On ephemerality

and the shape of grief and life

May 19, 2024

Hi there friend,

I am shying away from a lengthier ‘introduction’ as my usual approach. Instead, I just want to warn you that today’s letter is entirely about the shadows and griefs of life. Please go with tenderness and kindness, to yourself.

I’m still trying to understand this topic. It changes constantly, as it should. I found the topic difficult to write, not because it’s painful anymore, but because I have never really written about it before. This is a response to a prompt from the Spring Light class by

Beth Kempton

and it was a wonderful one to do. It might be a topic that I stop writing about about but for today, I will go and stand in some light and plant some seeds.

Much love and care.

K x

P.S. If you’re reading this in an email, please click ‘View entire message’ to read the whole thing.

So much can happen in a year, in a lifetime, in a day.
Kokoro, Beth Kempton

On a freezing December morning in 2018, between celebrating our first Christmas in Wales and our first shiny New Year here, I stood up to my ankles in a drift of skeletal leaves staring at the grave of a relative dead for 60 years. Buried with her was her husband and their son. The next grave over was a brother. Around the corner of the tiny Baptist church was an uncle, and his brother, with their respective wives. I felt strangely like I’d wandered into a silent family reunion.

I had known they were here for some time. They were my father’s maternal family, a family I had come to know intimately over the last few years of researching them, diving into archives and records, unearthing their lives and their deaths.

Graves thoroughly photographed, my fingers bitten with the cold, and my dog entirely perplexed at this particular outing, I checked for a place to get a warm cuppa and was delighted to find there was one literally behind the church.

The gratitude we felt at walking into the place to find it not only was quite nice inside, but it allowed dogs and had a wood stove on the go, I’m not sure I can adequately explain. My cuppa arrived swiftly (another blessing) and my mum, my grave-hunting companion for the day, nipped away to the bathrooms. In the solitude, I started to research the place and the village where a good proportion of my relatives had lived and died.

Then I heard it. A most distinctive acoustic guitar, then the most beautiful words, transporting me from this little haven right back to a funeral I wished hadn’t been necessary.

Oh, hot sand on toes, cold sand in sleeping bags
I've come to know that memories
Were the best things you ever had
The summer shone, beat down on bony backs
So far from home, where the ocean stood
Down dust and pine cone tracks
Old Pine, Ben Howard

Tears danced in my eyes. It had only been 2 years, hardly enough time to accurately describe the shape of my grief, to understand it or know it. And yet this song, played at my dad’s funeral, was a melody that cheered my heart. That it would appear at random, after a morning of visiting the graves of his family, when we had sought and found comfort in a lovely place, where the simplest fact that they allowed dogs made me feel happier - I received it as a message from him.

He’s always here, I thought. And I was glad.

I later discovered that the cottage we had passed once belonged to the father of the woman whose grave I had stood at. He had been the blacksmith for the village and, in comparing old maps, I realised that his smithy had once stood precisely where the restaurant was that had provided such solace that day.

Sometimes, my grief provides me comfort.

16th May

Watching the candle, vehicles groaning by, breathing. Enjoying life yesterday, despite it all. Standing and carrying on, despite it all. Having the audacity to continue.

I’m sinking into my ocean, my ocean breath, the deep sound of the earth. There is peace here. Worries and stress and to-do lists sit on the surface, rippling and splashing. Here in the waters, peace and stillness, hair waving about my face with each breath. Aches and pains and hurts become things to observe, to watch, but not inhabit. This pain is not me. I am not it. It is a thing that has shape in the water if I look at it long enough. If I turn away into the stillness, it dissipates, dissolves at the edges, still there but dispersed. Only there if I pay it attention.

Instead, I give attention to something else, something intangible here in my calm. It forms and shapes and becomes, not to be judged or labelled or ignored or loved or hated. Just a thing.

I will give it a name today. Hope. It becomes lighter, drifting through the currents of my life. What if we made a more conscious choice to give attention to the things we want in our lives? Not the pain or shame or jealousy. They are still here, drifting. Instead to hope, to joy, to feeling valued, to being seen. How would life change then?

Would the hurts and pains still hold their shape if we turned away? Or would they become something more, something that swirls through the waters, through the shapes and becomes its own beast? Fear. Is it this creature that makes us hold our breath as it swims by, the thing we come to fear more than the things we feared first?

What if we learn to drift in the waters anyway? Is it possible to sink down and breathe and not judge or give too much attention or try to even name any of the shapes we find there?

Peace can be found in life.

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Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, 
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 
You must wake up with sorrow. 
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth. 
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore.

- Kindness, Naomi Shihab Nye

I’m tired of being resilient I once said to my therapist. No, I’m tired of needing to be resilient.

Resilience wasn’t something I had consciously cultivated. I don’t think anyone stands up and says ‘Yes please, I’d like a tough life so I can be resilient.’ It’s the result of refusing to roll over or lie down for too long. of having an unpredictable life, of living through trauma and tragedy, instead of living in it. I am proud of it, but I am sometimes tired of the need.

Life cannot just be a slow drift down the lazy river under the sunshine and the trees. Inevitably, it changes. Faster, more winding, colder, rapids, trees, rocks, droughts and damns. And, occasionally, a bloody big waterfall.

Selfoss waterfall in the þingvellir National Park, Iceland

The past year hasn’t made me stronger, it has just made me realise that I was already stronger than I knew.
Kokoro, Beth Kempton

Grief doesn’t come with a road map. In the words of my therapist, it is less a ‘cycle’ and more like a bowl of spaghetti.

One grief is also not at all like another. The grief for my grandparents, for my uncle, for our friends - those are not at all the same shape or size or colour as the grief for my dad.

It reminds us that life is not forever. Things must change, they must end. With light, there must be darkness. By living, we accept death. I plant seeds in the hope of life, and I know that they must die. They cannot bloom or grow food forever.

Death is the start of a new chapter.

It’s probably not one we’d choose to write. But it must be written nonetheless.

It’s one in which grief becomes your new companion. A huge, untidy, unwieldy one that follows you everywhere. It occasionally smacks me in the face and reminds me to grieve - as if I didn’t already know or could ever forget.

Somewhere, there is a hole, a gap in the world that once held the shape of our loved one. The space my dad took up was immense. A constant presence in my life, a giver of stories and laughter and resilience and humility.

And then he was gone. The shape of him in my life was empty. I could no longer hear the stories he told on repeat. I’d give anything to hear them one more time. I could no longer ask for his advice. Now I have to figure it out for myself. I could no longer ask him to make sense of something for me. Now, it’s up to me.

And yet. And yet. He is still here.

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Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed.
- For Grief, John O'Donohue

It may seem a strange thing to say, but my relationship with my dad continues, despite the fact he is gone. A relationship is a thing of two halves; part me, part other. When the other is gone, I don’t believe the relationship, the connection, has to vanish with them. Who he is to me now is different to who he was in life, but that is entirely because I have changed and the shape of my grief has too.

I no longer look at the gap he left behind. The great creature of grief that once consumed my view is a little bit more like a scruffy labrador. It generally spends its days asleep or by my side, that constant reminder of this grief and loss - but also of the love and joy I had. Occasionally it whines or snarls or howls long into the night. But mostly it just is.

Our grief goes on. The alchemising of our grief and loss goes on. Our unfolding, unbecoming, returning, goes on. I’m not done shedding ash, slowing, listening… Tending to it is the ultimate self-care.
Kokoro, Beth Kempton