I wrote this post back in March. For some reason I never posted it at the time. I have not edited it, but have added an extra paragraph at the end as a wee update.
I’ve been thinking about loss a lot lately. I guess this isn’t much of a surprise to anyone.
Mum died 51 days ago, and I still feel her loss as though it were a large woollen jumper I put on each morning. It wraps me up and keeps me safe. It smells and feels familiar. Its softness fits my contours. It is light and some of the time I hardly notice I am wearing it. But occasionally it overwhelms me and feels like it is suffocating me.
But there have been other losses.
Sometime around 26th January I lost my house keys. It has been fairly common over the last year for me to temporarily lose my keys, but usually I find them in the bottom of a shopping bag, or in the drawer, or hanging up in the kitchen. On this occasion they were nowhere to be found. I was annoyed at myself for stupidly losing them, but honestly had other things that were more important at that point.
Mum died three days later. The keys didn’t show up.
This loss, which should have thrown me into panic, into a tizz, hardly touched me. Mostly I don’t need my set of house keys, as I’m either with The Captain (and his set of keys) or he is at home and we don’t need to lock the house up. In my head I tried to retrace my steps when I last used my keys – I thought I had them with me when I’d gone shopping, or perhaps that time I bought a coffee on the way to visit Mum?
A few weeks later I made enquiries at the few places I might have left my keys – they looked for me, but nothing had been handed in. Had I just dropped them in the street? Did I need house keys at all? I sort of felt like I probably did. But this loss indicated that perhaps they weren’t as important in my life as I had imagined.
The loss of my keys seemed to be part of a greater loss I’ve experienced over the last long year. I have lost some of my eyesight, aspects of my health and with these two, my independence. As I write this I realise it sounds more dramatic than it is – I am still an independent woman, but I am no longer able to drive and somehow the ability to get in a car and drive off somewhere on my own has always represented independence to me. Perhaps I have to look again at what independence really looks like?
Mostly I have just absorbed this loss. I railed against it initially, was desperately unhappy and, looking back, was really quite incapacitated by it. I felt let down by the medical profession – there has been little research for my condition, and as a result there are few options. The medication I need to take (to prevent further sight loss) adds new symptoms on top of the recognised symptoms of my condition.
And this brings me back to the loss of Mum. Except that I haven’t really lost her. Here she is, in this big woollen jumper, always with me. I see her everyday. She is in the camellia flowers, which have appeared so early in the Spring. She is in every meal that I make, but most especially in big pots of soup. She is under the stairs, in those ancient jars of salt petre and bottles of glycerine. She is in the jade elephant. And there she is in the birds twittering around the birdfeeder. She is in my wedding ring, given to her by Dad nearly 64 years ago when they married. She is here all around me, in the view of the pond which is so full of activity at this time of year – swans, ducks, coots, moorhens. She is with me when I sow seeds, with such hope for their growth. She is in every breath I take, for I am made from her.
One day a month or two later The Captain walked into my office saying, ‘Guess what I found?’. My housekeys had re-appeared, after a long holiday in the car way under the passenger seat. I have put them in my bag, but have not used them once since. There are some things which you believe are essential to life itself, and it’s only when they are gone that you realise they’re not. Mum was though.
Shewolfinthevalley 