Good Grief 329

19 years feels little different to what I wrote last time so I won't go on.

What also doesn't change is what beauty there is. Great sadness and great beauty is no bad thing. I was drawn back and walked back to where I walked 19 years ago and numerous times since. Then, after a sleepless night driving back via the mortuary and the sleepless nights that followed, I walked up here in the December dark. So little energy, and wishing each step into the gloaming would take me beyond this world to where he'd gone. And then later still, we scattered ashes here ... where he cherished boyhood memories of fishing the streams for brown trout. I suspect that is where he is now in those mists down there.

The trouble now is as I walk now the pain of one floods into the other. Part of me feels that logic would have one overlay the other. But it seems that is not how it works. They become part of one huge love and loss and I walk hardly knowing myself other than as a vehicle of both.

There is no now other than this now. This now, for me, carries this. That's okay. It's just that it doesn't sit well with the now of the world that seems to be all around me and that I struggle to to relate to. I don't mind so much but it makes it hard to co-exist and I'm sure it makes me pretty difficult.

But, it is where my emotional life is. I have no emotional life here, now. It's not that I wouldn't like to but it's not happening. I love those that are around me but there is not that connection. That's okay, it is what it is.

As I walked today I was aware again of how this particular connection bought me into honorary connection with this place. It cannot be taken away now. It is fixed. Even if no-one else knows anything of it. There is a sense of connection with rocks and stones and trees (and grass and droplets) that is profound in its utter ordinariness that is so familiar - each step carries me through my life, and stories and histories beyond mine. There will be so many stories that no-one knows anything about and yet they will all be of the same stuff.