In the summer last year, when I was feeling overwhelmed, still, with the loss of my parents, I emailed my oldest friend… The person who has known me for longest. I told her I felt as if I was a very fragile piece of fabric… A bunch of warp threads, and the main wefts holding the warps together, the ones making a fabric out of this bunch of threads were my parents, and just like in the picture above, when the wefts stopped, when my parents died, the warps no longer had an anchor… There was very little to hold them steady, to give substance to my life… I am lucky enough to have three or four very good, very dear friends, and thankfully, they were still there, holding the warps together…but the strongest yarns, my parents, were gone… Other wefts were also missing…. I was living in a foreign country, where I knew barely anyone… I didn’t know and couldn’t speak the local language… I had no job, as such… I was creating a new business, developing a new role…so there were very, very few wefts holding these warps together. I said to my friend: “I know other people are a zillion times worse off. I truly can’t imagine what it’s like to be orphaned as a child. I feel like I’m the only one in the world who has no family. Somehow, that matters to me. You’ve known me since I was 18 and you’re the only one in my life who has known me for so long. And I know self-pity is a terrible thing but I’m utterly exhausted. I’m basically a bundle of warps just flopping around with only a couple of anchors and a huge gaping hole where my security was…..”
And here I am, just 6 months later, feeling strong again… Yes, the fabric will never be the same, but I don’t want it to be the same! How could it be? They say “Time is a great healer”, but I don’t believe that is true, certainly not in the way I understood it in the past… I thought that over time things would go back to how they were, that I would feel like the same person I used to be. The same, just without my parents. That there would be SOME familiarity…but there is none – but I realise, now, that that is ok… Now I know that it is something I will have for the rest of my life… This feeling of utter loss. It’s constantly going round in my head, still… “They are dead. They are gone…”… However, now, alongside that, there is the equally insistent “But it will be ok… You will manage… You are strong…”. And, that is how I feel. Strong again. Changed and yet capable.
Creativity is helping so much! Falling back on sewing skills, I can lose myself in my creative ideas… New skills too. Knitting makes me feel close to my mother; so close to her. There’s a sadness that I’ve discovered it too late to ask for advice. So many things I have wanted to ask her in the past week alone… How to count the rows… Is there a right and wrong side…? How exactly to “knit two together”… HOW/WHERE do I “leave” the stitches of the last row of the right front, while I knit the left front?! I need the needle…! Yes, we are lucky in the 21st Century… You Tube has all the answers to these questions, but I wanted Mum’s answer, Mum’s advice, not advice from You Tube… And yet, I am connected to her by knitting… Her hands, not mine, hold the yarn when I glance down… Her voice counts the rows, the stitches…
And then, there’s my new-found obsession; running… Yes, I’m still following the C25K programme, and I finished week 5 today with a 20 minute non-stop run! I am ridiculously proud of myself for achieving this… I honestly am – was? – the most un-sporty person I know. I was dreading this 20 minute run so much that on my last run, two days ago, I ran for 30 minutes just in case I couldn’t do it today! I followed the plan at first and ran for 8 minutes, walked for 5 minutes. Then, I started to run the second 8 minutes scheduled for that day, the last run of that day… It was so hard, I didn’t think I’d make it. So, when I got to 8 minutes I thought I’d do a bit more, in readiness for today’s 20 minute challenge. Just to see if I could push beyond 8 minutes… So, I just kept running (jogging!) and running… I looked at my stopwatch – I’d done 12 minutes… “If I carry on, I could do 20 minutes” I thought – my reasoning was that that would then count as my 20 minute run instead of having to do it today… However, I got to 20 minutes and was enjoying listening to Van Morrison’s Moondance, and was so worried it was a fluke and I’d never do it again, that I just carried on, only stopping after 30 minutes and 40 seconds… So, today, although it was still incredibly hard – especially the first 10 minutes – I did the required 20 minutes run and yet again had that wonderful feeling of euphoria when I managed it!
So… Is it THAT that’s made me feel so strong, so invincible? Or, is it writing down my thoughts, feelings, and memories – on here – in November/ December? Is it the creativity, the flow of ideas? Something has had a huge impact on the way I feel. Something has stopped me from feeling dead inside; as if I’m just waiting for my turn to die. I like feeling like this, alive, positive, excited… The knowledge of death, the taste of death, which is still tangible to me, no longer hinders those feelings…
“Why did she make things? Well…She enjoyed it of course; but it also somehow helped her remember who she was and where she came from.”
Amy Rubin Flett