endings

It feels like it’s been a long while since I last wrote a blog, perhaps two months absence is, compared to the usual fortnightly or thereabouts. I seem to have lost my flow, for writing, for making, going quiet, a lot of thinking, a lot of feeling, a lot of questioning, reflecting, more reflection, revelations.

Visual migraines were coming on like the January sales, noisy, lots of them and then over, done. Had new neurones been forming, old ones rewiring, rewriting the script? I’d been offered 12 weeks of free bereavement counselling at the hospice (weekly) and around the same time offered 6 weeks of free, fortnightly therapy. One seemed to compliment the other, even if it was a lot. 

Relentless was one of the words to come up, aspects of my life, not the therapy.

I was diagnosed with complex trauma.

And in parallel a sliding doors moment. An unexpected trajectory. To be a facilitator at the bereavement writing group in the hospice; I went through the motions – online training, form filling, DBS check, induction training, all to bring it towards fruition, oh, and soon after, “there’s a 12 week Bereavement Training Program starting that perhaps you’d be interested in”, of course, most definitely. In the first session of the training one of my antennas bleeped on hyper alert, to an organisation that worked with bereaved children. I needed to find out who and where they were. Easily found, I’m on a roll, how can I get involved? I felt a profound calling. And thus began the application form, another DBS check, more form filling, and, an interview. I haven’t been in an interview for years, like years. 

This new unforeseen, unplanned, unexpected trajectory had gentle lifted me off my feet and was gliding me along of its own momentum. What about my art practice? Where was that at? Projects I’d started I’d already parked to one side, that momentum had dissolved. But I had my exquisitely printed Someone’s Chair Snapshots – Looking for My Brother exhibition to hang – my first solo show in a long time, my first ever in a funeral parlour. I was so pleased with the install; the selected images, their intimate size, the ephemerality and tactility of the super light weight mulberry paper, the accompanying programme that I designed and printed that shared “such an evocative description” of how the series had been born, carried, and completed, and all my family of friends who were there to celebrate it with me. 

And the visual migraines became considered, managed and they stopped. Endings and beginnings. The 12 weeks of counselling ended as did the 6 weeks over 12 of therapy, the 12 week Bereavement Training Course ended, just yesterday in fact, and the month long residency at the funeral parlour, yes, also recently ended.

I’m not sure I want to be a facilitator at the writing group anymore. Quite naturally, even going as an attendee has ebbed away, another ending. I feel more impassioned to create an informal art group. And even with the endings the momentum is still gently flowing, the continuum, carrying me towards the overlaps to the new beginnings and going back to school: two accredited training courses that have pulled me in – Therapeutic Art Training and Child Grief Coach Practitioner Training with an an added Introduction to Child and Adult Anxiety thrown in for free.

Leave the expectations behind. Bye bye.

And a new making, creating, this time with clay. My brother’s organs. I’ll be taking them to Rhodes with me in September when I go to see for the first time, where he died. And I’ll mark the moment, on his anniversary which oh so naturally just happened to co-incide, with a ritual, an offering. Of all his organs, all those to be found in the abdominal or chest cavities – all those that were unexpectedly removed after he suddenly died in a car crash, to be replaced with “a mass of fine sawdust chipping” as the inquest report puts it. Apparently there are nine which potentially means nine lives saved, potentially nine little big parts of my brother out there somewhere in the world. Kidneys, spleen, gall bladder, pancreas, liver, small and large intestines, stomach, lungs, and his heart. Each lovingly formed, each burnished with my tender heart shaped crystal. I left his heart to last. Sawdust kindly donated they now sit cushioned, drying, reunited for a brief time before being released to the crystal clear waters of the mediterranean, on the beach, of the land where his dreams were made and laid.

My diary is looking empty.

Now nothing to be written , no dates, no commitments, endings and new beginnings and that gentle, unknown time in between.