A few months ago I wrote here about spending time with my seriously ill husband, and my experience of coming to terms with the end of a love that had been everything to me.
It took years to accept that love was over, and what I eventually took from that lonely, arid time was painful instruction on the power of human attachment.
When I visited A last year, desperately ill after a massive stroke, unable to speak coherently and only intermittently recognising me, our life together did indeed parade itself before my eyes, and I laid many things to rest as I sat for weeks beside his bed, holding his hands while he struggled to tell me he loved me and always would.
The miracle was, that after everything that went wrong we did still love each other. I wasn’t altogether surprised to find that in me, because I am very bad at endings. The life may no longer be a shared one, but something in me, deep in my belly, refuses to entirely let go of the love. I don’t know if this is a good or a bad thing, it just is. So I can look at someone I loved years ago and think oh, yes, I loved you and oh yes, the ending was hard and I hated you for a while, and oh yes, though I don’t want to do anything about it and my life has changed, still there is tenderness, and gratitude for what we knew together.
Grief is an altered state. It can take you by surprise, long after you think you’ve done with it. It becomes less wild, less consuming as time passes. It can take on a sorrowful tenderness that for all its softness, still wrenches the heart. Grief can be triggered unexpectedly, long after you think you’re done with it, and you find yourself needing to hide away while you work out what has suddenly gone wrong with your breathing, and why out of nowhere you badly want to cry.
For example, I walked into a room today where someone was playing Mendelssohn’s Sonata for Cello and Piano, #2 in D Major. I listened to this Sonata, along with the Brahms #1 in F, during a very rough period in my marriage, during the last of many journeys A and I made together, down the Mekong, through Laos. I’ve heard both many times since, of course, but never without some emotion, the power of which has lessened over time. Yet today, for reasons I can’t explain, I heard the familiar first movement as if I was back on that long boat, sitting on my backpack beside A, both of us silenced by the misery of knowing it was too late for this journey or any other journey together, and neither of us able to end it.
I don’t have a list of things I want to do before I die. At times I think, vaguely, of travelling to places I’ve never been because it would be excellent to leave the earth having seen as much of it as possible. At times I think I want to go back to the place where I was born one more time, because every time I return to that North Yorkshire country I feel a primitive and powerful sense of belonging that I have never felt anywhere else.
But lately I’ve been thinking that these things come a poor second to love, in all its frequently unexpected and varied manifestations, and it’s likely love that tops my bucket list.
Today my friend said, there’s no such thing as a perfect relationship is there? There is, I said, after a while. The perfect relationship is the one where you care enough to bother struggling through the shitty bits and find you still want to stay in it. The perfect relationship is the one where you don’t want to struggle through the shit, and you have the decency and the courage to leave before you cause anymore damage to yourself and the other. Love is required for both. Isn’t it?
Today I re-learned that nothing ends when you think it has. This annoys me, because I don’t live easily with loose ends. Somewhere along the way I’ve got it into my head that one must have “closure,” resolution, well-defined endings in order to move onto anything new. But actually, I’m coming to think that’s crap. My life is a chaos of ongoing love of varying kinds and depths, and I can’t think how to tidy up any of it. Perhaps I don’t have to? Perhaps instead I must learn to live with the disorder of a functioning human heart? Perhaps for years to come I will unexpectedly feel grief for my husband, for my dead mother, for my friend, for everyone I’ve loved and will love, with various degrees of complexity and difficulty, success and failure.
There is a human being. There is love. That is all.
No Place For Sheep 
Okay so I see your writer’s block has cleared up brilliantly 🙂
So much so that there’s not much I could add on the subject other than that I hope I’m accurate in saying that you’d probably change some things but not everything if you’d a second chance so it seems like the best thing to do might be to celebrate life’s journey rather than regretting it too much.
As for Mendelssohn he was a very clever fellow but passages of that piece seem too sad by halves wait for the parts nearer the end that seem vaguely resonant with the score to silent movies, imagine Buster Keaton’s stunts or some Charlie Chaplin’s more amusing antics and maybe have a bit of a smile when you recall the connection. After all life and love are alternately deadly serious and a little bit silly too. Don’t lose your sense of humour.
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Music, sweet music, the delightful soundtrack of our lives.
I wrote an earlier post – truly brilliant – which was swallowed by the ether.
Schubert’s Piano Trio no.2 (op 100) does it for me.
Associations of music with the events and joys of our lives are unique to each of us, our very own private soundtrack. It is so precious.
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Keep on the move also though Jennifer, grief can morph to reactive depression. As for “closure”, it is a myth except that it will come when IT is ready, not its subject- yes, if at all-and not always as anticipated, a point you made yourself.
If the best subjects of your grieving are as good as some of those I remember, the memories can become sweet and heathy eventually. Cop it sweet but remember others are still about who appreciate you and your efforts to make sense of things and offer consequent insights for the benefit of others.
Stick around.
Watch your grand kids grow into adults before your own time comes.
Accept that we know it hurts. We have all been caught out, had to lean on others as I believe has happened once or twice for me at least, as to you and others with this blog, even.
You want to lean on us? Go ahead.
For survival we have had to lean on others, believe me. It may involve wounded pride, but suck it up, good things are around the corner and besides, it might be of solace to those of us who have already failed, to know that even the best of us can falter when jolted.
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🙂 Thank you PW
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“…..the disorder of the functioning human heart…”
Says it all.
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