From Cymbeline..

Look what I found whilst reading the very odd play Cymbeline.. so beautiful..

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust

Fear no more the frown o' the great;
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning flash,

Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;

Fear not slander, censure rash;

Thou hast finish'd joy and moan:

All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee!

Nor no witchcraft charm thee!

Ghost unlaid forbear thee!

Nothing ill come near thee

Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave!

Journal Entry July 28 2011

"All I want to do is lie quietly with my eyes closed and let the tears drip from my eyes. Try to come to terms with the death of my sister. The idea of her life slipping away rips me apart and tears me to pieces. Her hair, her beautiful hair gone. That hair that was her crowning glory that clogged up plug holes wiry, wiry hair. Now we won't see her aging like Angie and me. I'm going to watch her more from now on on videos, I'm going to look at her ashes like Angie who has held them in her hand. I'm going to look at it like those buddhist monks who meditate in burial grounds and face it."

I haven't looked at her ashes yet and I haven't watched her on videos hardly..

Elephants mourning..

Pam was a big animal lover. One of the books I found at her house was called When Elephants Weep, she urged me to read it but I never did. I still have the book. This elephant whisperer recently died and all the elephants that he had saved (from being shot for being pests, they were violent and hated humans) walked for 12 hours to his home to pay their respects. How did they know?

What a beautiful thing read more here http://delightmakers.com/news-bleat/wild-elephants-gather-inexplicably-mourn-death-of-elephant-whisperer/

music to help stare at the ground..

;

Smile

Frying an egg this morning this face was smiling up at me ... is something trying to tell me to lighten up?

Permission for Depression

Duino Elegies

We wasters of sorrows!
How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them
trying to foresee their end! Whereas they are nothing else
than our winter foliage, our somber evergreen, one
of the seasons of our interior year, - not only
season-they're also place, settlement, camp, soil, dwelling.

Rilke.

Still whacked out by the holidays.

I forgot that I have this file full of handouts on grief that I got from the hospice. I'm so exhausted emotionally. I've been so full of rage and hatred and sadness. Anyway in this file the majority of handouts are on dealing with the holidays. Here's one quote, 'Unfortunately American cultural mores place a virtual embargo on sadness during the holiday season and the consequent mandate to be jolly and cheerful makes the depressed person feel worse.' And another, 'Much holiday depression stems from the almost inevitable disappointment that follows the grandiose expectations people carry over from childhood based either on real memories or unfulfilled fantasies.'

I'm putting this post up so that next year I can look at it to a. remind me to read the handouts and b. read the handouts!

One more thing I just read, it's a bit cheesy but it just helped me to not feel alone.

The mother of a dead child
will always weep
at Christmas time
on that you can depend.

No matter how many people
or how many presents
the pulsating void that seems too large
for her heart to hold
keeps on drawing her attention
back to the child who's missing.

As others laugh and play
her thoughts fly away
to Christmases past
or a lonely cemetery.

To a face her heart aches to be kissing

The face of the child who's missing.

by Fay Harden.

Tomorrow it will be three and a half years..

Note to self read this next December.

Happy New Year

This has been the worst Christmas since Pam died. Last night I cried until my bones ached then I went to bed and dreamed that the world was ending and Pam and I were trying to find a place to be for the final end.

This is proving to be an awful time of year for me. Last night I came to the conclusion that perhaps the best thing would be not to do it anymore. Just try to shut Christmas and New Year out. It's too painful. Pam was my family. This is a family time. Let's all gather and be that happy family that we are supposed to be. Let's make it all nice. Let's make the table nice, the food nice, let's put glitter on everything and make it nice. Cover it with gloss. Now all that gloss makes me feel even worse. I've looked at blogs with photos of happy, shiny families all about to tuck into hills of tasty looking food. Gifts wrapped creatively and cosy scenes of bliss. Everyone getting what they want. I wish someone would put some photos up of the after effects. The bloated bellies and screaming rows. No this whole Christmas business only makes me feel the loss even more acutely. When the pain hits like this I feel like I've been thrown into a void. Like I don't belong anywhere. Like I've lost my place in the world.

Right now I feel like I'm going to end up in a home a lonely old woman who no one gives a shit about.

