to be nurtured and enjoyed.
Perfectly and eloquently put, Endymion. Thank you. It very much tallies with my own perspective on life. Yes, those tiny parts of life. As Jim Jarmusch, my favourite film-maker, puts it: 'The beauty of life is in small details, not in big events.'
These are the things that the poets and fiction-writers notice. Sadly (or maybe not!) I haven't been able to write poetry for some time. But here's one I did a few years ago...
SEEING
I wish I could explain to you
how it is that when I see
a sunrise
on a shattered landscape
an empty shoe
washed up on a beach
a blackbird
pecking the bones of a cat
an old man
laughing in spite of the fear
a child
playing games with a stopped clock
a flower
blooming from a crack in the road -
these things
I also see
a poem.
@Endymion and @Martian Tom , you both write so beautifully and eloquently; you've inspired me to go do some writing of my own
That's beautiful Tom. That's exactly the kind of thing that I admire about good writers such as yourself: something that takes me a hundred words to describe or explain, you can say so much more clearly in ten! I'm going to keep a copy of that (I hope that's alright?).