Here I am again, breaking records that haven’t been broken since 2013, and effectively doubling my yearly blogging productivity. There was a time when I dabbled in fashion blogging. I wasn’t very good, and didn’t have a huge following (pretty sure it was mainly just my girlfriends that read them) but every week or so, I’d take the time to do it, for me. Probably mostly for my own vanity if I’m honest. Soon every week became every couple of weeks, then every month, then every couple of months and in time the spaces between gaps became wider and wider and the world moved onto the ’gram, and I moved on to wearing a uniform most days of the week (which is not fashion forward enough to deserve one blog post, let alone one a week) and mostly being in gym gear when I’m not.
Today is a weird day. I can’t help but to feel as though I need to acknowledge it, and the cloud that usually hangs over this time of year. Yet as I sit on my balcony – which, had the world not decided to continue its meltdown, could have been the balcony of my hotel room overlooking the lakes of Queenstown – I look out on my neighbourhood below completely clear skies. I hear the calls of at least five different birds; beyond the tree in my front yard are the trees in the park, and if I ignore the houses partially obscuring the view, I see the mountains in the (very distant) distance. It’s not Queenstown or Wanaka, but it’s definitely not bad. I know I am one of the fortunate ones – I am afforded the luxury of having a home, with a yard and a balcony that overlooks the park, a home gym, a supporting husband, the option of having my groceries delivered to me, and a stable job/income that I’ve found myself feeling increasingly guilty about, while so many others are struggling (by the way if anyone reading this is struggling financially or mentally, reach out– we are more than happy to help out however we can). And beyond that, I am grateful to be in a country in which I feel safe – where, despite not ever being able to please everyone, our leaders still get out there and try to do their jobs even though they know they’re going to be getting a hard time for it. Do I think that bloke in charge is a bit of a peanut? Yes. Would I want to trade places with him? Not for all the money in the world. And just the fact that we can openly voice our opinions about disagreeing with the country’s Upper Management shows what freedoms some people take for granted. Anyway, I’m not very into politics, and this post was not meant to be about Covid and what it’s taken, but it is about something that was taken.
Today marks sixteen years since Mum took her life. I have officially now lived half of my life without her, and to be honest I don’t really know how that makes me feel. On one hand, I feel so far away from that naïve teenager who just thought she was throwing up because she was unwell – and I suppose she was, just not the sort of unwell I thought – who got towels to clean up, and tried to give her water to drink even though she wasn’t responding in words. And yet, simultaneously as I write those words, tears involuntarily well in my eyes and I’m transported back, and so vividly remember the panic I was starting to feel tugging at me that things were not okay. Like the way they portray memories in the Pensieve, I remember the blurred swirls of background, and in the middle of it, clear as day, the blue and red fleece jumper with ‘Angel’ embroidered on the front I was wearing; the neon green numbers on the digital clock in my parent’s bedroom; the dim light of the lamp on her bedside; the sweat on her brow; the smell – the sickly sweet one I now know to be tissue necrosing – something that transports me right back every time I learn in too closely and unintentionally smell on the breath of an end-of-life patient at work.
I remember one of my sisters – then seven years younger than I am now – coming home from work and instantly knowing that something was wrong, calling an ambulance and saying “I think my Mum’s taken something,” and realising in that moment just how dumb I’d been. I remember the first ambulance arriving – her getting moved to the floor – how she’d soiled the bed – how they called for back-up – how I sat staring blankly in my own bedroom after the second ambulance arrived and the big burly paramedic ambled into what I’m sure he already knew was a lost cause. I watched them cut through her pyjamas and attach the defibrillator, and then I left and stared blankly at the wall from the edge of my bed in my room, and remember thinking to myself ‘I wonder if this means I’ll get an extension on my Social Studies assignment?’ and to this day I am angry that that’s what my mind chose to think in that moment, when one of the most important people in my life was leaving it, but I guess the mind does weird things when it’s under distress.
