Grief
It takes you unawares, grief
Oddly so.
It’s in the suddenness of the absence
The no more
A voice gone. Forever.
It’s in the silence that’s left behind
And the nothingness of it
The tiny minutes between living and dying
The same face, but empty.
The same person, but not.
But mostly it’s in the never.
Never again to smile. Never again to laugh.
Never again to be cross, or funny
Or impatient or loving
Or even confused.
It’s the never that takes you unawares.
My name is Paula Leyden, I am, among other things, a children’s author, living in Ireland and my books website is www.paulaleyden.com
There are some things that I wish to write about that do not really fit on that site, so I created this blog for those things.
Thank you (in absentia) to Dr, Seuss for so many things – but in particular for the title of this blog.
The Celtic sea that I look out on in wonder
at its infinite beauty and power is no different
to the sea that brings only terror and death
to those who have no choice but to flee
the villages of their birth and homes.
And these children, my children, who
I look at in wonder through their birth and growing,
are no different to the children whose small lives
are risked by parents with wonder and love in their hearts,
infinite in exactly the same way as mine.
Yet it gapes between us, this human space, messily cluttered
with fear and loss and different ways of living and dying
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I got to wondering
about the memories inside your lovely old head.
I imagined at first that they were simple ones.
The smells sniffed a thousand times.
The birds chased and the briars catching you
as you charged through, in pursuit of something or nothing.
The leaving and returning of those you love.
Because that I know. You do love us.
The treats and the pats and the rubs
and the puddles and the river. The rain
and the cracks of thunder that you hate.
The fears and the excitement.
The sorrow and the smiles
The confusion and your endless curiosity.
After all, not so simple.
Not much different to our own memories.
But maybe the difference is
that you do not know you are near the end.
I hope that is so.
You have no doctor to tell you, kindly and solemnly,
that this is, in fact, terminal.
It will end, this life of yours.
You cannot hear it in our voices.
You have not read that the life expectancy of a Springer is
somewhere between ten to twelve years,
and you are fourteen, beating the odds.
We know that but are grateful you don’t.
All those memories, good and bad,
stored away behind your kind tired eyes, as you still walk
down the familiar laneway.
As you still, sort of, jump with joy when you see us,
and wander off through the same old bushes
in the same old fields.
Slower yes, but no less for it.
It is a year that’s gone missing.
Day by day, week by week it has left us wondering
where it went , so quickly and so
relentlessly slowly all at the same time.
Measured out in the life-stages of the virus
and our frightened responses; closed, opened, surge, retreat,
half opened, half closed, mutations and variants.
All old words put to new use. Suspicions,
resentments, conspiracies, piety, and confusion have
tumbled through our streets and our homes.
We are not all the one in the way we greet this.
In how we can greet it. The masked up
and the defiantly mask-less, the resigned and the angry,
the contained and the hungry, the bored and the sad.
Some muddle through clumsily, other are just not able for it,
and the fog of despair creeps in and settles into every small fold
of their being. There to stay. Not counted in the monotonous
daily tally of deaths and infections, hospital beds and ICU numbers,
but there, hidden in plain sight, just as surely.
On a Sunday walk along the banks of the turbulent river,
how easy it is to see why it was named the Boiling Barrow.
Home to the remains of three fearsome serpents, plucked
from the heart of the impossibly ugly infant born to Morrigú.
Dian Cecht, whose mystical mind should have known better, burned
them down to powdery cinders which he flung across the water.
The vengeful serpents, their wickedness undimmed by death, churned
and twisted in the murky depths, killing all who dared live there.
And today, without rest, the river still runs deep and wild,
feared by those who know and understand it; those who for
generations have lived so carefully on its banks.
Not a river to be trifled with, even on a Sunday walk.
Crouched down in the hot dry sand
she held the twig lightly
and twirled it once, then twice
on the rim of the perfectly formed cone
waiting for the moment when the
spiny, cross ant lion would dart out for a meal.
His disappointment was only temporary
as with infinite patience he would settle back down
and wait for the next unsuspecting creature
to tumble inelegantly down into his lair.
Time is not on the side of those who live in a hard-baked land
where rain used to come down, predictably,
in the rainy season.
Time is not on the side of those who wait for green shoots
to push their way through the dry red earth
in the rainy season.
Time is not on the side of those who collect water from springs
and rivers that are now no more,
in the rainy season.
Not one of us are just one word.
Not one of us are only one thing.
Not one of us is a simple shortcut.
Like capital R, Refugee.
A simple catch-all word that catches nothing
of the person other than they left their home
and sought refuge elsewhere.
Other than the fact that they risked everything
to flee the place of their birth, handing over their lives
and their hopes to strangers. To unknowns.
But that part of them, the leaving part,
is so little compared to the whole of them.
To a life lived in full, to parents and grandparents
and graves visited on anniversaries, to celebrations
of days that matter. To food and talk and music.
To neighbourhoods, familiar and easy.
To wonder and knowledge and fear. To the things
taken for granted until they cannot be. To waking up
to a day stretching out, and just living that day. And the next,
with hardship and love and comfort and pain.
That simple word refugee meant nothing until suddenly it did.
Until it became all that you were, because you had no choice.
Until everything else that was you, up until that day,
crumbled into the ruins of your home.
Not one of us are just one word.
Home is a different kind of a thing
when you have been at home all over.
When you are not of a place that has always been with you,
a place that knows you almost as well as you know it.
A place where your grandparents and those before them
cried, laughed and loved while stumbling through their lives.
Home is a different kind of a thing
when the trees that you grew up with are far from you
growing old without your knowledge.
Your child memories trapped in your mind and your heart,
not casually revisited every so often by just being there in your adult self.
Home is a different kind of a thing when you do go back
to a place that was once yours. A visitor, half in and half out.
An almost stranger but not. Exclaiming with delight at things
and places, remembered with the sharpness of childhood.
But that’s all OK, because home now is where you are.
New memories joining those from long ago.
New trees growing close to you, tall and solid in the wind.
New tears and love and laughter, new delight at the recently remembered,
as you and yours stumble through your lives. At home.
There is something in the gaze of a horse
that touches us, and allows us to believe
that we know what they are thinking.
Something in their soft whinny and
snickering rumble that makes us want to protect them
from those who would do them wrong.
But somewhere, right now, a mare is standing
in a stall barely bigger than herself. Day in and day out.
Eternally in foal but never to know one.
Her pregnant urine harvested for tablets and creams
for ageing women, meno-pausing them on their journey through life.
Her foal an endless by product. Never to suckle.
Never to be taught how to graze on soft spring grass,
or to run from an imagined predator.
Never to whinny or snicker or roll or buck.
Just a disposable by product of an industry that remains
untouched by the gaze of a horse.
Nothing prepares you
For that moment.
Nothing you have seen
or thought or wondered about
any time before this.
No imagining of what it will feel like,
no reading of books
or listening to others
or learning from your own mother.
Or your own father.
Nothing.
And then your life, as you knew it
and lived it and wandered through it,
disappears. Just like that.
Because now, here they are.
They, who were within you and are now
just themselves. In this world.
But still yours.
That’s when it all changes.
And I feel so lucky to know that.
oh the thinks you can think 