Me too

I remember that girl
  She really knew how to love
  in that kind of way.

I miss that girl
  I wonder where she has gone
  and how so much of a person
  could just disappear like that.

My movie

We went to Kindy Gym yesterday morning, as we always do on a Tuesday, and the little one decided she needed some sustenance before she got started. So I found myself sitting out in the rec centre corridor while she nibbled away on her early morning tea and I gazed off in to the distance.

In the distance was a group of elderly people doing some exercises. Pumping their arms in to the air, sitting on chairs and lifting their feet. They looked, well, old. Tired, worn out, but grabbing at life. I struggle very much now with the way our lives so often seem to end. With a loss of function, with exhaustion, with a loss of dignity. Amazing, competent, full, complete lives that can fade in such harsh ways. I seem to be hyper-aware of the cycle of life - and the speed with which it goes. As I watched these elderly people in one room, I could feel the lives in the room just behind me. Fresh and new little bodies, just beginning to explore all the magnificent things they are capable of. And across the loud speaker came the music, "to everything turn turn turn, there is a season turn turn turn, and a time to every purpose under Heaven. A time to be born, a time to die..." The song finished and I tried to break out of the place I had landed in, but the next song followed. The song that I was singing to my children at the moment Kent died, "how wonderful life is, while you're in the world." I plummeted back in to my thoughts until our girl was ready to take me back in to Kindy Gym, and give me a hug.

*

I can't tell you how any moments I have had like this over the last couple of years. In fact I wish I had told you, I wish I had recorded them, though often they have been too intangible and acutely beautiful to know how to record. I often feel like I am living in a movie. Not just because of the big story, but all the little stories that happen along the way. Wow, you couldn't have *written* it better than this. Not better in a good way, this is not generally a good story, but the moments, the coincidences, the coming together of things. It has been extraordinary. I really seem to be living in a movie. I think what's supposed to happen next is that I open a chocolate shop and a handsome man arrives and falls wildly in love with me.

I'm not too sure about that, but the credits aren't rolling on this extraordinary life of mine. Ordinary seems to have gone forever.

Prescription ladders

-I wrote this late last year, soon after I wrote "Grief and the Black Dog,"
and soon after that I got myself a ladder-

I seem to be lost

Somewhere inside of me

Grasping and clawing

Under a heavy black blanket

Send down a ladder

So I can find me again.

I saw his face

I saw his face in my dreams last night. As so often I do, but this time, unusually, it was healthy. Perhaps it was only a dream, I have had so many powerful ones that have become nothing but broken.

It was beautiful, of course. Crystal clear, his features sharp and face glowing, more than I have ever seen in this life. "I love you so much," he said, with his smile. Thank you love, I know you do, I know.

Please come and tell the kids one day (night) too.

Listening

- Not my best writing perhaps, but words I need to get down -

I grabbed a couple of CDs from my Mum's collection before the half hour car journey the other day, and hoped I had the right ones. It's good to try and choose something that I will enjoy, that won't envelop me in a dark and heavy blanket of memory and sadness. In the car I chose to play The Shot Band, they sounded kind of loud and fun. The first song was exactly that, but I prepared myself for the second one, I had seen on the cover that it was titled "The most beautiful widow in town." The melancholy of the first few notes jaded me, after the fun of the first song, and I thought "is this what has to be mine? Is this the music that is for me? Is there only this sadness now?" The fun of the first song was just pretending for a while, the second was reality returning.

It's hard to say really. I need words, and music, that describe pain, but I guess I don't need them all the time. And music is particularly hard. Perhaps because so much of my listening is done when I'm driving. But whatever the time of day, I have to be prepared for a journey (of the emotional kind) whenever I listen, and if I am choosing the music it can really take some choosing.

Looking at my mother's collection I could choose some old Jewel, there are few connections with Kent there. But what about that song that is so full of hope about life, fill your lives with love and bravery, and we shall lead a life uncommon, when life is skidding out of control? How do I join in the hope? Or there is that wonderful Mark Cohn album that Mum and I used to listen to, often in the car too, but I'd be preparing the whole time to skip the last song, when the years have done irreperable arm, I can see us slowly walking arm in arm, just like that couple on the corner do, cause girl I will always be in love with you... Then when I leave this earth, I'll be with the angels standing, I'll be out there waiting for my true companion.

Today I chose Sarah McLachlan, I have the sense to recognise that I don't know how to let you go grabbed me, and I succumbed to the searing beauty of Angel, spend all your time waiting for that second chance, for a break that would make it ok.. It's hard at the end of the day, I need some distraction, or beautiful release, memories seep from my veins, let me be empty and weightless and maybe I'll find some peace tonight.. oh this glorious sadness that brings me to my knees. But actually, it's OK, it gives the silent and rock hard burn inside of me voice and beautiful sound, and I like that. And I'm good at driving now with tears streaming.

