Keep Your Head Above Water

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I keep thinking this is it. I do my sad little wave, a quick bow. Goodbye, au revoir. Then I turn in my flip-flops and start my brief walk home.

    
Of course the following day I return to the water’s edge. Since autumn has arrived it happens less, but this game isn’t over. I refuse to leave the sea alone; I refuse to commit to King Alfred’s chlorine depths: the stinky changing rooms; kids’ hair in the plughole. There it's all straight blue lines, rubber-capped old ladies and the flailing arms of front crawlers. There I'm a machine cutting up water, a chugging mechanism, hidden behind goggles and cap. Nameless, sexless, meant for movement and breath, there I am the number of seconds it takes for me to touch the concrete ledge of the deep end. I disappear, no longer weighed down by the burden of being somebody. It's for this reason that I tolerate that ugly pool. 

     
Seawater magnetises, hypnotises, pulling me in to where it’s deep and slightly treacherous. Buoyant and serene, it calms my thumping heart and floats me home. Often it’s hard work (the dragging current, those endless bloody waves) but the reward is in the crashing orgasmic flood of the senses. The serotonin kick. 

     
I like swimming far out. But these days I listen to friends who say For fuck’s sake, Clare, be careful.  I chit chat with lifeguards. Check wind speeds on the Web. Never go in if waves break violently on the shingle. This summer I even surrendered my solitude and swam with others - we sped past buoys, circled the West Pier and sank back onto hard pebbles, thighs trembling.

     
The sea has a character and a culture of its own, a world apart from the hectic town I live in. This town doesn’t feel like mine, but down here is – amidst this silent, sturdy society of swimmers, surfers and fishermen. The sea’s an addiction, I know; I'm aware of the risks I run for the high I experience, for that joy peculiar only to open water – the vast expanse, the arctic chill on the toes, sun on face, an unhindered smile. I wonder who, or what, I'd be without it, what shape my life would take. No coincidence, of course, that I started sea-swimming when mum had her last stroke, the one that finally silenced her, that condemned her to unseeable depths somewhere between sky and land. Back then, swimming far out I escaped the world, escaped people, the tick tock of life; I entered her world for a while - fluid, formless and all that quiet. 

     
Sun's out. Sitting here writing I keep one ear out for the waves, and my nostrils still sniff seaweed. This could be the day. Last week the buoys disappeared – no markers now, no edges to swim out to. No yellow globe, slimy with seaweed. Just a cold abyss, a charcoal smudge beneath a cloudy skyline.
     
But I wade into a new experience every day; keep my head above water. Chance it one more time. Before friendly waves turn frosty. Before the last farewell of the season. 

Brunswick Festival

It's warm but blustery today, the kind of day I sit on the beach, but end up shivering. I woke at an ungodly hour this morning, to a small child patting my face and demanding Big Barn Farm videos. In the main, I’ve enjoyed waking up too early these last few weeks – it’s at these times I sometimes catch a whiff of inspiration that makes me crawl to my desk and write.

     
It's unbelievable to me that it's over four months now since Mum died. I always feel strange writing or saying 'Mum died' because that sounds so definite, so clear, so exacting. Of course it wasn't like that - pieces of her went missing every day. I'd set off searching for them with my torch and magnifying glass, but always came home empty handed. In the end, there was only a thin breath left, the warmth of her arm and a frightened look in her eye. She was a scared rabbit in the headlights of a car that never came.

     
Until four months ago. Most of the time I make myself forget. After all, amnesia is anaesthetic. But there are always moments when memory seeps through like an ugly stain beneath my newly painted wall. I searched for beauty and love in the situation, even after the end, to keep myself sane. And there it was, like one of Rilke's angels rising out of the blackness. But the ugliness, well, it's chiselled into my bones now like some kind of code, and no matter how I try to deny it, it's a part of who I am.

It shows itself in the most ordinary moments. I passed a woman in a wheelchair at the Brunswick Square Festival the other day - middle-aged, but looking much older. I noticed her limp, paralysed hand, the other making a fist around a Mr Whippy cornet. Sun scorched the grass. The woman had accidentally smeared ice cream all around her mouth and on the end of her nose. She looked like a ghoulish clown, a three year old going on a hundred. She was probably only fifty. Her weary husband pushing the wheelchair couldn't see her face.