What I wouldn't give right now to be in a cafe with my sister having a good old chin wag and laughing our heads off.

Yes you are damn right I'm feeling sorry for myself.

Perhaps I'll delete this soon... sorry.

Pam would have been 47 today

So True

I pray thee, cease thy counsel,

Which falls into mine ears as profitless

As water in a sieve: give not me counsel;

Nor let no comforter delight mine ear

But such a one whose wrongs do suit with mine.

Bring me a father that so loved his child,

Whose joy of her is overwhelm'd like mine,

And bid him speak of patience;

Measure his woe the length and breadth of mine

And let it answer every strain for strain,

As thus for thus and such a grief for such,

In every lineament, branch, shape, and form:

If such a one will smile and stroke his beard,

Bid sorrow wag, cry 'hem!' when he should groan,

Patch grief with proverbs, make misfortune drunk

With candle-wasters; bring him yet to me,

And I of him will gather patience.

But there is no such man: for, brother, men

Can counsel and speak comfort to that grief

Which they themselves not feel; but, tasting it,

Their counsel turns to passion, which before

Would give preceptial medicine to rage,

Fetter strong madness in a silken thread,

Charm ache with air and agony with words:

No, no; 'tis all men's office to speak patience

To those that wring under the load of sorrow,

But no man's virtue nor sufficiency

To be so moral when he shall endure

The like himself. Therefore give me no counsel:

My griefs cry louder than advertisement.

Reading this made me cry this morning..

A loss of this magnitude - psychologically, it is a loss of the heroic defense - draws the psyche into liminality, which may be coloured most heavily by feelings of grief for a lost past. Liminality is created whenever the ego is unable any longer to identify fully with a former self-image, which it had formed by selective attachments to specific internal imagos and embodied in certain roles accepted and performed. It had been embedded in a context created and supported by an archetypal pattern of self-organisation, and now, since this matrix has dissolved or broken down, there is a sense of amputated past and a vague future. Yet while this ego hangs there in suspension, still it remembers the ghost of a former self, whose home had been furnished with the presence of persons and objects now absent and had been placed in a psychological landscape now bare and uninhabitable without them. There is memory, too, perhaps, of status, of secured supremacy amidst a host of valiant defenders of the realm. But now all is different.

Murray Stein, In Midlife

Singing the same tune..

Day 5 of being sick. Not up to writing stories for the blog, been reading other blogs and finished reading a book. I've been grieving pretty hard this past week, maybe it's because I'm ill and feel weak. I read a couple of pages of one of Pam's journals yesterday, after mum mentioned that she wouldn't mind taking a look at them. I didn't advise it. It was painful to read as usual, tears left me exhausted but then I felt a sense of calm after the storm. Later in the evening I read the same pages to Ron, he was reassuring saying that Pam's writing about her difficulties with me was positive. That she was individuating. I wonder if you could describe her death as individuating?

Ron said she sounds so like me. We were very similar women. Often I would call her or she me and we'd both been thinking the same thing or had bought the same clothes or had the same kind of dream. Our sister Angie says we had a special bond because we were so alike.  It feels like part of me has died. I'm glad I've got her journals even though they are so upsetting to read. I said maybe I shouldn't be reading them and Ron replied maybe you are meant to. Maybe I am. Maybe in time they can be my guide? To remind me of the path that we were on together. And perhaps I can let it keep me on track even though I'm on that path alone now.

These lines from Rumi seem appropriate...

Friend, I've shrunk to a hair trying to say your story.

Would you tell mine?

I've made up so many love stories.

Now I feel fictional.

Tell me!

The truth is, you are speaking, not me.

I am Sinai, and you are Moses walking there.

This poetry is an echo of what you say.

No Pam

I wrote this quote on a piece of paper in the months following Pam's death.  I found it in a file where I put all the hand-outs on grief that were coming my way.  I don't know who wrote it.

"When all the family members are alive, the family system is carefully held in place.  When one member dies, the system is thrown into a chaotic state destabilizing each family member.  Old ways of coping are no longer effective; those left behind feel exhausted.  This exhaustion combined with a sense of disorientation and disillusionment make room for new awarenesses to break into consciousness..awarenesses that at other times a person could keep at bay."