Coming Home to Story

9 December 2015

Today, Captain Midnight and I went with our good friends William Ayot and Sarah Bird to Matara to visit Chris’s damaged memorial stone and to make a small act of remembrance now that a year has passed since she died. When we arrived, it was heart-warming to find a small bunch of Rosemary already lying on the stone beneath the broken body of the bear, placed there last week by other friends while I was in London on the Five Realms Course.

William, Sarah, and I looked together in some amazement at the rotten stump of the tree whose shattered trunk had improbably threaded it’s way through its neighbours to fall on the sculpture during a stormy night three weeks ago. We stroked the bear’s wounded torso and stood in silence for a while, before making our impromptu ritual.

As Captain Midnight rootled in the fallen leaves nearby, performing his own arcane doggy rites, we humans placed our offerings on the memorial: a few small stones, some sweet grass, and the year’s last rose from the garden at Folly Cottage. Sarah left a copy of William’s recent book Re-enchanting the Forest: Meaningful Ritual in a Secular World, which is dedicated to Chris’s memory, standing against the stone, in thanks for her contribution to its publication. We each spoke a few informal words of gratitude and farewell and then made our way to the Gumstool Inn for lunch.

Over dessert, William reminded us of the old practice of year’s mind to mark the passing of the first year of mourning for a loved one. Simply put, it involves consciously turning away from the memorial and walking toward the future without a backward glance. It’s not about forgetting (you can return at any time) but about giving a message to the soul and a commitment to the departed that you will live what life is left to you fully and with an open heart.

It’s hard to imagine that Chris – the most life-affirming and open-hearted person most of us have ever known – would want anything else for those of us who loved and love her still.

Over the past few months, I’ve been in email contact with writer, storyteller and polymath Leslie van Gelder. She lost her husband to cancer in 2008 and generously got in touch to share some of her experience of living with grief. It wouldn’t be appropriate to divulge our correspondence, which is private. But I can say that I’ve found it enormously comforting to be reminded that although every grief is different, we don’t have to navigate this territory alone.

What she writes on her website (www.leslievangelder.com) is in the public domain, and I want to recommend a piece called Letters to a Young Widow in which she writes to an imaginary recently bereaved friend. The fundamental question for the bereaved to address, she says, is as profound and simple as this:

Do I want to feel alive again or don’t I?

In the numb aftershock of loss, the question doesn’t even make sense. But she’s right. It’s taken me 12 months to realise that this is a real choice and that my answer (my deeply felt and embodied response) will determine every other choice I make.

Later in the same piece she speaks of well-meaning friends who – with misplaced sensitivity – would skate awkwardly over the surface of a conversation trying to avoid exacerbating her pain. It was a widowed friend of hers who knew exactly what to ask:

How are you getting by without touch? Have you found someone whose hand you can hold? Have you come to terms with the realization that you are now no one’s ‘first thought’?

My answers to those same questions would be that I physically ache to touch and be touched, that I yearn to hold and be held, skin to skin; that I don’t quite know how my hand would fit anyone else’s; and that I’ve never felt more lonely in my life, despite the comfort of my children, Teddy, and a multitude of loving friends.

And yet I do know that I want to feel alive again.

Two days ago, at the end of the Five Realms Course, we co-created a ritual space in which to explore something of the wisdom of the somatic, personal, systemic, archetypal, and divine realms. At one point, I lit a new candle for myself from the flame of a memorial candle I’d used to mark the anniversary of Chris’s death.

I did it without thinking, but in my mind I could see Chris’s smiling face, and the symbolism of the moment struck me as a powerful affirmation of a renewed openness to life and love. On the way home I wrote these lines:

Today I lit a candle
from the one I lit for you
to mark the one-year passing
of your passing into night.

I wonder what the meaning is
and suddenly I see
you’re trying hard to tell me that
this candle burns for me.

You’re giving me your blessing
to spark another flame
and, knowing that I love you still,
you bid me love again.

I promise you I’ll welcome love
as long as I’m alive,
for life and love are conjoined twins
and both or neither thrive.

The candle that I lit for you
will always stay alight,
but I will kindle this new fire
and let myself burn bright.

Thursday 3 December

It’s the first anniversary of Chris’s death. Memories of her are so vivid that it’s hard to believe a year has gone by since her passing.

Two days ago I took my desolation and grief at losing her into a constellation facilitated by Judith Hemming. When it began, I felt I had to choose between life and love (between loving her and going on living). When it ended, I’d moved to a place of knowing that I will always love her and that, with her blessing, I am available for life once more. Thinking of her right now makes me smile, not weep.

Today I remember Chris with joy and gratitude for the years we spent together and the love we shared. I think of the huge contribution she made to so many lives and I’m surrounded by the loving kindness of our friends and by glorious manifestations of her artful life: paintings, sketchbooks, notebooks, scholarly articles, clothes, hats, recipes, and bears, bears, bears.