     
All around people laughed with each other, dragging toddlers by the hand, sipping warm beer in the sunshine. The sight made me want to throw up. It made me want to cradle her husband in my arms. To lie down in front of them and ask them to run me over. Ridiculous, I know, but in flash, it was all there. Standing in that square, I was ridiculous and out of place, and so were they. For a few seconds, I loved them.

     
I think I seek out situations and people that make it okay to feel such irrational things; that will lift the skin from my body so I might run a finger along the white bones underneath. Perhaps this, for me, is consolation.

     
I'm never quite sure what I want out of life, if it's what I think I want. To be honest, right now I'd be happy just to put on this old Lou Reed record and let the words drain out of me until there are no more.

Bank Holiday

Twenty to midnight. This is the last thing I should be doing. But I'm here, at this screen, fingers fumbling over buttons.

So this is the crux - I find myself at that place, the place of no return, where I am scattered to the wind a thousand times over, waiting for the pieces to blow back into a self again. I tried to hold it, and I couldn't. I tried to keep it in a shape that still looked pleasing to the eye, that could bathe my ears in a comforting sound. But it broke out, and now we're all running.

Looking at it another way - it's a late night, after a hard weekend, following a tough break-up and too much alcohol. Hardly surprising if my heart's on the floor (better sweep it up with tomorrow's litter). Another day blinks at me, and we all find a way through.

In a week it'll be two years since Mum's final stroke, two years that she's been lying staring out of that goddamn window, without a thing we can do about it. Two years since I last heard her utter a word, or since she looked at me and I could say "Mum, I love you" and know that she hears me. Two fucking years. So I'm parentless, childless, a plastic duck bobbing on top of the bathwater.

It's also, unbelievably, almost six months since David died. I can't really think about him, but the loss works on me in inexplicable ways, twisting my life in its hands.

Today I walked with friends through caverns of green, emerging into sunlight, down lanes, unwinding, winding. A sip of pale ale, a search for cream tea, heat and damp, rain and warm. England at its most omniscient, its most lordly; giving of itself; springing into skylarks, whooping over hedgerows. Breaking out the wheat fields into dappled joy.

I know the grace that surrounds me, the friends who love me, friends I could not do without. So I sit and I listen, watch summer run its course, feel it lean in and whisper. And everywhere buttercups offer themselves up to us, as they tear across Sussex meadows.

And I remember, how two years ago, I stood on the bank of a Hawarden stream, gathering posies under the hazy blue sky. I made buttercups into a shiny yellow fist, took them to the hospital. Behind white curtains, under the rhythmic pulse of the ventilator tube, I placed them in a vase for my mother. They were the yellowest things I had ever seen.

My sisters and I gathered around, clucking and fussing. And if she ever opened her eyes and looked our way, we smiled. I might have shown the buttercups to her, placed them under her chin till they glowed. But she was a closed, quiet flower, petals sleeping - a perfect stalk, returning underground.

Two Left Feet

Tonight I think I need to confess how I'm feeling. Well, I probably don't need to, but I want to; so forgive me for using you as a kind of therapist's couch this evening. For I am confessing to being a mess.

In fact, it was last night when I realised what a mess I was, as I struggled out into town to band rehearsal, full of some strange flu-like illness, and sat wobbling on a high black stool listening to piano keys clunking and red wine being supped. I felt tears pricking my eyes and a familiar welling up inside. Shit. The penny dropped. I am all over the place.

Then something else happened. Something that rarely happens to me. Instead of feeling upset, anxious, fearful, confused and stupid about feeling a mess, I suddenly was overcome by a feeling of alrightness. Absolute alrightness. And I liked it.

I'm one confused human being at the moment. I wonder if this is why, when I am falling asleep last thing at night, my heart keeps doing little pirouettes in my chest and why my dreams are filled with psychopaths. Why I keep having to trim my hair just that tiny bit shorter. Why one day I wear low-cut tops and the next I find myself in high collared shirts. Why I reel from reading the biography of a saint to writing songs about strange animals to compulsively watching a tv show where women are dressed as men and strap-ons are as commonplace as the next soya-decaf-frappucino. All this might not sound too significant, perhaps a bit drama queeny, if you don't know me that well. Or maybe even if you do. But who I am doesn't add up anymore. It doesn't add up.

Tonight I feel less welcoming of this fact. I feel disarmed by myself. I'm also aware of the fact that I'm going to be back in Wales in a couple of weeks, and I know, deep down, I'm really frightened because it brings the mess of me right back into sharp relief. It brings back how confusing life is, and how hard it is living under the shadow of Mum's state; knowing how I've been blocking it out these last months, because if I didn't block it out, I would have become a mess, and I don't want to be a mess, I want to be ok.

