First, a few words from Shakespeare:
Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.
Grief makes one hour ten.
A few days ago, my wife Pip and I were sitting on the back steps of the house, soaking up the rays of the spring sun. The warmth was settling into our bones, but we both knew and felt what the presage of this seasonal greeting meant. It’s become intuitive this knowing, like an osmosis of love and loss into what the other is feeling at this time of year. Soon, it will be October.
Some days, we say, we wake up and think that he is not dead. This thought is but a sliver of light from an alternative universe that comes in through a chink in the mind and heart. Time is playing tricks. Like this one, too: How can it have been five years without him? And yet, it is. One night in mid-October five years ago, Hamish died. He was 21.
Some days, this thought of unreality opens the front door of our hearts, enters quietly, doesn’t make a sound and sits with us. Surely, time cannot move so fast. Surely, it cannot be in two places at the one time, both a blink of the eye and forever. And yet here I sit typing these words in the moment that is the blink of an eye and forever. In five years the world has moved on: wars begun, wars continued, political leaders and governments come and gone, grand finals won and lost. We are older.
In these weeks, the grief that swells and falls like the tide, the absence, begins to open up. My chest then holds an ocean of infinity, from nothingness to eternity, rising and falling with each breath. After five years, the movement is slower, more gradual, the sharp piercing has gone, mostly.
In the first raw months after Hamish’s death I charted the shape of grief, its contours and shadows. I have since written thousands of words in prose and poetry on the grief that fell crashing onto the shoulders and then burnt into the heart from that day in October.
At first I was just trying to keep Hamish’s name alive in the world. Readers, I could not stop. As the world kept spinning, so the words flowed like a river to the sea. I self-published two books on the writings to hold all the words together, to moor them to the one port. One is called The Ocean. The other, The Centre of Zero.
Publications were kind enough to run part of both the prose and poetry. There were reviews, kind, kind reviews that followed. I received letters and emails from people I knew, friends, colleagues past and present, people with whom my work had enabled contact, and from strangers. All were a comfort beyond measure. The overwhelming feeling was that people are kind. It’s an act that is too often drowned out in the cacophony of these shrieking, manic times. But, people are kind. This I know.
The grief of Hamish’s death shaped the words and, slowly, the words shaped the grief. Both shifted a gear in me, and in how the world is viewed. This is natural when an axis is tilted. Some look to grief to be healed, but this, to me, for me, is the wrong word.
You may be scarred, deeply, but you are not of a disease, you are not sick. For mine, the words over the past 60 months have become a sculpture of sorrow, solace and discovery. The latter is in finding what the depth of love looks and feels like when it is taken from you.
Grief had begun life as the enemy, the tormentor of the soul, the cruel artist who coloured every scene of the world, who was the constant companion of what had ceased to exist. But after five years, the shape of grief has changed. A friend and colleague told me recently of a friend she knew who had also lost someone. I said, grief can be a friend. I had never thought or said that before. It just rose. A friend because it only arises when someone you love is no longer with you to be loved. You only grieve if you have loved and lost. The deeper the love, the deeper the grief. It’s a tributary from the dam of the breaking heart.
This, of course, is only my path through the past five years. It’s not a map, but an atlas only of my world that now has marked on it ‘the undiscovered country, from whose bourn/no traveller returns’.
And every now and again a poem arises into the still air ...
The Numbers
Counting backwards,
counting forwards
the heartbeats of the day
casting them to the air
see if they float
differently,
catching light and wind
holding my breath, not
holding my breath
for the seconds
to become sentences
for meaning to form.
Counting backwards,
counting forwards
the dark calculus
that shadows the eyes,
that turns on the
grains of blown sand
that speaks to the ash
surely, it can’t be
this time for all
time – waiting for
a silence to break
that can’t be broken.
Counting backwards,
counting forwards
forging days into
a chain of voices
that whispering
flow as a hand
moves, as eyes flicker
in the here and now.
These are the pale
numbers that add
and take the sum of
life from earth to sky.
Counting backwards,
counting forwards.
Warwick McFadyen is an award-winning journalist. He has won two Walkley Awards and four Quill Awards. He has published several books of poetry. The latest is 21+4 Poems. His prose and poems have also appeared in Quadrant, Overland and Dissent.