I’ve chosen a picture and some music to remember her by on this day. The picture shows her in glorious wild-woman-artist mode, on a painting course at Esalen, California a few years ago. The music is Leonard Cohen’s Here it is which we played at her funeral service, as we wrote and doodled messages on her cardboard coffin. As the chorus says:

May everyone live,
And may everyone die.
Hello, my love,
And my love, Goodbye.

Fare thee well, darling girl.

I nearly called this blog Sailing Blind or Lost at Sea because those titles were more resonant with my mood when I started writing this poem a few days ago. “How can I steer a true course when the compass of my heart is broken?” I thought. But something shifted in me as I dwelt with the images that arose: a fog bank; slack sails; and the sorrowful sounds of gulls and warning buoys.

During the day, I spent hours writing and re-writing the few lines of verse that follow. Gradually, I realised that I may be lost but that I’m getting ready for a change. The journey that Chris and I shared is over but my voyage is not yet done. In the midst of desolation, a sense of possibility is also arising.

In less than a week it will be a year since Chris died. I’m coming to understand that while grief is not ruled by calendrical time, there is wisdom in the old practice of mourning for a year and a day. The mortbrod she made as a memento mori still hangs in the window by the front door, but it will not stay there forever.

Perhaps a fresh breeze will spring up, blow away the fog and fill my sails once more. If it does, I’ll know where it’s coming from. Chris lived her life as creatively and joyfully as she could. She would expect nothing less from me and even now I can hear her egging me on. As I listen to her voice, my attention shifts from the past to the present and I sense the possibility that the winds of change are coming soon.

The world is shrouded in grey fog:
no line of sight; no landmarks
by which to set a course.
The only sounds are screeching gulls,
and the dismal clang-clang clang-clang
of a distant marker buoy.

The broken compass of my heart,
knowing it is useless now, calls out:
Whither shall I steer if not toward you –
my beacon and my guiding star?
Look to what is truly yours, you say.
Find your own way to the shore.

So, I’m waiting for the fog to lift
and a fresh breeze to fill my sails;
for I have untrod islands to explore
and untold tales to tell;
a few more chapters yet to write
before the book of life is done.

26 November 2015

Today is Thanksgiving Day in USA and our friends Karen and Dick have come over from New York to spend it with me in Lyme Regis. This time last year they came to England to be with Chris and me at Folly Cottage during her final days. She was struggling to get around by then, but made it to the kitchen table for a fine dinner of salt marsh lamb and roasted vegetables.

Chris always had a lively sense of gratitude for the bounty of life and she loved the whole business of Thanksgiving. It was typical of her that the last words she spoke before she slipped into unconsciousness just five days later, were “Thank you.”

One year on, and I’m pondering the many things I want to give thanks for since last time. First, of course, I thank Chris for loving me and allowing me to love and care for her until the very end. She taught me so much when we were together and she teaches me still, to live artfully and to love life.

Next, I thank my children Nicky, Jamie, Georgie and Tom and the many friends who have rallied round for the ways in which they have demonstrated that, even though Chris has gone, I am not alone. To list them all would be impossible and to exclude any would be invidious, so I shall not attempt to name them here. You know who you are and I thank you sincerely.

Star prize, of course, goes to Teddy (aka Captain Midnight) for his unremitting, unconditional, animal love especially when I’m distressed. It is truly humbling to receive the gifts of his solicitous snufflings and his bounding, canine energy. He doesn’t know that I know that he sometimes borrows my laptop to write a blog, but I forgive him this foible and happily acknowledge both his moral and his literary superiority. As one Facebook friend put it, #capmidnightrules.

This evening, Karen, Dick and I will be eating locally-caught, fresh brown trout and drinking some of Chris’s favourite white wine, a few bottles of which I found in France this summer: a 2008 Clos de Papillon from the village of Savennières in the Loire valley. When Chris and I visited the secluded vineyard together a few summers ago, she dropped her trousers and peed between the vines, “to improve the terroir.”

Maybe that’s why the wine is so good?

This is how Chris’s memorial looked during the celebration of her life in June. It looks very different now. During the high winds last weekend, a single tree 15 metres away crashed down on top of Sassy Bear. Her head and right fore-leg broke off fairly cleanly and stone carver Lucy Churchill who made the memorial is going to examine the pieces to see if the sculpture can be repaired. I’m keeping everything crossed!

It was a terrible shock to see Sassy Bear so badly damaged and it threw me into a tailspin of grief and crazy, misplaced guilt (if only I’d visited it more often, kept it cleaner, etc. etc.) as if I had somehow caused it to happen. Teddy had to work overtime to get me back on an even keel but was up to the task, as ever. Our lovely friends Miche and Flora rallied round and descended on Folly Cottage with food and wine for supper, lit the fire and generally coddled me all evening.

I’m a bit more together this morning and trying to make sense of it all. The accident seems like a bizarre echo of the night Chris had her seizure in Portugal: a sudden, catastrophic injury to the brain/head. But I don’t want to latch on to some false analogy. Maybe there is no meaning to be found, other than the fact that shit happens.

As I write, some words of WB Yeats are going round and round in my head: “For nothing can be sole or whole that has not first been rent.” I’m coming to think that a re-made Sassy Bear would be a fine testament to Chris’s determination to live and love beyond catastrophe.