After a year of silence it was David Gray's White Ladder that I went back to first, it was probably the last thing I had listened to a lot during Kent's illness, and it was the first thing I returned to. The beauty and sadness in it worked for me, and I played it in the car over and over. I have always had to skip what we gonna do when the money runs out, wish that there was something left to say, how we gonna find the eyes to see a brighter day, because it reminds me of a life running out, and the desolation of it is too much. So alive with wild hope takes me back to a good life long ago, I got half a mind to scream out loud I got half a mind to die - I listen to the first bit and try not to hear the second. And I love that someone out there has said so beautifully it takes a lotta love my friend to keep your heart from freezing, to push on to the end.

There is so much music that Kent introduced me to that I can't quite work out how to approach yet. I don't want to miss out on The Arcade Fire but I'm not quite ready to be landed in the middle of our happiest married days - good as that may sound. There's Coldplay that drops me straight back in to London and I am missing them too, but tears stream down your face when you lose something you can not replace.. lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones, and I will try to fix you can only be listened to in the dark and when you are fully prepared. Cat Power I would like to listen to again one day too, but they were a very recent discovery, and that seems to remind me that all good music that is to come won't be heard by Kent, and, less of a tragedy but disappointing nonetheless, without him to find it and bring it to me, I am less likely to hear it too.

I did discover The Lumineers without him, and I have found room for them without too many tears, though I wonder often about it's better to feel pain than nothing at all, and always notice when we were young we did enough (no we didn't, we didn't have enough time!) and when we were cold we bundled up (we did!). I also hear I'm standing on your porch screaming out, and I don't blame you dear, running like you did all these years, and most of all, most of all, Kent's voice, and the name he used for me, keep your head up my love, which, along with David Gray's The One I Love, led to me writing From Here to Here. Ho Hey and I belong with you, you belong with me, my sweetheart - those words make me struggle but the fantastic happiness and life of the song fill me with a fizzing excitement and I am pulled in all directions.

We can't talk of music and Kent without Dave Matthews of course, and it is something I have struggled to bring myself to listen to. For a myriad reasons - both lyrics and associations. They're words too hard or too precious to even write here to be honest, they're words that describe our earliest days together, words that we walked together back up the aisle to, words engraved on the inside of my wedding ring. Though I have spent some time with Grey Street and love the truth and experience of the words. 

And it is the most beautiful combination of Dave and the gorgeous Emmylou that tore at my heart and my eyes when I braved them just yesterday:
I can still hear him he calls to me only, what once was begotten shall come to no end,
But the road is so long and the nights are so lonely,
My soul just to hold him in this world again.
You are my sorrow, you are my splendour,
You are my shelter through storm and through strife
You are the one I will always remember, all of the days of my life.

- My soul just to hold him in this world again -

I always
wanted
to change
the world,
but the world
changed me.

The second anniversary

On the 17th of January a group of family and friends took time to mark the second anniversary of Kent's death.

It was a strange day. I don't like the idea that how I am feeling should be dictated by the calendar. I think I do find the lead up to difficult dates particularly hard. I tend to feel sort of hamstrung and unable to do things. It's a relief when it's over. And on the morning of the 17th my mind did turn with great clarity to some pretty difficult memories. But I was treated with such lovely tender care by those around me and it was nice to have that acknowledgement. There are other days of such fragility that are nothing on the calendar, but noone knows when they are, and the special care on special days can be remembered in the in-betweens. And I wouldn't really want to be treated like an eggshell every day.

It was hard to know how to mark the day, we couldn't really do an exact repeat of last year. But we had to do something. I bought some flowers and lay them on the grave, and while a friend played guitar we each took a stem and put it in a vase on the headstone. It felt like the right thing to do.

I was somehow both stunned and numbed at the sight of our children playing with the flowers as they sat upon Kent's grave. It was the most unbelievable and incomprehensible thing. They enjoyed the flowers and the little guy enjoyed making sure everyone had a turn. But when I cried a little behind my sunglasses they both left other various family members and came over to me, popping down on my knee and sitting quietly for a long time while I held on tight. I asked later and learnt that they had both chosen to come on their own, noone had suggested it. They saw me, and came.

It's hard, really hard, going in to the third year. I've read quite often about the second year. Everyone seems to like to say how noone talks about the second year, and how all the support comes in the first and you feel lonelier in the second. But never have I ever read anything about the third year. It seems to just be lumped in to "the rest of your life," and that's pretty tough.