Grief

Sherlock Holmes died last Sunday night.  Yes, I know it was all a fix and he'll be coming back, but his poor Watson doesn't know that, does he?

The most poignant moment of the programme for me was right at the end.  John stood over Sherlock's grave and begged him for one last miracle.

'Stop being dead.  Just stop - this.'

Thats what we all want, when someone dies.

I can remember last summer, standing outside the church after my step-father's memorial service, talking to the lay preacher, a family friend who had helped lead the ceremony.  'I just want him back,' I sobbed.

For many years I have been having dreams about my father, who died when I was 13.  In my dreams, which are not the same every time, but share the same theme, my father comes back to our family home.  He is sullen and unhappy, won't say where he has been, or whether he is staying.  There is always the suggestion that he has been with another woman, another family, elsewhere.  And there is that fear that he will go away again.  But I am just so happy to have him back that I try not to care - I just want him back.  Next month it will be 30 years since he died, and I am still having these dreams.

My point is that when somebody dies, all we want is to have them back.  But if they came back, it wouldn't be the way we want it to be, all hearts and flowers.  Life isn't like that.  There are no Jesuses, or Holmeses, to return from the dead.  We are just left to get on with living without those we love as best we can. 

The 'word' for 2012

All over the internet in the last 10 days, people have been talking about what their 'word' for 2012 is.  Courage?  Passion?  Experiment?  Embrace?  Everybody seems to have come up with a word that embodies their theme for the year, something they can keep coming back to, that guides the way they approach their life in the coming months and helps them to achieve their goals.


Last year, mine was 'self care'.  2011 was my 'year of self care', and the fact that I made it through 2011, with all its traumas, in one piece, says a lot for how self caring I have learnt to be.

But I have been wrestling with what I wanted for 2012.  Couldn't get my head around it.  (Probably not helped by this going round and round in my head!  You can imagine how distracting that would be.  But I digress...)

Then, this afternoon my counsellor/guru told me a question her old training course leader used to ask:

What would you do if you really loved yourself?

None of the usual pfaffing about. 

What do you need right now?  A danish?  Oh, yes, a great big danish pastry would be a really good idea, Rebecca, considering your IBS and wheat intolerance.  Yep, that sound really self-caring, that does.

Just think about that question for a minute.

Genius, isn't it?

So I'm not going to have a word this year, but a question.  A question I shall ask myself every morning when I get up.  And I hope that it will change the way I live, and make my dreams come true.  Or at least mean I take better care of myself and feel well a little more often.

The evil that is the 'To Do List'

Every day since we got home from our annual Christmas visiting marathon, I've been assembling a To Do List so that I can plough through a) all the things that I should have got done before we went away, b) all the things that need doing because we've been away, and c) all the things I want to do because its New Year and I have all these daft ideas about  things I want to change, as everyone does around now.  Which is all well and good, but what I have of course not taken account of is that my body has just spent two weeks travelling, not sleeping, eating inappropriate food, being in constant motion, and processing continual language (old people talk A LOT).

Today, it all packed up.

Its been really hard for me to accept that I  just wasn't going to get anything done today.  To say 'stuff the To Do List!'

But the baubles are going to have to wait another day to be packed back into the box, and the bedding will have to wait another day to be washed.  I gave myself a face pack and went back to bed.  When I woke up, the sky was livid with the stripes of a winter sunset and the bedroom full of velvet shadows. And I thought:


Enough.

Enough with the To Do list thing.  Give yourself a break, Rebecca.  Life is too short and too beautiful to be raging about whether you finished all the things on your list today.  You just have to live every day as it comes.

I'm reviewing the situation....

Ron Moody as Fagin in the film 'Oliver!'

Its that Dickensian time of year again, the last few days before the Big Day.  I finished my shopping today, and the presents are wrapped and under the tree.  And now I am taking a bit of time to sit on the sofa and think about the last six months, and the next.  Its been a very complicated time.  I've:

• written about 50,000 words at least
• helped to organise my stepfather's funeral
• helped to care for my grieving mother
• grieved myself, too
• been to my niece's wedding
• fallen in love with Him
• And fallen back in love with Him
• and met him. (He's wonderful.)
• and changed my opinion of this. (Its a beautifully written book, in case you wondered.)
• unblocked the drains (AGAIN)
• fallen on the ice (AGAIN)
• drifted in a dreamworld for most of the time.

I've also failed to:

• meditate
• do daily yoga
• write many blog posts
• finish my Victorian Bodice-ripper novel
• look after myself in much of a tangible way
• understand why I need to write 50,000 words of Sherlock fanfiction (It's about my father, apparently.)

But can this 'felon be a felon all her life?' (As the song goes.)  My plan for the next few months in beginning to form, thanks partly due to the help in this book , which is amazing.  So at this point, as I see it, 2012 is going to be the year of:

• meditation
• yoga
• reading more great fiction and even a bit of poetry
• finishing that Victorian Bodice-ripper
• okay, look, I can't see me not still being addicted to this, can you?
• writing writing writing
• and maybe taking a life drawing class.  But don't quote me on that.
• And going to this.  For def.
• And writing more posts for this blog.  And another one that I am secretly incubating, with the possible involvement of lemons.  Watch this space....

And now I have to go and have a lie down and try not to think about Benny in that sheet....   I may be some time.

Writers Retreat

The annual feet photo

Just come back from our annual writers retreat.  What to say?  Ate too much, laughed too much, didn't get enough sleep (elephants on roller skates in the room upstairs).  And also got a bit of writing done.  The standard of work read out on Saturday night by everyone was dazzling.  All my love to Bridget, Nina, Clare, Sally, Heidi, and Pat.

Count the chins!

Happy New Year

Today is Samhain, commonly known as Halloween, the Pagan new year.  Today, Pagans all around the world are celebrating the last of the harvests, the harvest of Souls, and preparing for the Long Dark, the time of winter, where we venture into our interiors and seek out our personal bogeymen to exorcise.  We look around at what we have achieved over the active Spring and Summer months, harvest what we cherish, and take it with us.  And we celebrate those who have Gone Ahead to the otherside.

I've spent the day in contemplation today, walking and meditating, deciding what I want to take with me into the Long Dark, considering what plans I could make for the next three months (I tend to work up to Christmas at this point, because its such a huge, stressful event that I can't see past it).  And I have been thinking about what I have achieved this year, and what I have lost.

Of course, tonight is especially poignant, as I will be mourning the passing of my step-father, and celebrating the gifts he gave me.  His wisdom, his quiet strength, his wicked sense of humour, all of which I miss terribly.  But I feel like I have sat shiva for him long enough.  The grief will go on, but its time for me to end the mourning. He wouldn't want excessive wallowing.  Its time to open myself up to the future now.

So I feel optimistic.  I don't know what my plans will be for the coming months yet - they normally come to me in the days following the Festival - but I feel that I am coming back to myself now, and that I am over the worst.  Lets hope the Long Dark isn't as bad as it sounds this year...

Fifteen Years Ago Today...

A page from the Wedding Album on our 15th Wedding anniversary.