Trying to understand

I know that I have written about this before but it is a subject that certainly engages my attention – what, actually, is LIFE – that essence, that vivifying factor that makes something alive which is absent when something that was alive is now dead? This is the ultimate in pointless questions I suppose, as I don’t believe we will ever know. It may be that we are never supposed to know.

And yet I try. And I’ll keep trying. Always.

The various forms by which life expresses itself is astonishing. Take for instance the very small black ants that I find in my kitchen sometimes. They are no more than, possibly, a millimetre long and yet they are aware of danger and will scurry out of the way if they see my thumb, or the shadow it casts, descending on them. They are alive and sensitive to danger and aware enough to try and remove themselves from any threatening situation as quickly as they can.

I find this extraordinary – that something just one millimetre in length has (possibly) the same awareness of danger as I have. But that is Life. Yet it puzzles me still – it always has.

This, by a rather circuitous route, gets me to consider another aspect of Life - my feelings -my sense of loss and grief. This is certainly not a new topic for me but that doesn’t stop me from always seeking answers.

There is a difference, I believe, between mourning and grief. Grief to my mind is more than a deep sorrow. To me grief is similar to a deep knife cut. It hurts. But the wound can be bound up and healing will begin. The wound may heal but the scar will always remain.

There is also a time element associated with grief. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about grieving and loss in his letters, “Time does not console, as people say superficially, at best it assigns things to their proper place and creates an order.” After the great stillness that accompanies death, life gradually becomes normal again. The hours and the days, that had been so disrupted by the death of my wife, Magucha, seemed to swing back, slowly, into their habitual rhythms. I had to eat; regain some regularity in my sleep; greet the world and its people. Life continues.

Mourning on the other hand has a connotation, at least as I think of it, with lamentation. Now I did lament, not outwardly but in my heart it was a different matter entirely. But no one can lament forever. Lamentation is necessarily rather brief. 

One deep lesson I have learned, however, is that death, and the realisation of death, especially of someone we love, never exceeds our strength to bare its burden. Death does after all “bookend” our life – where there is a birth, there will ultimately be a death. Just the way it is.

I am sure that through love and through death we, all of us, learn that Life entails the loss of others and the abdication of any ideas of “control” over events that we may think we have. A true awareness of this gives us a greater understanding of the pain needed to reconnect with the life we lead. We need this pain to explore, as difficult and confronting as this may be, in what specific way our loss has impacted our life. This can and possibly should be, a transformative moment. 

As always in moments of high emotion I resort to reading poetry and prose I find emotionally enriching. From a small book called “Fruit Gathering”, by the Bengali Nobel Prize winner, Rabindranath Tagore, I offer the following simply entitled “LIX” – 59 in Roman numerals:-

“When the weariness of the road is upon me, and the thirst of the sultry day; when the ghostly hours of dusk throw their shadows across my life, then I cry not for your voice only, my friend, but for your touch.

There is an anguish in my heart for the burden of its riches not given to you.

Put out your hand through the night, let me hold it and fill it and keep it; let me feel its touch along the lengthening stretch of my loneliness.”

A special day.

Today – the last day of August – is always a special day for me. It is the anniversary of our wedding. Magucha and I. That was in 1979 – so today would have been our fortieth. 

Not long, I suppose, in the great scheme of things but long enough for there to be many memories. Fond memories. Memories of deep friendship; memories of close companionship; memories of quiet evenings together when each knew that they were loved. That is the important part.  The love.

I try not to dwell on the end – I mean death does come to us all. The “uninvited visitor” calls at His own time and place. I like to dwell, rather, on the strength we each seemed to give to the other and on the many important, if seemingly relatively minor, events that shaped our life together.

But above all I recall Magucha’s strength of character and her courage. She was utterly fearless and met all that Life (and the Fates) threw at her with a courage and fortitude that I found inspiring. 

She never complained. Each day, every event was a new adventure and I never once, not ever, heard her ask “Why me?” Her slowly declining health was certainly a sore trial for all concerned but she always met each day with a smile of good cheer and always with plans afoot. She seemed always to shine a kindly light, which was appreciated by all and drew many into her orbit.

I know that Magucha has gone on ahead, that she is out of sight. But, to me, she is still there and I know, just know, that one-day we will reach out and hold hands again.

I am certainly not the only one who holds such beliefs – many over the millennia have said the same. So I don’t think I am all that wrong!

As anyone who reads what I write will know, I have always loved poetry.  Now the poet who writes under the pseudonym  of Atticus seems to capture my mood very well, and with some humour:

“Angels must be warm to fly –

That’s why she always 

Slept in socks.”

And it is true Magucha always (well nearly always) started off with very loose socks, inevitably discarded during the night!

But this poem, by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, just titled 87, from a little booklet called Gitanjali always affects me:

“In desperate hope I go and search for her in all the corners of my room; 

I find her not.

My house is small and what once has gone from it can never be regained.

But infinite is thy mansion, my Lord, and seeking her I have come to thy door.

I stand under the golden canopy of thine evening sky and I lift my eager eyes to thy face.

I have come to the brink of eternity from which nothing can vanish – no hope, no happiness, no vision of a face seen through tears.
Oh, dip my emptied life into that ocean, plunge it into the deepest fullness. Let me for once feel that lost sweet touch in the allness of the universe."

Sixty-four.

Sixty-four.  Had she lived that’s how old Magucha would have been today - May 9.

I am not sure how others do it, but I find that coping with what Life (with a capital L) throws at me to be a continual rather ad hoc arrangement. Everyday, every moment, is different.

What I am doing is coping in my way with my grief. I know that I could wallow in a “poor me” trough – but I realize that such an attitude would not do me any good. But grief is not just “grief” – some amorphous “thing” out there somewhere. It is personal.

