My Grandmother's Hair

Full Participation

Full Participation

How I can be transformed and still be miserable

“I crave a normal that can never be. Haunted by the memory of my first life, I’m embarked on a second one that I must construct alone.”

            “I must give myself over to what I do not understand.” (Brant Frayne).

 

THOUGHTS

“Now that I understand that I do it, that I forget my sensing, feeling selves, why do I still do it?”

I was writing! Finally expressing myself in clay and in words, understanding and sensing the weaving of so many threads, seeing and connecting behaviours and patterns and origins. I felt so happy – and relieved – open to the energy swelling within. I had come to feel outrage and kinship with Demeter’s abandonment, anguish and frustration, and to understand Persephone’s – and my – choices. I had learned stay out of my own way at least enough to understand how our stories effect the changes in our lives. I had lived the anguish of bereavement in ways that I never imagined I could endure, and had come home to myself as poet and writer and sculptor. Now, I was thinking – taking for granted really – “now I understand more; now that I have gone through so much, now, life will be easier.”

Yet – it seemed this was not to be. I began to feel a terrible uneasiness when illness and pain did not go away, or even mitigate. Alarm bells rang. There was more pain, continuous and insistent, not less.

Step back.

Look at the myth of Demeter and Persephone again: wonder about Persephone’s pain. Neither of the versions of the myth gives attention to feelings – whether dragged down unwillingly or following her heart in response to the crying below, nor to her feelings when she realized that there would always be more deaths, more needs, more crying which would always demand her answer. And so, as Charlotte Selver of Monhegan had gently chided me so many years ago, why was I surprised? Recognition, even dread, but not surprise, as my new openness allowed years of yearning to well up and cry out to be heard.

I kept on going: worked, wrote, saw friends, went to concerts, but I was sick, off and on, for most of the winter. Perhaps a whole summer away from the demands and stress of the city would be healing? My private practice was part-time, I negotiated with my clients and, since two months on Monhegan was unaffordable, rented the same cottage I had lived in on Manitoulin Island. I had never before had such a long holiday, and dreamt of endless hours lying in the sun listening to wind and waves, of having time to read, and to sculpt and write. Of peace.

  

ISLANDS     

But I got sicker, not better: a creeping weakness and disorientation slowly disabled me. “How could this be?” I disintegrated into lassitude, but after lying all day in a lawn chair under a tree without stirring even to eat, I came to enough awareness to realize that something was wrong. Made a trip to the local hospital, where the doctor attributed my disorientation and dizziness to stress and my age, advising rest. Drove home obediently, too sick to insist on the genuineness of my illness. Two young neighbours came over that evening to visit.

            “Are you all right?” they asked

“Not really, but I’ll be fine. The doctor says I just need rest.”

“I don’t think so, you can hardly stand up. Have you eaten?”

They urged action: I must go to hospital again. I didn’t see what good that would do, since I’d already been dismissed, but I didn’t resist, and when they saw I was too disoriented to know what to put in a suitcase they took me, stayed with me until I was seen, waited until a blood analysis indicated a mineral imbalance (bone nourishment, bone loss, bred in the bone, place of deepest injury) and I was admitted. There I was, hooked up to tubes and a sodium drip in a hospital, a place that had always been toxic for me – and feeling safe. Someone was looking after me as I was being stripped down to the bone.