In any case, I’ve cancelled everything and I’m staying at home this weekend to be close to my poor wounded girl and to remember Chris’s glorious life as well as her outrageously early death.

Captain Midnight here, moonlighting as your rural correspondent.

Before my country sports report, I should say that having been tried and condemned in the court of public opinion, himself eventually purchased a belated but delicious marrow-bone for my birthday. Thank you to all of you who petitioned to establish my entitlement to a proper present.

Now, see that fellow in the photograph? There are lots of them about at the moment, flaunting themselves in the fields and woods around Kingscote. They’re just asking to be chased and I’m only too happy to oblige. It’s a good game, though I do think the way they jump into the sky and don’t come down is cheating. They wouldn’t stand a chance on the ground!

On the whole they’re pheasant little pluckers and I like ’em.

The trouble is that lots of unpheasant, tweed-clad, human pluckers keep taking potshots at them. Bang! Bang! Lead shot flying everywhere. Smell of death in the air. It’s enough to ruin a chap’s daily walk.

If it happens nearby, I demonstrate my disapproval by tucking my tail between my legs and bolting for home, in case one of the silly sods shoots me. Himself says that pheasants taste good but it still doesn’t seem right to blast away at unarmed creatures. Apparently it’s called “sport.” Doesn’t sound very sporting to me. Give them guns too, I say. Make a fair fight of it.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind humans killing animals for food.

As long as they do it properly.

With their teeth.

Captain Midnight here.

All I can say is that he had it coming…

We had a nice walk on Charmouth Beach this afternoon. Except that himself kept chucking tennis balls, which meant that I had to do a lot of running around to make sure they didn’t get lost. Sometimes they went into the sea and I had to swim for them. He’s either a rotten shot or he does it on purpose. I think he likes to see me get wet!

Every time I brought one back to him he chucked another one. Perhaps he’s just a bit slow to catch on? We got back to the car with a full quota of balls and then we drove to Bridport where we went into a hat shop and three women made a fuss of me. Himself says I’m a babe magnet but I’ve no idea what that means.

When we got home he looked at my belly and said I had fleas. The cheek of it! The next thing I knew, I was standing in the bath tub covered in lather with the power-shower at full blast. He said it was for my own good but I didn’t like it much. I jumped out and he chased me round the flat waving a towel. That was fun.

Then he undressed (not a pretty sight, I can tell you) filled the bath with hot water and got into it. Why he’d want to do that is beyond me but he seemed happy enough. He lit a stinky-candle and lay back, eyes half-closed, with a glass of red stuff in his hand.

That’s when I used my ninja powers to sneak back into the bathroom and liberate a sock. It’s a bit of a mystery why I’m drawn to his socks. I may well be the only living creature not utterly repelled by them. I took it into the sitting room and gave it a serious nibble. I thought he’d be amused by the avant-garde new design but judging by the fuss he made he’s not got much fashion sense. In the end, I told him he and his sock had it coming for covering me in soap and turning the fire hose on me.

He called me a vandal and a sock thief.

Can you believe it?

Captain Midnight here, reporting from the trenches of domestic life at Folly Cottage. Yesterday – 5th November – was my second birthday (as you humans calculate) thus proving once and for all the superiority of the canine race. Himself was still crawling around at that age, barely house-trained, certainly not a fully-fledged superhero like me.

He’s put me in the slammer today while he goes off to London to “earn-some-money-so-we-can-both-afford-to-eat-and-you-should-really-be-grateful.” The slammer goes by the name of the Hydegate Pet Resort but I don’t suppose you’d want to go there for a holiday. He’s left his laptop behind so I thought I’d write another dispatch to while away the time (as you might imagine, there’s bugger-all else to do here).

So, I’d like to thank all the fans who celebrated my birthday last night by setting off fireworks. For future reference, they’re not exactly my cup of tea: a bit too showy and inclined to assault my super-sensitive hearing. But I appreciate the gesture.

Himself decided to celebrate by having a birthday dinner with a couple of his female friends (apparently “bitches” means something else to humans and he’s told me I mustn’t use the word). They had bio-dynamic chorizo stew with fresh spinach and wild mountain rice from Borneo, followed by home-made sorbet.

What did I have?

Dog biscuits with a “tasty topper.”

Not even a hint of sausage.

O.K. there were a few pieces of four-day old roast chicken but he made me dance for them on my hind legs, to show off to his [bitches] female friends. Then there was the birthday present. A stick with ribbon tied round it. Not a bone, a stick! The trouble they must have gone to…

Actually it was a rather nice chewy, crumbly, messy kind of stick but don’t say anything as I wouldn’t want him to think he can get away without shelling out for a bone. I shall look soulful and hurt every time he looks in my direction until he gets himself down to the butcher’s shop and does the decent thing.

He’s due to come and get me soon from my luxury (not) Hydegate penthouse suite, so I should put the laptop away now in case he catches me using it. I think he’s got issues about “the freedom of the press.”

Bye for now super-dog fans.