My way of coping is to try and “meet” my grief head on and attempt to understand the how and why. I mean the woman I loved, my wife, my best friend Magucha, is dead – has “passed away”. I can’t change that fact. I can’t deny it. To try to ignore it; to try and hide it; to try and divert my attention from this fact just doesn’t work. Not for me anyway.

But it is very hard. I look at some of the many reminders of her that are in the house we shared and I can remember the time and place, when and where the photos were taken, or the items purchased, or when the gifts were received or given; I sit down at a café and I immediately recall the table we sat at and what we ate when we were last there together.

It is of course a fact that we all suffer grief at some time in our lives. People have died of old age, illness, in battle, on expeditions and in various other tragic or violent means since humans first walked the earth – grief is always with us.

Being the person I am and as a human being, as a husband and father, I have a strong desire to know, to try and understand.  I am deeply curious but it is all made harder because I suspect that I will never understand what happens at the end. I am not alone in this and why I think that from the earliest times humans have had a belief (hope?) that there is a hereafter of some sort. But are we ever supposed to know?  

In my case my grief is compounded by the mystery of it all. I just have to accept it! But what has happened to the “person” – not the body - but the essence that was Magucha? I find it incomprehensible that her love, her intelligence, her vitality, her emotional strength and empathy have just disappeared into nothing. After all it has yet to be determined what Life actually is (that “something” that makes any living thing, “alive”) – it may be beyond our knowing.

But why is there something rather than nothing? And why us?

As always in moments of high emotion I find solace in poetry.

Shakespeare expressed this mystery in his timeless verse:

“The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn

            No traveller returns, puzzles the will.”

Rabindranath Tagore, in a more accepting mood, also wrote:

“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”

And Shelley, long before Tagore, obviously had similar views when he wrote:

“Peace! Peace! He is not dead, he doth not sleep, -

He hath awakened from the dream of life;”

    Even though only 62 when she died, she lived her life to the full and Magucha, to quote Kipling:

   “Filled the unforgiving minute 

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.”

She did this every day and was glad.

It comforts me to believe that Magucha no longer suffers, that she has gone before me, gone on ahead, and that some time in the future we will meet again. That love will always win in the end.

I hope. Maybe - but who knows? I still have my memories.

There are always poems.

Some events; some memories; some recollections don’t get any easier, any less confronting with the elapse of time. They are still too fresh, too raw to be easily cast aside.

At times, such as the present, when recent past events cast a long shadow over my life, I am drawn to poets magisterial use of words to express the inexpressible. 

For reasons that I cannot explain – possibly because of its very early, childhood introduction – poetry has always stirred, within me, a deep well of emotion and intense imagery. Poets use of words are like a cry from the heart, that bring forth both pain and a salve to ease the pain.

One such poet is the Bengali polymath and Nobel prizewinner, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). From his 1913 publication, Gitanjali, a very short poem, number 87, hit me with a body blow that left me breathless and deeply moved.

87.

“In desperate hope I go and search for her in all the corners of my room;

I find her not.

My house is small and what once has gone from it can never be regained.

But infinite is thy mansion, my Lord, and seeking her I have come to thy door.

I stand under the golden canopy of thine evening sky and I lift my eager eyes to thy face.

I have come to the brink of eternity from which nothing can vanish – no hope, no happiness, no vision of a face seen through tears. 
Oh, dip my emptied life into that ocean, plunge it into the deepest fullness. Let me for once feel that lost sweet touch in the allness of the universe.”

The word "Help"

The word ‘help’ is a short four letter word with a wide range of meanings – it can be a verb or a noun. Its meanings range from a scream for assistance, or offering succour to those in need, to being a servant (a ‘help’ around the house). The word comes from Old English, Old Frisian (helpe), Old Saxon (helpa), Old High German (Helfa) and Old Norse (hjalp), so the word has obviously been around for quite a while.

What brought this to my attention is the crying need for more help (in the sense of succour) for many people in all walks of life and in many countries. What particularly bothers me is the plight of so many children – on the streets (any city you care to name), malnourishment (Sudan, Ethiopia and even in Australia and the USA), abused (any society anywhere), injured in wars (ie Tamil Tigers 27 year insurgency - and now the terrible aftermath of the conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Myanmar) – these are the most defenceless and vulnerable in our society.

Regarding this subject (which is actually about injustice) I remembered reading something which took me quite a while to find. It is a little story written by someone who has faded from view in recent years – Sir Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941). He was a Bengali and the first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize – in his case for Literature. He was also Knighted by the King in 1914 (I think). He was what is called a polymath (a man of knowledge) - a poet, visual artist, playwright, novelist, educationist, social reformer, nationalist, business-manager and composer whose works reshaped Bengali literature and music. He was also fluent in English.

In a little book he wrote called “Fruit Gathering” is a short piece titled ‘XXXI’. This piece shows how even the most humble of us, given the will, can change society by helping, one small piece at a time:

“Who among you will take up the duty of feeding the hungry?” Lord Buddha asked his followers when famine raged at Shravastri.

Ratnakar, the banker, hung his head and said, “Much more is needed than all my wealth to feed the hungry.”

Jaysen, the chief of the King’s army, said, “I would gladly give all my life’s blood, but there is not enough food in my house.”

Dharmapal, who owned broad acres of land, said with a sigh, “The drought demon has sucked my fields dry. I know not how to pay King’s dues.”

Then rose Supriya, the mendicant’s daughter. She bowed to all and meekly said, “I will feed the hungry.”

“How!” they cried in surprise. “How can you hope to fulfil that vow?”
“I am the poorest of you all,” said Supriya, “that is my strength. I have my coffer and my store at each of your houses.”

Such is the will and power to help that even just one can offer!