Surrender to loss

 

I heard this morning that my father,  stricken by a massive stroke more than a year ago, died last night. A peaceful ending to a tormented life and I am glad of that.

 

Stumbling around  and calm but disoriented, unsure what to do and letting the waves of grief come up and fall away. I had no dreams, no intuition, no premonition – but then he was a stranger to me. I last saw him in 1979.

And so I begin the last stage of life after the Minotaur has died. So much to lay to rest. And I have made my own peace with the violence of my childhood, the lovelessness. The labyrinth has become a place as familiar to me as my own back garden, intricate and green and spiralling into a deeper understanding. But the heart goes on  in love and sadness, searching for what might have been, a child crying in the dark.

 

It is a day buttery with sunshine and the skies are very blue. The bird whistle so loudly in the garden I can hardly hear myself thinking, or give attention to the skirling of bagpipes blowing through my memories. A Scottish exile dying among green hills  that are not his own Highland hills. A daughter standing at the window looking out across a field suddenly grey and barren, lost to herself and an orphan in fact, but unparented since birth.

And another kind of understanding emerging with slowness and uncertainty. This is who we were to one another, a memory filled with long blue distances and silence.