So the mess has to cope with only getting little outings, little forays into the world of Clare. And the rest of the time, it is strictly relegated to the world of dreams.

As usual, there is a good side to this. Whether I let it in or not, the devastation of Mum's condition is working on me night and day. And the price I may pay in sorrow for this, is reaped back through all the cracks that grief shows up in my life. It prises the cracks apart so I can look inside and see what truly makes me tick.

I thought I liked it better when I supposed I knew what made me tick, even if it felt constricting and suffocating, like a silk stocking tight around my throat. Now, I don't quite know what to do with all this air. Or what this feeling is in my lungs. I know too well the sting of life. And how things can fester. But this breath inside me, well, it's equally as terrifying. Such a grave responsibility it is: stepping into one own shoes.

fire burned and blew out flowers

This morning I've been re-listening to that little ray of sunshine himself, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. He's such a cheery lyricist. Songs such as Another Day Full Of Dread, Today I Was An Evil One and of course I See A Darkness make up this sunny and light album. One of my absolute favourites on it, however, is Death To Everyone:

I am here/right here/where god puts none asunder/and you/in black dress and black shoe/you do/invite me under

One of the hardest things about grief, I think, is the insidiousness of it, the way it filters into every atom, every fissure of your life. How it creeps up on you when you least expect it. Making a cup of tea, the radio on, one minute you're singing along, the next you're on the floor doubled over. What happened? Perhap it was a line of a song, perhaps, just a word. Maybe it was the way your spoon clinked in your cup as you stirred in the sugar. Maybe it was noticing that picture that wasn't hanging straight on your wall and adjusting it, suddenly you find yourself staring at it, lost in its image.

It is a hard process to understand in oneself, because it is sometimes so unpredictable and apparently illogical. For me, there can be several weeks where it follows me everywhere I go, it's that black dog I simply can't shake off. Then eventually I emerge, new again, still alive, still whole, still able to smile, perhaps smiling even more. Other times I can go in and out of it on a daily, even hourly basis, one minute writing out some plan for my life, preparing an application form, the next, I am inconsolable, unable to lift a pen.

It is perhaps even harder to understand in another person sometimes. And the thing about grieving is that the only thing you can do really is carry on, is to get on with life, because you need the straight and narrow to keep to whilst your world falls apart, it's the concrete and the road signs that keep your nerve steady and your feet moving when there's a tornado tearing through all the land around you which you once called your home.

You keep looking ahead, eyes on the next step forward. And when you come across a patch of meadow that hasn't been hit you say "hey, look at those daisies, look at those buttercups, aren't they beautiful!". And they are, and you do really see it, you really can smell the grass and the earth beneath it. Sometimes it can feel like the first time you've seen a flower at all, it is that beautiful. In that moment there is joy, so much joy to realise the grass is still growing and the flowers are still blooming somewhere, and that they all look so perfect and smell so good, even if you know that's your house over there in the distance, and it's burning to the ground.

However, the thing about getting on with life when you are grieving is that people can then believe you're ok. Of course, they want to believe that, we all do, because grief is unpleasant for everybody, even if it's not your own loss, it still brings a chill to the heart of an otherwise sunny day, it still reminds you of your own mortality, it is the cold clammy truth none of us particularly want to know about on a consistent basis. Unless it's thrust on us, of course. But when you are grieving, it is all you know. It is all you think about. It paints every aspect of your world with it's own particular colour. Life, death, ageing, sickness, beginning, ending, birth, loss, love, suffering.. questions, questions, always questions that you can never stop asking and yet must learn to live with the unsatisfactoriness of the fact that no answer can really provide you with the solace you long for.

So when you cannot yourself run away from the truth of loss, when it is right in your face, you also realise that others can run away, that they have an option which you do not. And so, on some level they cannot access with such intensity what you youself can at this time, and that, right now, every day, they are creating and building worlds just as yours are constantly being torn down. You realise that on some level, at the end of the day, at a time when you most acutely want and need kinship and understanding as if it were air, you will be, at times, most profoundly alone.

This has been a strong realisation for me, and it's helped me grow up a lot. It's also been hard. And people are there when they can be, and some people close that gap as much as any caring person can, and it's a beautiful thing when they do. And somehow, in the times when people can't, you learn to find a way to live with that gap of experience, and not blame, and not blame yourself.

