Hard to believe, but it’s been very nearly three weeks since my mother died. I think we’re all bearing up pretty well. There were certain conventions around a family loss like this that I was dreading, but they’ve passed off better than I feared. The day afterwards, for instance, we traveled to my brother’s house, just so we could all be together. I was afraid it would be more emotion than I could deal with, but in fact it was a very gentle, calm day. My mother was the emotional wellspring of our family, and the lodestar around which we oriented ourselves. Without her, we were three people all used to holding our emotions in check in order to be responsive to others. My mother could be very dazzling, and I didn’t really realize how much she soaked up my attention. Now I find I’m seeing my father and brother in an amped up technicolour, in exceptional detail. When I was around my mother, I shifted into a higher energetic gear, and I can feel how that would be too much energy for the remaining men. It would be overwhelming, unnecessary. I wonder what the consequences of all this will be, how I will change, who we will be for one another.
On our last visit, we needed to find some photos of Mum to put in the Order of Service. I braced myself emotionally for this task too, and once again it turned out entirely different to my expectations. This time we were all at Dad’s, where the cupboard under the stairs is a kind of Aladdin’s cave of family history. My brother dragged just one of the many boxes of photographs out and hours passed as we sifted through them. My Dad was a keen photographer back in the day and the photos were good. We watched our children grow up again through family holidays, parties, outings, visits, every few minutes someone would cry ‘Oh I’ve found a good one!’ or ‘Do you remember?’ and we would laugh or sigh or say ‘Awwww’. There were photos I’d never seen before, black and white ones of grandparents I’d never met, my Dad as a young boy, my parents before they were my parents, a beautiful one of my mother, holding my brother as a baby in her arms for his christening. I really loved that one of her. When she was full of joy, she was radiant.
I read online in one of the endless stream of Instagram memes the thought that grief is love with nowhere to go. I feel that I gave my mother every bit of the love I felt for her, and I think that she gave all the love she had to me. There is nothing left undone between us. I’m sad she’s not with us but I don’t – at present anyway – actively miss her. I’m all topped up. What I feel I’ve lost is not the person my mother was – who I know better than I know myself – but the structural pillar that is a mother. The attention economy of my life has altered: in the first few days it occurred to me that there was no one now on earth to whom the things I did would matter as much. That was an odd thought because it caused both sorrow and relief. But the real change is clearly going to happen at a much deeper level. This past week I’ve felt more free-floating anxiety than I have in a long time, a signal that some kind of emotional Kraken is stirring in the depths. My inguinal muscles have been tight, which makes sense. They cradle the womb, the mother core, the place of creativity. I imagine some unimaginable ancestral foundation crumbling away. Will what I have built on it stand firm?
After all the years of CFS, I’ve grown used to my body telling me things more clearly than my emotions do. I will admit that these three weeks I’ve felt very tired. This I recognize as a reaction to the past year of drama and the last six weeks of melodrama. There’s also a lot to do and a part of me is saying, What? MORE effort? I find all I really want is to read and daydream and sleep. But other parts of me want to see what happens next, to go through this ritual of a funeral, of a family mourning, and see what comes out of it. My curiosity is both my downfall and my saving grace. And although I feel sluggish and disinclined to move, exercise has in fact been very helpful. At the end of last week, I was full of unidentifiable emotion and my yoga session just wiped it clean away, processed it effortlessly for me. Writing helps a lot, too, because it’s only when I write things down that I really get a purchase on them.
I don’t want to lose the little oddities that keep cropping up. My mother will be having her hair and makeup done for her last great party, and I find my thoughts often crystallising around the person – I’ve no idea who it will be – who will do this for her. I feel a great tenderness for this person and their task, which is so futile and yet so dignified, so loving. The other evening I realised I couldn’t face watching Who Do You Think You Are? on the television, and asked a long-suffering Mr Litlove if we couldn’t have another episode of Make It At Market, a daytime programme in which people are mentored by professionals in their craft and helped to create a business. I realised I couldn’t stomach the great sweep of family history; I just wanted to watch good parenting.
The psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan came up with the term extimacy to describe the way that the most intimate inner core of our self can often only be seen outside of us, reflected back in unexpected moments that feel uncanny. My experience at the moment is deeply marked by extimacy. I don’t know what I’m feeling; the emotions are too deep, too close, until I see them reflected back to me in something random outside of myself. We have a long wait until the funeral at the end of April, and I’m actually glad of the time. Several friends have encouraged me to just be as far as I’m able, and I can see its potential. I had empty, spacious time after surgery for breast cancer in the middle of the pandemic lockdown. No one could visit and so I didn’t need to compromise my healing process in order to reassure people that I was just fine; and I became more myself, more in possession of myself. I think I need some emptiness to allow the generational tectonic plates to shift and settle.
oplus_2097184
" data-orig-size="689,919" sizes="(max-width: 689px) 100vw, 689px" data-image-title="oplus_2097184" data-orig-file="https://litlove.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/img20250315154135.jpg" style="width:379px;height:auto" data-image-description="" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"oplus_2097184","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"oplus_2097184","orientation":"0"}" width="689" data-medium-file="https://litlove.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/img20250315154135.jpg?w=225" data-permalink="https://litlove.wordpress.com/2025/03/23/how-things-have-been/oplus_2097184/" alt="" height="919" srcset="https://litlove.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/img20250315154135.jpg 689w, https://litlove.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/img20250315154135.jpg?w=112 112w, https://litlove.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/img20250315154135.jpg?w=225 225w" class="wp-image-5354" data-large-file="https://litlove.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/img20250315154135.jpg?w=440" />
