One Day in March

One Day in March

Some find it on the dark side of midnight at the bottom of a bottle or the sharp end of a needle; another failed attempt to escape a persistent, formless darkness within. Others find it after the death of a loved one or a breakdown in a relationship, where the cruel, bitter tang of loneliness mingles with sadness and loss.

My catharsis arrives dressed as Grief. One day in March in the dim, slightly cramped hallway by the kitchen, it begins.

For months Grief has been flirting with me, flashing her pearly whites and offering me glimpses into her depths. She’s slipped love notes under my door, imploring me to talk face to face. Now she’s graduated to fists and fury, banging on the door, howling at the top of her lungs, threatening to wake the neighbours, and until this moment, I’ve held her at bay. I know why she’s here, and I want none of it.

This is how catharsis goes. First, the small echoing feeling something needs to change, a niggling sameness that sits lopsided. Gradually the patterns escalate, becoming harder to ignore, encouraging us to make the changes before they’re made for us. If we continue to avoid its call, the big events are called in to raze our foundations. Here I am.

This March morning echoes other dawns as I wake. Chestnut trees line the familiar street outside in orderly rows, sentinels sporting spring blossoms. Five blocks away, the ocean keeps time with the Moon, waves licking or lashing the shore depending on her mood. Cycles and change, the constancy of life’s rhythms.

Four cats offer their steady presence to my routine days. Loving and warm, their regular demands provide a sense of purpose. I drag myself downstairs to feed them and prepare to face the day ahead, like an unfeeling robot stuck in a never-ending loop of human activity, befuddled by the futility of this ordinary, empty existence. Life without passion, devoid of meaning.

Thirty-eight years old, I’m staring at the tail end of another relationship with a familiar, uncomfortable pattern. In a moment of reckless lucidity, I accept my complicity in it all — the choices, the beliefs, the shame — leading me here, now. A realisation, in a blinding flash of insight: I am the common denominator in all my experiences.

Exhausted by attempts to outrun Grief’s relentless pursuit, I throw open the door, invite her in and take her as my lover.

In the end it’s not a long courtship defined by increasingly expensive dinner dates and weekend mini breaks to romantic hideaways. There are no whispered sweet nothings. There’s only a headlong dive into Grief’s outstretched arms and annihilation of my carefully constructed inner walls. The door opens and in she waltzes, like she owns the place.

What I don’t know then is that she’ll take up residence for the next eighteen months, leaving indelible marks on my furniture and my heart.

***

Grief begins to shake my world. Some days she lets herself in quietly, using the spare key stashed beneath the door mat. I wake, surprised to feel her strong arms wrapped around me, begging me for release. Other days, she breaks down the door; hair askew, eyes blazing, she kicks me in the gut and shackles me to her before diving straight into whatever she has planned for us.

The chestnut trees bear fruit; at first, small green maces hiding the tender young nuts within. As summer progresses, these grow and split; conkers litter the pavement and road, left to be crushed by feet or tyres. Autumn winds blow in.

By day, I’m a library clerk, moving through the quotidian tasks that keep us fed and housed, while Grief waits patiently in the background. The nights come alive as her fingers caress my skin, her voice weaving tales of times past, taking me to hidden places where I’ve deserted myself. She lays before me a tableau of loss and love to pick through, to remind me of who I am beneath the false constructs of the life I have created.

Before long, she’s part of the family. The cats accept her presence, as if they know she’s here to stay a while. When Grief slumbers beside me, never more than an arm’s length away, they lend me their comfort. Their softness grounds me and soothes my shattered heart, their purrs a reassuring symphony in the darkest hours.

Five blocks away, the ocean echoes our burgeoning partnership. Some days, the surface is as calm as smooth glass, revealing the wonders and beauty lying beneath. Peace and stillness, with an ever-present, powerful potential for something else. Other days, the pain laps endlessly at my edges, as waves kiss the shore. Grief calls me to surrender, to release the tightness around my heart. I resist, and she turns violent, throwing all she has at me. Enormous waves crash over me, relentless in their ferocity.

The choice? Surrender or drown.

