My world was turned upside down, as was that of everyone who knows her.
The shock, the pain, the incredulity that something so awful could happen to our family, and most especially to her was completely new territory.
One always expects to bury a parent. One hopes to never have to bury a sibling. And it flies in the face of the order of life to ever have to bury a child.
What else can one do but be there. In person, jumping on planes, packing up the baby and trekking down for appointments. On the phone, trying to support and love them through what ever they were having trouble processing. Thinking of them and sending messages, txts, notes, gifts, little cards.... just so that in those lonely moments when they are feeling bewildered and isolated they might just know that someone, lots of someones, were holding them close.
Being a sounding board with the tough decisions, being a safe place for them to work through the next step. Just being there no matter what the emotional cost....
There is nothing else that can be done. Sadly we have yet to develop the ability to take away someones physical pain and carry it for them, or I would gladly have done that too.
It was at this time that I began this particular work, and it has been a difficult piece right from the first stroke.
There were so many huge emotions that I was trying to process. I was watching a sister prepare to die. I was watching her children working their way along with that. I was watching my other sisters try to make sense of this unthinkable event. I was watching my own children cope with not only their own grief about losing an aunty, but cope with what this was doing to their mum... me.
And, I was watching my own mother struggle to find her way through the fact that her daughter was dieing. Of all the grief that I saw, it was her grief that pained me the deepest. Yet with the natural process of family life, and with a lifetimes' worth of baggage and issues that collects within most families, it was not easily recognised that a mother was losing her child.
All of this I saw. All of this I felt. None of this was in my power to change.
So I had to try and find a way of processing it.
I began with the purple. The purple was my symbolic place of deeper understanding, of emotional safety and peace. By creating the soothing, beautiful purple and lilac environment I felt better placed to find a way to carry the grief. The figure emerged. It was new territory in that I began my work in oils with this piece. I wanted something that required a new discipline, a patience that I had not had to apply to previous work. This grief was going to be with me for a very very long time, and I wanted to work with something that demanded that time as well.
This was a great challenge for me as I am not a details person and I have never attempted to create a figure in this way. What needed to be said, had to be said with a gesture, not with features. The figure needed to be androgynous, and anonymous. I was not and am not the only one experiencing this event and going through this process. I am merely finding a visual way to process what I see and feel.... so this figure had to emulate everyone I love and care about..... as well as me. How can one encapsulate so much on one canvas?
While still attending the TLC jewellery class with Hanne Erikssen-Mapp, I found that my ability to concentrate on fine jewellery was simply beyond me. As always I found myself in a wonderful and loving environment, Hanne encouraged me to to just explore and not worry about where I went or how I got there. From this place of creative freedom emerged a very battered, worn, crooked and unattractive box. I wanted to create something to sit within the realm of safety I had created with the purple painting, something that sat in juxtaposition to the serenity of the space with which I could identify the rawness of grief but in a controlled way. It was to hang around the neck of the figure in the painting. I needed to find something that sat at odds with the rest of the work, in the same way that my feelings and the weight of those feelings sat at odds with the rest of my world at that time. It had to be carried. Contained. Set apart, yet a part of the whole.
Made from copper, this little sealed box on a hand made beaten copper chain became my focal point. My start point to try and make my way through this pain.... or to try and start to live with it.
I had found my safe place to carry all my grief.
I chose the copper because it would evolve and oxidise. It would change colour and texture and grow old with me. My ugly little box would carry this weight for me, and hold it safe until I was able to carry it myself.
For over two years I have been unable to do anything to this piece. It has sat staring at me in my studio all this time. There were times when I would get it down, put it on the easel and hope that the time had come to finish it.... and then it would go back to its place on the wall of unfinished stories waiting to be told.
I had no idea how or when that time would come, but I began to trust that it would, and the pressure to complete it waned. It became something that was always there but could no longer sit on the easel at the center of my studio. Just as life had to continue and the grief and enormous feelings and anxieties over my sister's illness had to move from the center of my existence. It is always there, just as the painting was always there, but it had to move, work had to continue, life had to continue.
At the beginning of this year I would never have thought that there would be quite such a journey ahead.
On top of what had become my 'new normal' with the huge feelings around my sisters illness, we also found out that a dear aunt was diagnosed with MS. Another aunt was also terribly ill with lung cancer and June/July of this year (2011) we lost - through an early miscarriage - our little surro-bub. Thankfully it was an early loss, but I felt the loss regardless. Our main concern was for this special woman who was giving us so much, and who had chosen us out of all the families she could have chosen, to connect with and to create this much wanted child for us and with us. The miscarriage itself was over quickly but the concern and the guilt for what someone else was having to go through not only physically but emotionally too, lingered.