However, last year I had to let go of several people I thought were and would always be the closest people in my life because for whatever their reasons, they didn't have it in them to meet me even a tiny bit of the way in trying to understand what it must be like to be losing a parent. And that hurt. There hopefully aren't that many times in one's life when one has to hold up one's hands and call on friends and loved ones to rally round a bit -and it's hard not to feel let down when that does not happen, and people even turn away from you. I'm still working on that one.

Grief does its work on so many levels, it leaves nothing unturned, on the one hand it draws out and burns up what is not true, what is bullshit, what is fantasy, what is not good for us, what needs to go. It shows up what is weak, superficial or selfish and it highlights what is strong, what is deep, what is loving. On the other, it brings forth a demon of rage and bitterness and an unforgiving pain that will not be pacified, that does not want to understand the complexity of human foibles, only it's own need for solace. For me, I struggle to work out which is which, and what I can realistically expect from people, and that struggle is part of the complexity of my grief.

We all go to places no one else can go at times in our lives, over and over again. There are things about every single person on this planet that no one else will ever know or understand. We stand alone. And yet we cannot survive without human love. These two will hold hands in a clasp of contradiction forever.

And I wouldn't give up those moments when I realise I'm really ok being alone in darker places, I'm really ok that no one else knows all that I am keeping inside. What would the world be without its secrets? And somewhere, out there, there is always someone who has shared your experience. Because whether we realise it or not, ultimately we're all in the same shoes, heading in the same direction, coming from the same homeland. And it's a place of fire and flowers, meadows, whirlwinds, the scorched thatch and the long, long road.

I'm slowly learning to draw a circle around me, I guess you could call it a sacred circle, one that honours and cherishes that space where no one else but I can go, that lights a candle and sings softly in devotion to those darkest, loneliest hours. And to remember that there is still love over the other side of the line, sometimes imperfect, messy love, but love nonetheless. And I am not perfect, and I cannot always do the best thing, and I get upset, and I get bitter, and sometimes I flail and I rail, stumble about, and I can't always forgive others' shortcomings, and I can't always understand or even be reasonable, because I've been losing the most precious person in my life for some time now, and death isn't doing it's work kindly, and loss is a peculiar, devastating thing, and when any person deeply touches it, it is a fire in the hearth from which they cannot remove their hand, until gradually, eventually, with the passing of time, its flames die out.

So strap me on/and raise me high/cause buddy I'm not/afraid to die/cause life/is long/and it's tremendous/and we're glad/that you're here with us/
death to me/and death to you/tell me what else can we/do die do/death to all/and death to each/our own god-bottle/s'within reach..

Nunhead Cemetery

Four o' clock. The iron gates close at five and this is not the kind of place you want to spend the night in. My sister and I hurry up the gravel path, then stop suddenly to speak about our mother, taking it in turns to empty our hearts, spill our grief, hear the brown leaves crackle underfoot.

We walk up to the ruined church, without a priest or congregation, without stained glass or sermon. No hymn book. No bride. Only our two sad faces peering up into the light, past the crumbling pale stone, no longer seeking the holiness of perfection, instead loving the ruins of beauty, perfect in themselves.

And so we wander this way, wander that way, speaking in staccato through leafy alley ways, past grey tombs and mighty obelisks, under huge trees heavy with ivy, graves hidden in the bracken, overturned headstones, fallen angels with broken wings sliding, sliding into mud.

We stumble down a narrow dark tunnel of green, and there, in the squelch of mud, we speak our truth of grief and fear and losing, say things rarely spoken of life, except at times like these. Names and dates, old and young, men and women, loved and unloved, all pass through our unlit eyes.

To my right, an ancient tree is being lifted into the air by a cracked headstone which has subsided and moulded itself into its thick roots. My sister turns, spots a marble casket, its lid open some inches, sliding off. The blackness inside stares back at us like an unflinching eye.

We stagger out into daylight and a damp grassy glade filled with the graves of wives and mothers, plastic flowers in psychedelic colours in plastic pots dotting the horizon. And there, around the fresh churned soil of a newly dug grave, jump seven magpies, and a red fox, darting, moving.

I feel like we are intruders in this scene. The grass is all lit up, the trees are bowing. A strange current of silence is in the air. The grass is blowing. For this is their world, their language, of brightness and burial, tender woodland and no return.

