Cerebellum Chic

So, here I am.  A year of slowing down and rebuilding everything. Everything had been moved all over the place.  So much transpired.  I know we are never really the same person for long, everything is always changing – but I had never been so conscious of the fact that I had not only changed and whatever I thought I had, or was, that was solid – was gone. Fundamentals that I thought were you know, fundamental, turns out they were not. Everything just kept shifting at a pace I could not make sense of. I mean, things had shifted for me before, but in times before it had happened when I wasn’t looking. I noticed after the fact. When this was all going down, I was desperately looking. Searching. Trying to be solid, to be something. I was wrestling with the difference between reality and my own ideals whilst the ground and the ceiling were disappearing. Fun times. But no, now maybe I mean, really, fun times. Here I am. Opened. This is life.

When you died it was like I was living outside of myself and I became so filled with grief and regret that you got some version of me that was in transition, fleeting, not centred and graceful, supporting you like you deserved.  Now, I’m maybe reaching acceptance that part of my problem is ever expecting myself to be anything but in transition, fleeting.  For putting pressure on myself to find a ‘centre’ or telling myself to be graceful when what I need to do is just say I’m feeling frustrated, exhausted, and even scared (as it happens, I’m terrible at suppression anyway, so if I tell myself to ‘behave’ in the name of gracefulness or some other noble idea – I normally get the opposite tenfold. E.g. screaming at everyone over Christmas dinner).

When I was a new adult, I remember someone older telling me that you “learn to live with your regrets”.  I thought that sounded so heavy and unbearable (while also in denial of the fact, I already had some).  I was naïve and inexperienced enough to think that I could avoid that.  Well, this past year is when that came back to me, and I realized what they meant.  It doesn’t stay heavy and unbearable; you do learn to live with them.  And they’re perhaps unavoidable if you are to really have any growth.  You will look back on things with hindsight and you know your “future self” would do things differently. It doesn’t mean we weren’t doing our best at the time, though.

As I let go of and make peace with last January, and all the chaos in the 18 months leading up to that point, in my mind’s eye it all looked like a black hole. Yet, now I’m grateful to see some space opening up between and around it. It allows me to look and remember the things that mattered from that period and led me to where I am now.  I think we are both coming into greater acceptance of the repercussions of that time and just how far it rippled. And we are realizing just how much we can do with that. Where we can take the influence of that period as we move along. The black hole is becoming just one other part of space.  There is so much more around it. And there was so, so much more to your full and giant life, then how it ended.

We prematurely declared we would have ‘a year of fun’ in response to so much sadness. But, at the beginning of grief, and the administration that can come along after death – we were again naïve to think we could control the rhythm of the life. Everything we had to face still with was complicated and dense, dense, dense. It took time to begin dropping the layers of heavy we’d been carrying.  Should haves.  Could haves.  Got to dos. If onlys. What’s returning now, and following us into this New Year, is more space to play. To see, that is all that’s left to do, and the only clear thing we did ‘right’ when we didn’t know where to turn or what decisions to make. We played around you and invited you to watch us play when you couldn’t. We lived before you and you lived with us.  I’m sorry you saw us fight from despair at times also.  Yet, I think you knew that when you saw us despair, it’s because we were all really connected. For us to watch you hurt, was for us to share some of that hurt. And although we’ll never know, I hope we did lessen the load.

Now, through some of my shifting fundamentals, I can even envision a continuing for you, in a different form.  Before, that couldn’t have been a consolation I could offer myself.  I would internally roll my eyes at the idea of anything after. Quaint stories with giant plot holes. I thought people used them to patch over the deepest wounds of all – stories that seemed so lacking in adequacy for the wound they are trying to cover.

As I said, this period is when everything became eye-opening for me. More questionable. My mind was opened for me.  It’s not disingenuous for me to conceive of some kind of afterlife now, it seems funny to me that I couldn’t envision any possibilities before.

Yet, I still don’t necessarily think it matters.  Most people I’m close to continue to think this is it, and I’m still open to the idea that maybe it is.  You should live the same way in any case, in my view.  However, it’s been soothing to think of some possibilities of how life can change shape, that they may be myriad. I don’t need to land on some final belief, because that’s exactly what I mean – I know these things are bigger than me and anything I conceive wouldn’t be enough.

I know J’s pain is greater and more complicated, being your son.  His grief is still unravelling, and he hasn’t and doesn’t like to think about what he doesn’t believe in.  I understand this. What’s the point in offering some story that you can’t buy into.  It just reinforces the pain when you find you’ve tried it on and reconfirmed the finality of your loss.  For J, we are getting to a place where you can come up again more casually in conversation.  We can mention your favourite films, or remember that story you used to share. Still tinged with sadness, as we thought about some good news we would share with you and could have predicted your exact words as a response. He is also reconciling the meaning of this grief along with the other important male family members he has lost, his step-father, his grandfather. It’s been a lot and I think your death reinforced the collective absence from all of those losses. Don’t worry though, we are continuing to fill our lives with all sorts of things, embracing the sort of renaissance attitude you torched.

But for me, for now, when I think of you, I’m thinking of you absorbed in the cosmos, animated, soaring, excited, and free. Nothing can shade you from the feeling of love. If you are feathered in the fabric of everything, in the company of a greater spiritual power that also resides everywhere, then I think of you laughing, along with us, when we do.  Because, if there is any ‘why’ to anything in this life (and really, I think that’s the only question I’ve ever had) then it’s love.  You are still loved by us and if we are here playing, you are playing along with us.