A quick word for people who are new to the blog: I’ve devoted 12 months (perhaps more) to writing about grief. Our son died unexpectedly earlier this year. We are heartbroken and devastated and the best way I know of to put myself back together is to continue writing. You’re welcome to read, and I hope too that for those who knew Noah or wanted to know him, you’ll find out a bit in my writing about the luminous soul that has left us. You can read my posts in order here.
It was Noah’s birthday on Tuesday, and it had become our family tradition to take a holiday to the Welsh coast for Noah’s birthday, usually Pembrokeshire or the Gower peninsula, and we’d play board games, sit on the beach and relax for a week. This day has been looming over us for some time now. All the big days loom heavy now: fathers day, my birthday, even silly hallmark holidays like Valentines day. Over the years we’ve made a habit of creating little family rituals around saints days and secular holidays alike. Noah especially cherished this way of marking the time, so our calendar is littered with an unusual density of emotional landmines. Katy and I could both feel the day approaching and chatted out what to do. We concluded that skipping the celebration and sitting at home would be the worst thing to do. But returning to a familiar, now haunted, place felt similarly unwise. So we dropped a pin on a map of the UK and found an AirBNB in a place where we hadn’t been before. That would give us access to a bit of liminal holidaying space, avoid what still feels like a profane action of creating new patterns, and also hold the time as sacred in ways that it demanded. We shortened the trip to four days, bearing in mind that our endurance for the everyday is ebbing low right now.
So we found ourselves on a little road trip with our car packed full of books and graphic novels, a small complement of board games (we were unlikely to play, but felt urgent to bring nonetheless), clothes for every kind of weather, and squashed in among the various duffel bags in the back of the car was our Welsh Collie Scout wearing an anxious canine grin. It was that emotional juxtaposition of a dog who is thrilled just to be included in a few days away but also on the surface wondering if it was maybe just an accident that we’d included him in the packing list and trying very hard not to voice the question lest we realise the error and return him home immediately. We three humans were also squashed and juxtaposed in various ways, not least under the weight of grief and our own uncanny and idiosyncratic wonderings about the state of ourselves and one another.
Our holiday was tender and sweet, unburdened with very much planning or very many outings. A brief nature walk. No beaches, Isaac had insisted. Something new in a visit to a golf driving range to hit some balls (very therapeautic). Simple meals. Low effort. One thing which stood out to me about our holiday is – to return to a previous theme on the singularity of grief – how much each of us carried a heavy weight of still-ongoing-mourning with us, and that this was expressed in ways that were unfamiliar and unpredictable to one another. I don’t mean to say that this was somehow negative It was just reality. We are unknown even to ourselves right now and in the process of becoming completely new people in the wake of what has happened to Noah and to us. So it goes without saying that we are unknown to one another in the patterns and timing of our grief. It struck each of us at unpredictable times, and out of sync with one another. It might have been that one of us was feeling briefly cheerful, seeking company at a board game, and the others were too grief-striken to speak. Or one of us was feeling low and needing rest, while another was needing the distraction that activity brings.
This experience of being out of sync with one another seems to me to be an abiding feature of our family landscape of loss. I’ve focussed on trying not to start each day with expectations of those around me, but this takes effort and intentionality and I can’t guarantee the supply of those emotional commodities. There is a sweetness to this experience as well though. There are often times when my emotions are inscrutable and infuriating – I desperately want to feel something concrete and simple in a way that can be dealt with or processed in conventional ways. And sometimes, in those moments someone else in the family is able to process what it happening to them and I can see it, and recognise fragments of myself in their rumination or outpouring. It is a sort of improvised dance of exhausted beings, holding, releasing, spinning, still. So we did that for the weekend, trying not to demand things of one another or ourselves, but to accept what was being offered in those moments when clarity appeared or had fluttered away again.