The fox looks up and stares at us carefully, turns tail and leaves. The magpies scatter and disappear, and we are left alone once again in the singing daylight with only the trees, the dead and the ravens, and some distant echo.

We leave the gates of the cemetery. Back on the high street, I feel as though I am emerging from a murmured spell, a remarkable tune running through my head.

Darkness When The First Light Was Born

Homage to the world. Homage to the raging fires that eat it alive. Homage to tomorrow. Homage to the day when none of us will wake up. Homage to ships and planes. Homage to speeding clouds. Homage to the stripe on the zebra's back. Homage to all fallen prey. Homage to the predatory. Homage to light. Homage to the baby's skull. Homage to machinery. Homage to apparatus. Homage to buildings and to streetlights. Homage to my sisters. Homage to bad friends. Homage to mistakes. Homage to silent birds. Homage to snow.

Homage to stereos. Homage to the yellow stain on my mother's nightdress. Homage to kissing. Homage to fingers. Homage to harrowed eyes. Homage to brilliance. Homage to stupidity. Homage to sex. Homage to abstinence. Homage to a blue sky. Homage to apples, unripened fruit. Homage to leprosy of the soul. Homage to worshippers. Homage to the uncontrollably vain. Homage to TV. Homage to the hermitage on a hill. Homage to the ringtones of teenage children. Homage to their fathers.

Homage to the dying. Homage to every tear wept at their bedside. Homage to my mother. Homage to my father and his ebbing mind. Homage to animals and to beasties. Homage to the night. Homage to the frail, the ugly. Homage to superstars. Homage to the brave. Homage to power stations. Homage to sadists. Homage to euthanasia. Homage to the suicidal. Homage to insects. Homage to bats, eaten alive by beetles. Homage to caverns. Homage to church steeples.

Homage to the beatific. Homage to the horrific. Homage to the damaged and needy. Homage to air. Homage to sunlight. Homage to wrinkles. Homage to breath. Homage to limbs. Homage to eyesight. Homage to decay. Homage to the Atlantic Ocean. Homage to gravestones. Homage to small Northern towns. Homage to nonsense. Homage to the written word. Homage to mystics. Homage to tenderness. Homage to the cry of the wind. Homage to bad smells. Homage to the face in the mirror. Homage to you. Homage to me. Homage to waving goodbye. Homage to the end.

I have not forgotten...

I have not forgotten the breeze in the branches of the tree outside my bedroom window, and how, during those long mornings, it kept me going. I have not forgotten the way your hair sits on the pillow, braided like a seven-year-old girl's, the sweetest sight I could ever lay my eyes upon.
     Nor have I forgotten the way you leaned in to feel me near you, when I kissed you, when I wasn't even sure if you remembered my name anymore, or who I was to you.
I have not forgotten the trips to the supermarket after the hospital, how I cowered in the drinks aisle, behind the diet cola, nor the feeling of something I could barely articulate between us three sisters, feeling so alone in the world without our mother, fussing round your bed like the oldest of souls together, the best of friends, the tiniest of children . We love you; that's as clear as the first morning of June, we love every hair on your head, and brush it with all the tenderness our shaking hearts have within them.
    I see your toes in their special white socks, poking out of the bottom of the white bed sheet. It cripples me with love just to look at them. I see your mouth, encased in plastic, and this is the part I find hard to talk about.
     I see a loss so big it will never be replaced, by wind or water or earth slide or rain storm. And you are in me with everything I do, you never go away, but also you are somewhere else. And how can that be - that you are always here and yet so far into another place I cannot reach? Here, gone, here, gone, here...awake but asleep, living, breathing, dying, seeing into my eyes, looking away, travelling, sailing, floating, shivering along another shore, a foreign land, in a language I cannot speak.
     I have not forgotten how you brought me up, how you taught me to spell, how you always nudged me to look up at the sky, to see those red and violet sunsets, to watch for the blue of the morning. How you are my only mother, how I was born out of you, how I stretch way beyond you into vastness and my own mystery, but always return, a cub to her mother bear, a fox to its hole, a bee to her hive that always was the source of honey and creation. Home. It is so far away now, and yet I carry it between my breasts, under my vest, in this heart here, and in everything I do, everything I want to do and will become, as the last light of this day ebbs into a filament of dust.
     Here are your daisies, your buttercups; the box of flowers you planted and that are still growing. They are all for you, and their colour will keep the night alive in your absence. For today you are sleeping, as you have never slept before, and when you awake, I will be there.