Emotionally multitasking

You have to do life, somehow, even when you are grieving. This will of course depend on the loss in question. However, in a very general sense - life stuff keeps happening. 

I'm a mother. This is beautiful, chaotic, intense and often bloody challenging. It is still all these things whilst I'm grieving. Moreso, obviously. Somehow, I have to pull myself up by my bootstraps or, as a gentle nod towards the awesome human that is no longer here, I have to reboot myself. I have to hope that I am sufficiently bug free to avoid some kind giant syntax error. In short, there are things that must be done. The life code I write doesn't have to be stunning but it does have to work. This is difficult in a every-moment-kind-of-way. 

Within all this, there is still this sense that I'm not allowed to grieve. That I simply cannot feel that much. I sense this sometimes in people's reactions. There's an impatience. A lack of understanding. Perhaps there is simply discomfort because each time you acknowledge someone's grief, you have to face your own mortality or consider the possibility that you'll grieve or that you've grieved and the pain is still too near. I get it. I understand. But some people feel big. Some people feel so big that everyday life can seem unsurmountable. Add real, tangible grief into the mix and, well, everything is just too darned heavy. 

People ask me,  how are you and I feel like screaming: I feel the same as before. It hurts. It all hurts. But I don't. I sometimes nod gently towards my feelings or I cover my feelings up to save theirs. I allow myself to be inauthentic. I talk about the weather or shopping or football or any number of utterly pointless topics for their sake. But what of mine? What of my real feelings? Not pretense. Not words to fill in gaps. Reality. I want to shout into the ether: why, why, why. "No one will tell me why". I know they can't but I do want to be allowed to grieve. I do want people to acknowledge that I'm going to wobble. I'm going to be emotionally clumsy. I'm going to cry. I'm allowed to because this is the truth. 

I am doing life stuff. I'm not doing it well but I am doing it. I'm also emotionally multitasking in every moment. I'm holding space for everyone's feelings. I'm feeling their feelings as my own. I'm also feeling my own feelings. This is what empaths do. I know it because I live it. I've always lived it. Pretending to be anything other than I am is just extra effort. Effort that I don't have capacity for. 

So I'll stand, sit and lie down in my truth. I will protect people's feelings where it's necessary but won't avoid their discomfort. There isn't enough of me to do so. 

Xxxx

Forever luminous

Your lovely mum described you once as a light under a bushel. You are a light but you have now emerged from your bushel. 

You will never fade. You are forever luminous. 

As synchronicity would have it, this was our song:

Take me out tonight

Where there's music and there's people

And they're young and alive

Driving in your car

I never, never want to go home

Because I haven't got one anymore

Take me out tonight

Because I want to see people

And I want to see life

Driving in your car

Oh, please, don't drop me home

Because it's not my home, it's their home

And I'm welcome no more

And if a double-decker bus crashes into us

To die by your side

Is such a heavenly way to die

And if a ten ton truck kills the both of us

To die by your side

Well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine

Take me out tonight

Take me anywhere, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care

And in the darkened underpass

I thought, oh God, my chance has come at last

But then a strange fear gripped me

And I just couldn't ask

Take me out tonight

Oh, take me anywhere, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care

Driving in your car

I never, never want to go home

Because I haven't got one, la-di-dum

Oh, I haven't got one

Oh, oh

And if a double-decker bus crashes into us

To die by your side

Is such a heavenly way to die

And if a ten ton truck kills the both of us

To die by your side

Well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine

Oh, there is a light and it never goes out

There is a light and it never goes out

There is a light and it never goes out

There is a light and it never goes out

There is a light and it never goes out

There is a light and it never goes out

There is a light and it never goes out

There is a light and it never goes out...

Always forever

We'll always be together

However far it seems

(Love never ends)

We'll always be together

Together in electric dreams

Ravenhead

Your mind's made up maybe you won't go back on your word
It's that it's so unfair you're leaving me here in the lurch
You don't know how it feels to be left all alone
I tell you something for nothing baby
I tell you that it hurts

Nobody's ever happy any more
Nobody's ever happy any more

The beer takes me under to another world
Just live for the next drop you know, 'til my head hits the floor
What worse is that you don't seem to care
'Cause you're leaving me here dying
You're not there any more

Nobody's ever happy any more
Nobody's ever happy any more

The last little sip, the whisky runs down my throat
Do you remember the time you took me under your coat
What was it you said when the police carried me away?
You said the carnival had started but I'd left

Hey

Oh! Ravenhead
I take back all those things I said
I stare into an empty glass
I never thought it wouldn't last

Oh! Ravenhead
I take back all those things I said
Stare into an empty glass
I never thought it wouldn't last

The Tetleys 🐦‍⬛🖤💔

Not here

I didn't expect to feel as broken as I do at the news of your passing. I didn't expect your passing either. It was a shock. It remains a shock. I know there are stages of grief. At some point you accept it. But even as I know the process, I cannot even begin to correlate it with you. 

I feel destabilised. Like everything has been pulled apart. I know it's less than the heavy devastation that your family and close friends feel. I know I'm just part of your past and I didn't expect to be in your future. But I did expect you to have one. I thought you'd have grandchildren. I thought you'd play your bass until you had to walk on stage with a walking stick. I thought your life would be long and abundant and brilliant and I do think it was all those things but it was just nowhere near long enough.  

Come back Bean! Not to me but to your people. Your life. Your family. Your friends. All I want is to occasionally glance at what you're doing and feel happy to have been part of your past. I don't want this horrific not-here-ness. It doesn't make any sense. 

💔💔💔

Rejection of transience

As Anya, ex Vengeance Demon, newish human wisely once said in response to the passing of Buffy's mum: 

"I don't understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I mean, I knew her, and then she's- There's just a body, and I don't understand why she just can't get back in it and not be dead anymore. It's stupid. It's mortal and stupid. And-and Xander's crying and not talking, and-and I was having fruit punch, and I thought, well, Joyce will never have any more fruit punch ever, and she'll never have eggs, or yawn or brush her hair, not ever, and no one will explain to me why."

On some level that's how we all feel. We cannot comprehend how someone who was there, is now not in their body. It is  painful. All we know is aliveness. We do not know death. So when someone we love is no longer here, nothing makes sense. We feel newly human or like an alien or a Vengeance Demon. We cannot comprehend it. And we don't even want to. We just want to change it. 

Our connection to a person is tied to their soul. Of course it is. That's part of their aliveness. But it's their soul within their body. Every word they spoke. Each time they moved. The shared moments. The memories. The quirks. The everything that made them, them. So how can they be anything else, other than a beautiful solid form. How can they be gone. Or even transmuted into a soul outside a body. It is simply impossible to comprehend. 

I'm with Anya. I feel just as she did. I feel lost and confused and angry at the transient nature of the human experience. 

I know that cannot change reality but I wish that I could. 

Part of me

You are part of me. 

It never faded. 

It did not age. 

It did not stop. 

It folded.

Sometimes opening. 

Sometimes resting. 

But never gone. 

You are part of me. 

Always.