In August of this year I got the call that mum's lung cancer had spread to her brain. She was having to move from the care facility she was in to hospital level care. She had been diagnosed the lung cancer only a few months before, and after radiation on her chest, then her brain, there was nothing more that could be done.
I left the family here in Wellington and I traveled to Christchurch to be with her and with my sisters.
It was a great emotional strain on the whole family. How could we possibly find the inner resources to deal with losing our sister and our mother to this horrendous disease?
There were times when the only way forward was to be numb. To contemplate a world without either of these people in it was incongruous. To contemplate a world without BOTH of them.... that was just too much of a stretch. There were days when the weight of trying to find a place to put all of these feelings was overwhelming.
However, there is no option but to keep putting one foot in front of the other. To get up each morning and try to live each day the best you can while keeping all the balls of ones life in the air. To keep working. To keep raising your family. To keep the mundane activities ticking over, and to try and prepare for an experience that looms on your horizon like an ominous tornado.... and not knowing when that tornado was about to rip your world apart.
How does one find room in ones heart and soul to support two people they love so much go through this disease that will ultimately take them away from you? How can one's heart stretch that far? The short answer is ... it simply does, until it breaks.
After so many years of difficulties with mum's mental illnesses and needs, after so many years of sadness at how things were in our family.... it was time to put all of that to one side. To forgive. To move on. To remember the love and the bond of family. It was a special experience to share with my sisters and my aunt. We all have so much to work through. We all have so much to process and to find a place to keep inside ourselves. We all have so much to let go and release.
I learned so much from this time. I learned that while this was a shared experience. Grief is an individual process.
The process of leaving this world is as sacred as the process of entering it and it was a precious time to let mum have these last days just how she would have it.... with her daughters giving her their unconditional and undivided attention. All she had ever wanted.
Somehow we found the strength to get up each day, and to bring our love to her bedside. Somehow we found the strength to care for each other and love each other through this shared yet personal experience. Somehow we found the strength to say goodbye to mum. Somehow we will find the strength to adjust to the world without her in it.
My dad passed away 20 years ago also from cancer. She had waited an awfully long time to be reunited with him. It sounds strange to say that I have never seen mum so happy as when she knew she was finally leaving this world, and leaving all her pain and regrets behind.
That last month with mum was precious. There were tears and laughter. Memories and sharing. Even though she was not able to speak, she could communicate with her smiles and her eyes as we sat together in the afternoons looking at photos I had put on the laptop for her and my telling her the stories she had told me over the years about the 'old days'. She was able to look back over her life through the collection of memories I had put together for her on the computer and see that even though there was sadness and dark days behind us, there had been many good days and joy too. It was very healing for her.... and healing for me to be able to see that.
It was a time of reconciliations and the releasing of years of emotional plaque that she had collected along her life's journey.
And paramount to her was that she was not going to have to bury a child after all.
There is such pain in watching a loved one waste away. The grief at watching them slowly giving up life. Watching them slowly reconcile to their journey onwards, where ever that may be. Watching their body betray them one sense or one ability at a time. Watching this person who you love so much have to adjust to the failings of their strength, the loss of their independence, the leaving behind of things that have meant so much to them. Watching them slowly release those they love and watching that grief overwhelm them. Watching that process creep along day after day.
.... and then when that is all done....watching them wait to die.
On September 5th of this year, my mother left. She passed beyond the veil where I can no longer see her. She died peacefully and happy.
It has been a month now. I am only just now discovering what my world looks like without her in it. It is only now that my grief is becoming the ache that will always be there instead of the raw and open wound it was the day she died. I will never forget walking to the door of her room after she had passed and just not being able to take that step into the room. I remember feeling that if I just didn't walk through that door that she might still be there. That maybe she hadn't left after all..... I knew that if I walked through that door that it would be real. That one step took all the courage I have ever possessed.
There was a primal wave that came. The wail of pain rose from the deepest part of me. It was real. She was gone.
We had her funeral several days later. It was a time of adjustment. It was a time of pain. It was a time of bewilderment and loss.
Returning home was a relief. Returning to the arms of my own little family and my friends was like sinking into warm bath. It was time to breath. To cry. To think. To let the sadness wash over me and fill in all the little cracks of my broken heart.
