If you could drop a pin on the map of your grief, where would you travel to? In the early days of mine, I would have motioned you to the toilet in my bathroom where I heaved on my knees, again and again, into the bowl below. Six months later, I would have swapped that room’s lino flooring for grass, walking you down to the banks of the River Thames. We’d head to the bend in the water where I scattered my husband’s ashes in a boat, marvelling at the patterns he made, watching him spiral and swirl.
These days, four years on from his death, the question of “where” to locate my grief isn’t an easy one to answer. There isn’t a cursor to follow, nor is there a grid reference to share. I suspect that this ambiguity, at least in part, reflects the intangible quality of the water in which I released his ashes. For many years, I pondered whether a headstone would have given me the sense of stability I so desperately craved. The regular pilgrimage to a rooted headstone can give a sense of direction and sanctuary to many people in their grief. A visible conduit between two disparate worlds. But, as time goes on, the distance between “then” and “now” widens – and with it, my own understanding of what transience and permanence actually mean.
I often describe my grief as the air around me: not a coordinate to map, but a weather vane to gauge. Sometimes it’s a gentle breeze and other times (lesser now, as my life reconfigures) it’s been a billowing wind. On the days that it’s still, which are becoming more frequent, I wonder how much I’m forgetting.
“I thought the other day I should visit,” the poet Michael Rosen said in an interview with the Observer, about the grave that marks the sudden death of his son in 1999. “I ought to. People say they go and see it,” he added, referring to his decision not to – in spite of all the societal expectations that might push a person to venture to a place too painful to visit. It was the “ought to” that got me thinking about the pressure we place on ourselves, and each other, in times of loss – whether we’re wholly aware of it or not. The “I should be doing this” or the “why aren’t I feeling that”. The anniversaries to mark each year, the totems to honour, the landmarks to visit.
A line in Neil MacGregor’s Living with the Gods expresses a question I’ve often asked myself: “How do the living stay in touch with the dead?” However hard we might wish for it, there is no single answer to such a multitudinous inquiry when it comes to loss. On any given day my reply might be different. As mercurial as water – like my memories, too. There are currently more than 12,000 historic cemeteries, churchyards and burial grounds in England and Wales. A site of sanctuary and pilgrimage for so many. Yet reading Rosen’s words, I couldn’t help but picture the ones who might share in his hesitation – I’m one of them, after all. A normal – and wholly understandable – ellipsis that surely reflects the atemporal nature of grief itself: beyond the boundaries of any one tangible place that society might ascribe to it.
If my experience of grief – and my reading of it, too – has taught me anything, it’s that it can be counterproductive to try to contain something so unquantifiable in its shape and form. Perhaps the only constant to be found in grief is its inconsistency. Many writers before me have likened the disorientation it generates to being geographically lost. In A Grief Observed, CS Lewis wrote of ever-repeating circles after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman: “For in grief nothing ‘stays put’. One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round.”
Although she never wrote of her grief, I remember visiting the Brontë Parsonage museum on a frosty winter morning in 2016, where I read about Charlotte’s solitary laps around the dining table after the deaths of her siblings Emily and Anne. A few hours after I finished reading Rosen’s interview, I opened up my copy of Deborah Levy’s memoir, The Cost of Living, and found myself at a point of intersection: “Where are we now?” Levy wrote, sketching the weeks after her mother died. “Where were we before?”
I doubt that there’s a griever out there who hasn’t asked themselves these two questions in the debris of their loss. But as the years go by, I am less inclined to believe that there is a pin on the map that may bring me close enough with my past to help me make sense of what it is to lose someone you love in any fulfilling way. It’s been nearly a year since I last walked that particular stretch of the River Thames, and it may well be another before I return. The desire to retrace my steps has become less urgent in me over the past 12 months. For in life, as in grief, Lewis was right – nothing “stays put”.
Kat Lister is the author of The Elements: A Widowhood
