Alone

Grieving, and choosing to stay here for a while

I can't see the path ahead, but I'm not even looking for it. Not now, not yet. Just over two weeks ago my husband Farooq died.

My life partner for fifty years, the man I’d loved and worked with and lived with and who I'd cared for during a long, painful time of slow decline and suffering.

I'm finding it hard to write, or not anything coherent. For a long time now I’ve been too tired and my chronically sick body is doing a good job of expressing everything my mind can't, and I'm in pain. It’s even been hard for me to draw, although some of the drawings I’ve made have given me insights I couldn’t otherwise have seen. I was expecting grief to be something I could describe but I can't, so instead I’ve settled into it and I’ll wait and let it explain itself to me. For a while at least I’m in a kind of mist, a sort of liminal place that has no clear features. The truth is I'm in no hurry to leave, in fact I want to stay; I need the solace it gives me. I want to be alone here in this sacred space.

This isn't working out of course, or not entirely because there are so many things to be done that I have to do, and - and - this is hard to admit - I have been distracting myself with letters and emails and organisational stuff, the compulsion to set everything in order. Somehow I have to find the way forward on my own. Tread the path, on my own.

But grief has its own timetable and its own language. I'm finding the grief I'm feeling is such a multilayered thing. So unpredictable. There's sudden, overwhelming bursts of sadness and a yearning, empty sense of loss, but that comes sandwiched between enormous waves of love and a strange, unexpected, intense happiness. I'm just feeling it all.

I’m navigating alone through uncharted territory, but if there’s one thing I know (this is what drawing has taught me over the years) it’s that being in an unknown place, being in the state of not knowing - is the most sacred, alive place to be.

Today at least, I’ve put everything else aside. I'm just listening, waiting, feeling, resting. Learning how to grieve.