And now, a month later, I am emerging. With the support and love of my little family I am finding a way forward and beginning the process of looking at how my world looks now without mum in it.
So I finally got the painting down off the wall in my studio. Put it on the easel and picked up a brush.
It wasn't something I thought about. It was just something I did. It was time to move out of my safe holding place and into reality whether I wanted to or not, and face the new colours of my grief. My safe place of grief had been busted open. That little box could no longer contain all it was holding. The emotional seams that had kept me whole throughout these past years had buckled.
Something had broken deep inside of me during that time in Christchurch after mum had passed. I had no more to give. I was broken. Being a 'feeler' and a 'see-er' of the world around me, the 3 years of grief and preparing for a loss of such magnitude with my sister, the unexpected loss of mum and the isolation of that feeling finally cracked that safe place that I had kept those experiences.
It was my hope that we could grieve in communion with each other. And as I learned earlier, while this loss is a shared experience, grief is as individual as we all are, so we grieve in isolation..... and I am lost.
There was an overwhelming importance to me to acknowledge what each of us - her daughters and her sister - had lost. There was an overwhelming sense within me to acknowledge that this was mum's time to be what she had always desired to be... the center of our world. This was the one time when it had to be ok that mum's wishes were paramount. Each of us deserves to know that when we can no longer speak for ourselves, that our loved ones speak for us. This was a time when it had to be about mum.... and not because she demanded it as she had done in her lifetime, but because she deserved it. This final rite of passage from this life was the last thing we could ever give our mother. Preparing her body, gathering her friends and family, and saying goodbye was an experience that I saw as sacred.
Mum is gone, but what lingers - the memories, the good times, the bad, the laughter and the tears, the things said and unsaid.... they are mine for the rest of my lifetime. It can not be changed, the clock can not be turned back. I am thankful that there was nothing left unsaid between us. I am thankful that I have no regrets. I am thankful that I feel the loss of my mum, because that means that what ever ups and downs there were in our time together.... there was also love and joy and connection.... because that is the gap that I am left with.
It was painful to say goodbye. It is painful to know that everything that could have been will never be, and everything that was will never be again.
And so it was time for the purple to recede and the space that I am really in begin to emerge. This place of sadness and grief and loss and realising that my safe little ugly box could no longer contain all of this and it was time for me to let that be. I had to immerse myself in that space. See it. Feel it. Accept it. My space and my grief can now be one.
The painting now reflects this place. It is neither black nor white. It just is. It is neither dark nor light. It just is. It is neither right nor wrong. It just is. It neither remarkable nor unremarkable. It just is.
The earth tones remind me that death and loss is part of life. They remind me that from loss comes growth. Intuitively the colour pallet was a follow on from the current hues of the copper box. They are now one, reflecting each other. No longer separate entities. No longer at juxtaposition with each other. I am no longer separate from my grief. We are one. We will evolve together.
It is painful. It is hard. It is enveloping. It must be endured. I can no longer allow myself to stay in that created space which has held me these past couple of years. I am part of all that is around me. I am part of this experience.
My little box is now my companion in grief, not the caretaker of my grief.
In time the little copper box will take its place on the figure in this painting. And then we will see.....
Does this piece have more of a journey to take.... who knows. What I do know is that my grief certainly does.
It is now 2013. Time has passed since my last entry which was in 2011.
I have grieved, I still grieve. I think of so much so often. The only consolation is that each time those thoughts of what will never be, and sadness over the way thing were or are the impact is just that little bit less. No one asks "how are you doing" anymore. That passes so quickly, as it should. Life goes on. And so the journey to a place of being able to have a thought without tears is a solitary one. Makes sense I guess.... death itself is a solitary journey. No one can take that road with you..... and those left behind must make their own path in the world that exists for them, altered for ever. And so, quietly those moments have been felt, endured, overcome.... and I know that those moments will be my new companion for the rest of my life.... but the relationship between me and those thoughts will evolve in time, like all things do, and we will learn to sit side by side without inflicting so much pain on each other... my thoughts and me.
The piece is finished. As I said above... It is neither black nor white. It just is. It is neither dark nor light. It just is. It is neither right nor wrong. It just is. It neither remarkable nor unremarkable. It just is.
"And what of Loss"
- oil and copper on boxed canvas. 18 x 24 inch
B van Gils 2013
Bernice.....Beautiful! The last image with your painting, your hand and your jewelry says it all. Thank you for expressing yourself to me. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and hugs.Fre
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