Never look back, they say. My grandmother, my mother’s mother died, taking with her all of her memories, all of her stories; of people in the past, of her beloved, her way of life. There she sat, in her favourite chair, with her cat, until towards the end.
As a child, I remember lots of trees, blackberries, gardens full of flowers. Hers was the flowery garden I remembered the most. I could lose myself in there, blending in with the blooms and the sky.
I did not speak to my grandmother enough before she died. How are we to know that the best secrets of that generation go with them? They have seen the passing of time in a way no other generation can. But they don’t even know the things we need to know the most before they go. More than: ‘be happy’, ‘live your dreams’ – the whispered secrets that are told to them only on their way out, before they close the door.
“What was unbearable is not so much – these days, When I look back, I understand, try not to understand. Life was better with its mysteries and pain.
“I look back through my mind’s eye and a tunnel stretches out behind me. Flickering memories, I choose, one by one. One day soon, the tunnel will be in front of me. The fading events will be reeling through my mind. I will fall into the welcome depths. I am smiling; the softness is my death”
There followed a year where I seemed to live in the past. A dark year, that began with navigating the loss of a loved one in a hostile family. The year started with the overwhelming feeling of too many memories, one by one, like butterflies, flying through my mind.
I climbed, step by step, up from the bottom of the well of memory and somewhere on the way up, I once again met my true and present self. The climb from the abyss became a climb upwards towards a pinnacle of what I did not even know yet. I clung to my existence.
From the dark, snowy day when we buried my grandmother, I felt sure I was on a set of Escher’s steps, as winter dragged on. I found though, eventually, and after the turn of the winter, that the stairs I was climbing were leading me closer and closer to my wildest and deepest dreams and actually, here was where I needed to be, here was where I wanted to be and, with my inside smiling, I knew that once winter turned again, the well of memory would be lingering less and less and my dreams would be in front of me, like the box of pandora, suddenly opened.
That year, I didn’t realise there was still so much work to be done. A labyrinth where many others had been lost before. I met the younger selves of my parents and my grandparents. Some of them helped me to the right path. Others did not.
Always, always I could see the sky, the universe. Always, always, I knew I would be as happy as I used to be.
I moved to a new city: new for old, a surreal and distant experience at first, but that is how it feels, when the portal finds you. I moved for love, longing and for the sake of three children I have never met. There is still so much on the threshold – I feel their spirits, their energy, waiting by the door. A battle amongst all the other battles and only the true heart feeling to pull me through.
I said things that needed to be said. I cut some ties. I am cutting ties. I am in the eye of the storm now. My fear has been liberated.