I’ve done drowning. The summer I turned four, my five-year-old sister was teaching me to swim. As my parents were preoccupied with my baby brother on the beach, I stood on a sandbar, water up to my shoulders, facing my sister. Behind me was open water, more sandbars somewhere below the surface. ‘Back up to the next one,’ she said, and so I did, or tried. The last thing I remember - before waking up puking on the beach on my favourite chequered towel, ringed by concerned faces - is the water covering my eyes as the gentle movement of the waves lapped at my face and head.

Years later, I tried drowning my pain in alcohol, destructive men, and numb acceptance of my unworthiness. None of it worked.

No more drowning. This time, I choose surrender: an allowing, the act of dissolving resistance within. It’s gentle and terrifying at once. Grief shows me what lies beyond the walls and barriers of my guarded heart, possibilities I’ve not allowed myself to see, though they’ve always existed. Dancing on the outskirts of life, afraid to dive in, to try, to feel, to live. It’s safer where I am (I tell myself). I am safer.

Through surrender, I find a previously unmet power in my capacity to feel, to access a connection beyond myself. Without feeling, life is bland and monochrome. One moment of anguish and passion in Grief’s embrace is more vibrant and meaningful than years spent in different states of disconnection and self-denial. Her beauty lies in the chaos, the formlessness that allows for destruction.

I haven’t known another lover like Grief, who gives so unflinchingly of herself and demands the same of me. She sings my body’s song, and in doing so, teaches it to me. Eyes burning with a rare ferocity of purpose, she has one goal: break me open. I can resist or go willingly. Therein lies the difference between drowning and surrender, suffering and salvation.

She is not unkind in this. Her job is not to terrorise, but to expand. Misunderstood, often feared, her gift is to open pathways to love. Daily, I’m driven to the brink of madness and still crave more. When I feel close to touching the bottom of an impossibly deep well within me, she coaxes me onwards. ‘Look again. Open more. Dive deeper,’ she coos. And she’s right, there’s always more.

To love anything, anyone, is to risk meeting Grief. A gift wrapped in porcupine quills. There’s a moment, somewhere in the whirlwind of our time together, when the question arises if all beauty is born of pain. I don’t know. Perhaps it acts as a catalyst for alchemy, allowing the pain to form channels through which new information and experiences can flow.

***

When inner walls break down, it’s a death of sorts.

What dies for me are unconscious ways of being, old stories I once believed defined me. In believing those external stories, I had fenced myself in, confining the essence of who I was to something I thought would fit, or serve. It didn’t. Thus contained, I couldn’t recognise my truth to express it.

When the walls come down, I am bare, broken open for all the world to see. My skin sizzles with nerves, and raw to my core, I sit surrounded by shattered fragments of once-cherished dreams, long-forgotten lovers and abandoned pieces of myself. Glimpses of who I was and the lies I told myself through the process of building this prison.

It feels strange and vulnerable to be freed from stories that have become familiar companions over the years. Who am I without them?

Cancer took my father when I was a child. My mother tried to outrun her pain, to keep calm and carry on. In the end, Grief swallowed my mother whole and spat out the dust and bones, leaving a shadow of who she’d been, overwhelmed by rage, shame, and self-hatred. She turned hard, cold, projecting her inner pain outwards. As a child I vowed not to become like that, and now find I have, filled with self-loathing, anger and unexpressed sadness. Viewing the world through a lens of pain and struggle, instead of seeing the joy in the most precious of moments -- the smell of the ocean or the soft, sleek comfort of a cat.

So I let Grief have it all, daring her to take it from me, to carry it, destroy it or whatever it is she does with it, no longer wanting to be tormented. Unshed tears for my father and the solidity of his love. My mother’s barbed words, hurled at me daily, ‘fat, stupid, useless;’ words I’d been wearing as a mantle and on which I’d built an untenable foundation rooted in shame and fear. Unexpressed sadness for an unborn, unplanned child; regret for the times I denied myself respect, safety, trust and love; homes lost, friends lost; unacknowledged dreams abandoned by the wayside.