And then there’s a blank space and swirl and I’m at the hospital – my other sister must have driven me there since the sister that called the ambulance went with her in it – I watch my dad come in with a look of panic in his eyes – I watch my middle sister also arrive, come through the doors, drop to her knees and say ‘What have you done?’ to him as he says ‘I haven’t done anything’ and to me it sounds like he is trying to convince himself more than her. And still to this day I feel like he is one of the only people he doesn’t have convinced. I remember the look on the doctor’s face when he came out and told us he was sorry but there was nothing he could do…Then having to speak to the police, my eldest sister trying to stop me from telling them that they had been arguing (and on reflection it was a mix between denial and wanting to shield him from having to be questioned) but I have never been one for hiding the truth.
I sat outside on the benches in the dark, after I called my then boyfriend and told him, and it was there my cousin found me. He didn’t say much, but he put his arm around me, and there we sat in silence.
There was a lot of silence in the days that came. We went to my Aunty’s house to wait out the day because we weren’t allowed home until the authorities cleared it. My cousin made me toast and I said I wasn’t hungry – she told me I have to eat – and I remember thinking I don’t usually eat breakfast let alone toast, but she’s probably right so I ate it anyway. I sat on their front balcony and called one of my cousins that I thought would already know (she didn’t), and then one of my best friends. Eventually we went home. People came and went. Amongst it all, two family members – one of them my brother – made the comment “You were right there. Why didn’t you do anything?” as though my sixteen-year-old-self didn’t already feel like I was to blame.
Dad couldn’t bring himself to sleep in their room for weeks. Instead, he stayed on a mattress on the floor next to my bed. At night I would try not to cry because I knew it’d upset him, but because I couldn’t help it, he would always end up crying too – and there we were in what felt like this endless cycle of guilt; the two who only two people had blamed out loud, but who felt like the most to blame. I was angry at him at the start. I’m sure he was angry at me too. I’m sure the words that had been said by my sister and my brother had been thought – and caught – before they left the mouths of others. It took a long time for me to realise that the choice that was made, and the events that followed, were one person’s, and one person’s alone – though it’s all kinds of messed-up that she felt that alone. I sincerely hope Dad has found the same peace, but he is an old-school ethnic dad who is bad at feelings, so sometimes it’s hard to suss out. Plus, there are others in our lives who have never been able to think before they speak. It’s a toxic energy I’ve mostly removed from my life, for my own mental health, but Dad would never abandon, no matter how much stress and destruction it brings. I worry about him; we all do.
Robin Williams said that the saddest people always tried their hardest to make people happy because they know what it’s like to feel worthless and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that. That absolutely resonated with me when it came to Mum, because she has one of the greatest laughs, brightest smiles, and kindest hearts I have ever had the honour of encountering. Sometimes I wonder if it will ever apply to me, but (un)luckily internalizing feelings is not something I’m good at. Although I guess if I think about it, the specific times that I’ve felt like this statement has applied to me is when someone I know loses a loved one. I wrote in my last post about the line between empathy and pity and the difficulty that lies in walking the line between the two; I don’t know if it feels the same or not for the receiver, but if there’s light in my experience it’s that the line between sympathy and pity is a much less delicate dance.
It’s been many hours since I started writing and as I look at the word count I realise that I used to groan about having to submit reports and essays much shorter than this. There are a couple of small clouds in the distance now, but the sky remains for the most of it, clear. The birds are still chirping but they’re harder to hear over the man playing catch with his dog in the park across the road setting off all the rest of the neighbourhood dogs. And even as I look away and look back, the clouds are further away still. The air feels fresh and it’s still enough that my hair only slightly moves out of and then back into place. I almost don’t care that my wifi is still not working after three days and I now have to tether the data from my phone to post this lol.
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She missed
out on a lot. Birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, grandkids, feasts,
weddings, son-in-laws, halves of lives. And she was is will never
stop being missed.
