In fact I realised that I didn't want to enjoy my birthday. I could have made an effort to start an alternative tradition, or invited some friends over. If you've been single for a long time, then this attitude might seem pointlessly self-indulgent, since you're probably accustomed to organising your own birthday celebrations instead of wallowing in misery. But this year I found I wanted the space to preserve the feeling of Jen's absence rather than fill the void.
In the first few months after Jen's death, her absence was so strong it was like a presence. At moments it seemed that everything else was the same, that she might impossibly walk in the door from the next room. Time might have been just another dimension that I could reach across and touch her hand. Over the last two and a half years, the routines of our lives have evolved without Jen, and we have slowly filled some of the absence until the days can seem almost normal. Only occasionally now, perhaps coming back to bed in the darkness, do I have a flash of feeling that Jen might still be there, asleep on her side.
So I find at times a need to make space for Jen's absence, rather than fill it. I want to feel grief because it's about love, and open myself again to the intensity of loss. I can't do that every day or I would cease to function well, so instead the grief goes with occasions that once were special.
The other side of a birthday is the reminder of growing older. I'm healthy enough not to be worried yet about aging, and I still see much that I could do. The sadness is that I can't grow old with Jen and see the fruits of a long relationship, or enjoy the years with her. Jen was 'out' on forty, while I continue to move away from her in time. What comes to mind is the words used in the Remembrance day service, taken from a poem written in 1914 after heavy British losses:
- They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
- Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
- At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
- We will remember them.
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I'm newish here, Maritus, via Alison Sampson's blog. There's an ache inside when I read about your sadness and loss. I have not lost someone so close to you as your Jen, but I can imagine and it frightens me a little. At the same time I'm honoured to be reading these words here and humbled by the depth of their meaning. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteMaybe grief/love is like religious faith or religious observance - a calling that one's heart and spirit yearns towards, and yet in regard to which (for those who are "in the world", ie not monks and nuns in devotional orders) explicit specific practice needs to be confined to particular times (prayers or meditation on waking and sleeping; grace and Bible readings at table with the family; church on Sunday; or in your case, time especially on significant anniversaries when you meditate on your love and loss), while in the meantime you "get on with life" as you allude to here. Sometimes a person's practice evolves towards the idea of "praying without ceasing" - not on your knees in a chapel or a prayer rug or with a prayer shawl, and probably not even consciously, but in one's inmost heart and core being, wholly in communion without there being a particular outward time or physical marker or boundary separating this sacred, meaningful "be-ing" from the whole of life. In the corollary of grief/love, maybe at some point a person might change from putting aside those specific, focussed times for meditation on love and loss, to living in communion with that love and loss at all times. No matter what the person's practice, it is good. Thanks for sharing your experience.
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