A wiser choice to make

I travelled to my country of origin for a funeral. A family member died.

An ice-cube formed inside me and there is no one to argue with about this turn of events.

And the screaming about it also feels wrong at this stage.

But I feel I need to talk about it as otherwise my internal timeline or calendar will start ripping and I would have gaps in memory rather than the lived experience so let me talk about it in a manner that is as shallow and as deep as I possibly can at this stage.

I do not want to have memory losses.

I want to own my timeline.

So let me speak…

Ironically, my daughter is sitting right next to me right now and is watching You Tube shorts on endangered animals. These losses we can still prevent.

I flew from Birmingham to Warsaw Modlin in Poland. A friend accommodated me, gave me a warm meal and a warm breakfast, took me to a florist in the morning and dropped me to the little village near Warsaw where the funeral took place and where my family was waiting.

The night before the funeral I wrote a message to the President of Warsaw enumerating all the good things my auntie and her husband did for the city of Warsaw hoping that a bench with a plaque on with their surname would never make her and her husband vanish from memory and then I deleted the message remembering that my aunty liked being a private person, so she would probably not appreciate me butting in in that way. She liked the Moon more than park benches and I do not quite know how to honour her interest in it yet.

Grief hardly ever makes us holy. We know that. It pulls our teeth out making us restless and faithless as denial wraps around a belief like a frost around an unsealed shoe. It is trying to be pally where honesty would be more appropriate: I have taken from you your beloved and I am not willing to return them to you in any other form than a chain of complex emotions that you would need to learn to handle by not acknowledging that you do have a heart.

Life is giving me a workshop in distress tolerance.

Cheers.

Thank you.

It seems to be my staple at the moment.

My kid had altercation with another student on a bus. Now, I am taking him to school in the morning. The daily early morning car chat is what we both need, it seems to me. The teenage world is not easy to enter or navigate. I feel at times I do not have the necessary graces to guide my son through it.

I decided to be a friend to myself though and I signed up for a short online course in Creative Writing run by Falmouth University. It is delivered by Jamie Popowich and I feel very supported by his delivery and demeanor so far. I like his energy. I know that this is me being a good friend to myself and I also know that being a very good friend would mean doing filming or cinematography course too but I have not figured out the way forward with this yet. Things are not getting any cheaper year by year and I am not getting any younger so I figured that it is the right time for me to cover that gap in learning. I did my first degree in English, Spanish and American Studies but I always felt very deprived of the creative writing edge that would come with Creative Writing degree.

But maybe everything gives us an edge. Just the fact of being on the edge of our own life experiences makes our edge uniquely edgy.

Turning sour now.

Too much salt.

It’s been a week too hard to handle, in all honesty. And I wish I could cry but my left eye duct is blocked so even that in not possible now.

I’m turning sour now, where caring would be a wiser choice to make.

Stay or move in grace.

Lots of love, A.

Below Grief and Anger, drawn by me.