It’s been a while since I last wrote. Longer than I intended. There’s nothing I can say to excuse this, except that my mood of late has been mid-winter bleak, and I’ve been reluctant to share such a downbeat vibe. That’s not what you signed up for.
I have tried. Last week for instance I wrote a light-hearted piece on technology, the old Can’t live with, Can’t live without etc, but I couldn’t send it. A day after writing I sat down to edit and found the humour to be false and forced. Which upsets me. I think I’d rather lose my legs, than my sense of humour. It’s not that I’m overly worried. With my eighty-five year old mother choosing See You Later Alligator as the last song to be played at her funeral, I remain hopeful that my ability to laugh at almost everything will soon return. (My mother is alive and well by the way, it’s just that she’s chosen the tune in advance. In fact every detail is planned, including the shade of nail varnish on her toes – and I’m not joking.)
Still, I am missing my lighter-hearted self. Lately I feel brow beaten, hemmed in by lengthy margins of darkness, both at the beginning and the end of the day. As I write this, here in Stockholm, it’s currently -12 degrees. The sun rises around nine and sets around three. I go to pour a gin and tonic and find it’s only four o’clock.
And because the national psyche here in Sweden is centered around light, all through these winter months, candles burn in the window of every home and office, every shop and café. They’re placed there to offer a gift of light for those outside, and to hold the darkness itself at bay.
So every afternoon I light my candles. The land is covered in snow and Christmas lights are twinkling, but none of this has stopped me feeling as fragile as tissue paper these last few weeks.
The year is coming to an end, but the war in Ukraine continues. The situation in Iran is barbaric, teenagers are still drowning in the English channel and children fall through ice.
My own children are moving further and further away from me. Both geographically and emotionally. Plus, this year two close friends have lost a parent, and my mother-in-law is losing her mind.
The finite nature of our time on this earth, its absolute brevity, is suddenly too close to ignore. It has crept up behind me and now walks alongside. Gone are the years when nothing much happened, when change was welcome and something I’d chosen: a new job, a new place to live, a new adventure to travel to. And in response my emotional state has become precarious.
Memories rub alongside worries to produce sudden eruptions of intense grief that I don’t see coming, and I can’t prevent. Yesterday, for example, a young child cried intensely, all the way through my train journey home. In my twenties I wouldn’t even have heard, in my thirties I would have overflowed with sympathy for the mother, being up to my ears with the needs of toddlers myself, in my forties I would have felt relief that the child wasn’t mine, so why is it that now, in my fifties, I’m overwhelmed by the need to make this child’s world right again? I wanted to scoop him up in the kind of hug my own children will no longer accept, stop his tears and assuage his sadness.
I’m going to try and answer my own question. I think a part of me felt that in stopping his tears, I could stop all the sadness I seem to be hypersensitive to these days. The grief that I fear is just around every corner … as my parents age, as my house becomes emptier, as I look in the mirror and see my face changing beyond recognition.
Midlife, I’ve found, can be a time of incredible freedom. Confidence combines with experience. The unconscious need to conform vanishes and with the shackles off we are free to speak our minds, address our needs, chase our dreams, as never before.
But every moon has its dark side. And at midlife this is the sense of mortality that now shadows us, accompanied by an increasing sense of isolation as those we love dearly, pass away. The Elizabethan poet, John Dunne, was the first to coin the phrase, No man is an island. But as children leave and parents pass, I can be forgiven for feeling that sometimes it does feel as if the drawbridge has been pulled up, as if we are looking out at life, alone.
It doesn’t do to linger like this. There is no point. So I’m going to end this post with a poem I have pinned to my kitchen wall. It’s been there for years, many years before it ever needed to be and maybe that says something about my tendency to melancholy. Either way, I have always found it to be of immense consolation.
And if anyone reading this, relates to anything I’ve written … if you’re feeling blue, under the weather, down at sorts or any of those wonderfully benign expressions, I sincerely hope it offers some comfort. Look in particular at verse three. It’s six thirty am now, still dark, and I’m going to put some peat-black tea on, and get going with the day.
I wish you all a peaceful and happy Christmas.
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Cary
Here’s the poem.
Lore. By R.S. Thomas
Job Davies, eighty-five
Winters old, and still alive
After the slow poison
And treachery of the seasons.
Miserable? Kick my arse!
It needs more than the rain's hearse,
Wind-drawn to pull me off
The great perch of my laugh.
What's living but courage?
Paunch full of hot porridge
Nerves strengthened with tea,
Peat-black, dawn found me
Mowing where the grass grew,
Bearded with golden dew.
Rhythm of the long scythe
Kept this tall frame lithe
What to do? Stay green.
Never mind the machine,
Whose fuel is human souls
Live large, man, and dream small.
Just enjoy your rawness as you write . Sheer honesty . I think seeing the vulnerability of how your parents are still here but ageing , nest is emptying and feeling less noisy or a thing . Sending love , hugs, African thunderstorms and flame lilies to brighten your day .