It’s been useful having the memoir to republish over the last month because in that time two relationships have shattered. That makes three this year, if death can be called a shattering, although my relationship to my mother now, six months on since she left, feels more whole than it ever did. So I don’t count it, except if the frame is a fundamental repositioning of foundational connections, in which case I very much do. So that makes three.
My mother died. Fine. It was always going to happen and when it did she shuck off the armour that had kept her a distant, unassailable stranger and revealed her as no less strange but a whole lot more interesting. She pops in now and again to check on me. I feel her presence and our engagement is simple. Behind two enormous sliding doors she is getting on with the next bit, and occasionally I see those doors slide open and there she is. I know she is watching. I know she takes it seriously. I know she is dispassionate in her love. That is enough.
The last time she popped in, a sudden face up close to mine, I was lying in a hotel bed in New York after the second shattering. This is how I know she’s watching, because she was watching then; because she saw and her concern woke me. Eight years ended when I was four thousand miles away. When I was looking forward to coming home, when I was missing him and the feeling of being held, when my thoughts were comfortably on a future together. Eight years shattered and a friendship much older than that was shattered with them. I cut the call that already was sending a howl up through my blood, and six flights up in a New York hotel room I witnessed parts of myself spinning off into the universe.
There’s an incredible, momentary clarity that comes with great shock. In the first few minutes after it happened I said to myself and the room and New York, I’m going to imagine that this is the best f*****g thing that could possibly happen to me.
I am treating it like an addiction, focusing my energy on my own jurisdiction; what is the pattern? where did it begin? why these choices? Within the grief is the chance to go back to the beginning, and as if my body needed to make that clear, I landed in the UK five days later with a tooth infection stemming from the root. I’ve realised what I’m addicted to: charming, emotionally battering men who disappear, and anyone who’s read my memoir will know why. Okay. Thanks universe. Message received and understood. One last thing - the complex and crazy-making experience of grieving for someone who causes me pain. This, also, is my childhood. Except back then, when the basement shadow man vanished, so too did any chance of it being seen. That original shattering was rendered completely invisible. Which is why, in this hall of mirrors, I’m choosing to write about the pain I’m in now. I need it to be visible. I need to not pretend I’m all right.
The third shattering is perhaps more complex still, certainly older, and is a last straw in a relationship with a sibling. I must be oblique, there are people involved who I love, but as with the end of my man relationship I need to talk about it somehow. I don’t want to go over and over the story - I’m already tired of that, I don’t want to tell it, the telling of it cements it each time and the details don’t matter. What matters is that I’m walking around with a third devastation, a severing of what was, as a child, my strongest rope, and I need it to be seen. I cannot pretend it’s nothing.
So that makes three, and I can’t help but see the correlation between them all, the essential untying of terrible bonds, the liberation that’s on offer amongst all the flinging pieces.
Yesterday in a café in London I could not stop crying. I had a meeting to go to with people who’ve no need to know any of this stuff, and I found myself locked in lavatory with my hands against the door. I have never known grief like this. When my father died I had three month old twins to care for. There wasn’t time. When my mother died I felt a keen sense of liberation. I’ve lost friends, and I’ve friends who’ve lost children and all of these have been terrible, sudden gut punches and gasps for air and caused gaps in which I’ve stopped and taken in the sky. But this is different. This is mainline. I am not in control of it. It shows up on the tube, in cafés, in restaurants in Covent Garden. It arrives when I least expect it and when I most expect it and any god damn time it pleases in between. It is hurtling through me. It is my turn.
Eleanor
