Ghostbusters

Over Easter we were travelling north, through Canberra to Mittagong then Sydney, back to Wangarratta and then home. All those we visited were friends from our Canberra years, mainly the time before we were married. In Canberra and Mittagong I revisited places that we'd been together, such as Regatta Point, where we had our wedding reception. Each person and place evoked Jen - last time we were together like this, she was with us.

So why return and revisit? Why not simply 'move on'? Why disturb the ghosts at all? Firstly, it is say goodbye to Jen once more, both in celebration of the memory of the past, and in sorrow at its passing. I suspect that this element of farewell will continue long into the future. In a few places I have begun a small ritual. Jen loved beaches, surf and swimming. Sometimes now when I return to favourite beaches, as I walk along the tideline I write Jen's name and dates in the sand, and wait until the next big wave washes the writing away.

Secondly, to revisit is to overwrite past associations with new ones. In the immediate aftermath of Jen's death, I felt a trepidation in the first return to each familiar place - would it evoke Jen so intensely as to trigger further grief? In the most frequented places, such as at home or at church, that encounter happened in the days immediately after Jen died. Now those places feel comfortable and are now linked with the associations of the past eight months without Jen. Of course it's not just places, but people, situations, dates and objects, each with the power to evoke the past. If you can cast your mind back that far, it is faintly analogous to the aftermath of a major relationship breakup, where the recovery does require the time to reforge the links to each place and experience.

Over the months, the fear of remembering has been replaced by the fear of forgetting. The very process of creating new associations weakens the old ones. A piece of music or poetry that initially gave me a shudder of recall and grief does not continue to evoke Jen as strongly on repeated hearing or reading. I'm reminded again of a line out of T. S. Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night":

Midnight shakes the memory
Like a madman shakes a dead geranium.

It is an image of a futile effort to evoke feeling from memory. Early on I wrote about the temptation to try and sustain the intensity of grief, as though the passing of that terrible passion was a kind of betrayal. If I really loved Jen, shouldn't I miss her more than this?

One defence against this forgetting is to make a deliberate choice not to revisit or not too often anyway, least the experience of savouring the association be the means of destroying it.  For this reason, there are still some things of Jen's that I will keep out of the way for a while.

The other defence is instead to create deliberate new associations with Jen. This is most obvious with the seat I've put in our kitchen garden, or the place where her ashes are buried. Each time I'm there I think about Jen, and it does create a space where memory is strengthened, even if only the memory of grief. I do not hope to halt time's eroding current, only to slow it down.