As the nation psyches itself up for the New Normal, I feel like I’m back on a familiar path: trying to work out what normal looks like when everything has changed. I wrote this blog post last year at the Hookses, looking out over the sea at the start of the Pandemic. Now, as we walk the roadmap out of Covid-19 and in an anniversary season of celebrating and missing both Mum and Uncle John, it seems like a fitting time to post it…
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They always say that the time after the funeral is the hardest as things go ‘back to normal’; for everyone else, at least, if not for you. Somehow the hardest time seemed to come later for me, as I emerged slowly from the cocoon of exhausted numbness which gave me some protection in those early, fragile days.
It can never, ever, go back to normal because Mum’s absence pervades everything, but in many ways a new normality has resumed and it looks remarkably similar to that which preceded it: seeing my friends, going to work, doing the washing up, cleaning the loo, making cups of tea, watering my plants, sweeping my balcony, paying my bills, getting the bus, replying to emails, going to Sainsburys. Plus ça change…
One day, as I was doing the washing up, I was hit by the realisation that this – this – is life. Life with a capital L.
On family holidays at Hookses, a teenage version of my cousin Hannah listened to the Dawson’s Creek soundtrack and declared that she wanted ‘a life’, bemoaning the fact that she was isolated in remote Pembrokeshire, away from opportunities to encounter the life of which she dreamed. And how we all then pursued it, trying to find or manufacture something better than normal; some kind of prolonged ecstasy in any form. Travel, relationships, alcohol, pleasure, pain, God: something transcendent and significant.
How funny then that years later we are choosing to be back at Hookses and deriving deep satisfaction from being right here, right now, with each other. Suddenly playing the role of grown-ups, we find ourselves watching the children hide in cupboards and wind themselves up with excited play, enjoying a cup of tea after a swim in the sea, salivating at the memory of Granny’s boodle cake, loading and unloading the dishwasher, hanging yet more wet children’s trousers over the radiator to dry, the parents among us longing for five minutes of peace to read a novel or have a snooze.
One windy afternoon in West Dale, Hannah and I stood watching the boys play in rock pools, trying to get the right balance between leaving them free to roam and setting boundaries for their protection and ours, knowing how quickly the joy of exploration could morph into shivery sobs and a tantrummy walk home. We chatted about work, the practicalities of timing lunch around Oliver’s sleep, the weather, our homes, and occasionally reminisced about those who are no longer here, wishing they were. We waved at the boys as they turned round excitedly to show us rocks and bits of seaweed, making our smiles proportionate to their delight and occasionally reminding them, with a hint of panic, to not let the water go over their wellies. What do you think our mums chatted about when we used to play like that? Hannah asked. Probably exactly what we’re chatting about now, we laughed.
Whether nattering on the beach with Hannah or doing the washing up at home, I have a sneaking suspicion that as one normal, mundane moment after another weaves itself into the cumulative fabric of daily life, life in all its fullness can be found here. That each small and seemingly insignificant moment somehow matters.
On a good day, the realisation that life – Life – is in the normal moments is a good one. Within this framework, there is an option to live here and now, in the ordinary, and to not feel pressure to pursue a mythical fantasy of a life that could somehow be fuller and truer elsewhere. Within this framework, the more challenging activities under heaven – the uprooting, the mourning, the tearing, the hating, the dying even – find a balanced and companionable place among the more welcome ones: the planting, the dancing, the mending, the loving and the birthing. Within this framework, incarnation into a time and place somehow validates, transforms and sanctifies what otherwise seems so mundane and localised, futile even. It explains why it’s the memories of the normal in which I miss Mum the most.
And yet, on a bad day, the idea that real life is found here, in the normal, is utterly terrifying. I feel the absurd weight of responsibility that all these quotidien, mundane, hard, beautiful and fleeting moments matter, and that life – real life – comes in the living of them. No wonder that Sysiphus is best imagined happy. What a heavy burden you have laid on us! Can I cast this burden onto you too? I’m not sure I can carry it alone.
Reflecting on all this from Uncle John’s desk in the Hermitage, my body cosetted by familiar items and smells and my eyes lifting themselves up to the sea and beyond, I let my gaze linger on the cliff where a couple of years ago Joe, Anna and I had a cheeky G&T and watched the sunset. I see Mum standing on the cliff path looking down over West Dale Bay. I hear the sound of a carrier bag as a flask is dug out of it on a wet and windy walk, and the thud, thud, thud of toddler Joe plodding along the corridor in the early hours and waking us up as he fell. I hear Granny’s voice reading out the crossword clues and smile involuntarily at the memory of Hannah getting confused between ‘aborigine’ and ‘aubergine’. I smell the skate cooking in black butter sauce and notice the birdsong and feel the validating warmth of Uncle John’s twinkling eyes. I feel the water rushing over me as we bodyboard with Simon at Marloes until we’re too cold to notice that we’re numb, and I hear Frances’ efficient voice answering the phone in the other room. I picture Corey trying surreptitiously to pick up the bits of his dropped sandwich in the Relatives’ Room at Withybush Hospital just after Granny had died, and see Matthew standing by Uncle John’s slate memorial in Dale, immobilised by grief. I remember the telling-off from Martin when John and I were caught feeding Hannah Skittles in Helen’s Hut and teaching her words that were deemed inappropriate for our younger cousin. I picture Jenny sitting back in a chair with a contented sigh and a drink in hand and taste the prosecco we sipped as John and Michelle returned from a walk engaged.
For just a moment, the past, present and future, the mundane and the transcendental, those present and those absent, the happy and the sad, flit through my soul and, in doing so, both ground and lift me.
My eyes settle back on the sea; constant but never the same. Today nothing is new, yet everything is new. For all its unfathomableness, this moment is one of gift and is, like so many of the other normal ones which have preceded it and will come in its wake, beautiful in its time.
emilyintheworld 