I throw these at Grief, and in return she offers me alternatives; a vision of myself as I am without the burden of others’ interpretations or expectations. She points to the places in my heart where love has built islands, beautiful oases of safety and acceptance, patiently waiting for me to acknowledge their existence. I learn that a guarded heart is a broken heart, a lonely heart. The key that opens it is love.

The truth I was so afraid to face, the worthlessness I believed defined me, is nothing more than a lie, built on a toxic mélange of inherited, unhealed trauma. Identity is not a simple, linear expression of personhood, but a complex intermingling of factors, including family, nation, experience, emotion, perception, and history. Unravelling the separate threads takes time. Unexpressed grief doesn’t just disappear, it changes us from within. Like dry rot in a basement, it festers until the foundations crumble to dust.

Grief in her glorious messiness fuels my passion and nourishes my desire to live. Everything is new. I add three-hour walks to my daily routine, time away from her enormous presence and a way to attune to the ocean’s soothing rhythms. Grief waits; she knows my schedule, and attends to me when I get home, showing me how to access more of the deepening understandings and connections.

Walking and Grief work hand in hand to heal me. The gentle movement of the walks combined with Grief’s power exposes a conduit to creativity and imagination. Catapulted out of the body into a space where only consciousness exists; a perfect place to view the bigger picture. As if the veils between this very grounded human existence and whatever lies beyond dissolve, allowing access to the perspectives she’s laid before me. I reconnect to a voice deep within me, stifled by the walls and barriers I had so painstakingly built. That voice becomes my guiding light and most trusted companion.

As I walk, this process, this love affair, is named for me. ‘Catharsis, catharsis, catharsis,’ the voice whispers in my ear. First, the recognition of a need to let go, then the purge, then each step an integration of the newness, putting down roots.

***

And when the catharsis is over and the walls have come down, what then?

Perhaps I am meant to leave the theatre, forever changed by the experience. This love affair cannot go on indefinitely. Grief is a tempest, not made to be domesticated by the limiting construct of permanence. Her job is to introduce me to life and break my heart open to possibility.

She’s a brilliant, ruthless teacher, as she is a lover: the perfect blend of enthusiasm and ferocity tempered with compassion. She has taught me so much, about myself, love, and the very act of existence.

A year and a half after Grief waltzes in, she leaves. There’s no fanfare, she simply walks out one day while I’m busy elsewhere. In her wake, space remains. This is not an ending, it’s where the hard work begins.

I’d lived many places before the flat on the tree-lined street, five blocks from the ocean. I’d held many jobs before working in the library. Something in the exact combination of comfort and familiarity, the mundanity of routine and that time and space, gave me the courage to open the door. Things I believed fenced me in were the very things I needed to face to release me. A shift in perspective more than circumstance.

The challenge after my time with Grief comes with reconciling the infinite potentials she revealed with the world around me. The structures in my life to this point had been rooted in other peoples’ ideas of right and wrong, distortions so firmly entrenched my being had adapted itself to them as the only normal that existed. Where I feel so new, everything around me is now obsolete, as if I’ve outgrown my life. The pre-Grief normal has become part of my history.

From here, I must learn to make new choices, aligned with the possibilities introduced to me by Grief. While still connected to the old life - people, places, beliefs - the draw to return to old ways is undeniable. Like stories of people who, when released from long prison detentions, commit crimes that ensure they’re incarcerated again. The idea of freedom beckons, but the reality is more challenging. The familiar, no matter how unhealthy or untenable, has tendrils that root deep, pulling us back in.

Building new foundations is a long, slow process. My refusal to go back to the life I knew before keeps me stretching myself to try new things, to open myself to new people, perspectives, and opportunities. When the walls threaten to creep back in, and I want to constrict instead of expanding, I choose differently. One of Grief’s greatest gifts is the power of presence, to sit with discomfort and allow it to point the way to new pathways.

Sometimes now, Grief drops by to visit. The intensity of those many months together has given way to a new calmness. I surrender more easily, offering her new pain I’ve accrued. She holds me for a while, and moves on, satisfied I’ve not forgotten her gifts.