Who Am I Without You?

About a month ago I went up into the attic to retrieve four large boxes of old photographs of family and friends. They spanned the time from before I was born up until photos became a digital affair, stored not in an attic but a cloud instead. I was prompted to do this by my Dad’s recent, and terminal cancer diagnosis. Swallowed up by a grief that wasn’t yet allowed to manifest itself, I clawed around in the beautiful past to lift me from the horror of the present into a time when my Dad would live forever, never aging, always laughing and playing tricks on us or telling us stories of Raynard the Fox and his childhood full of mischief and fun. 

I didn’t find what I was looking for there in those photos. Bittersweet is how I feebly described it at the time. If anything it intensified my sense of grief. Someone said it was called “anticipatory grief”, maybe. It’s a very real and intense grief. I’m grieving the loss, not of the person, but of the life we had before this despicable interruption.

I thought I would find myself collecting photos of my Dad, special times we had shared – memories of endless summer Sundays with no hint of a wet and windy Wednesday anywhere to be seen. Isn’t that the beauty of old photos taken on film with 36 exposures; we only took pictures of the good stuff. It surprised me that instead of taking this path I found myself looking at photos of old friends, people who at the time walked with me through some of the most significant experiences of my life, but who, through the passing of time and place have since become distant observers or, for me, distant observations of a life passing by. Assigned to the category of Facebook Friends, or worse – lost forever. A rare thing for me, only a small handful of people have fallen by the wayside of my obsessive need to remain in contact with everyone on some level. Of those that have I still look for them in the hope of re-establishing contact. 

And so it began, I found myself emailing old university friends, sending them copies of the photos, arranging to meet up or sending endless “where we are now” messages to one another. It became a mission; I must re-establish meaningful contact with everyone!

But why? As I started thinking about this I thought this was a story about friendships and about a need to be liked. Yet the more I thought about it the more I understood it to be about loss, or more accurately the fear of loss. Is it ego? Is my story really that “I’m too wonderful for you to forget about me”? I don’t think so (although I will concede there may be a sprinkling of that), I think that it has more to do with understanding who I am or where my friends and family end and I begin. So I centred in on my friends because I can’t do anything about my Dad’s diagnosis, but I can keep those friendships alive and by association I keep parts of me alive. I fight off loss for another day.

We are, all of us, connected by shared experiences. Sometimes were connected by genes or of bearing witness together. What makes me unique is in fact influenced by so many other people. As I think of my Dad I think about the mannerisms I share with him; I speak and I hear his voice. I walk and he walks with me. If I lose him does not a part of my get lost too?

I found this poem that sums it up much better than I ever could:

Possession

That anxious way you have of closing doors

(like the brown of your eyes and hair)

was never really yours.

My arms and elongated nose were owned before – 

fragments of jigsaw

in the rough art of assemblage whose end we are.

Sometimes I don’t know where we live

or whose voice I still

hear and remember

Inside my head at night. In darkness and in love

we are dismembered,

so that the fact of our coming to at all

becomes a morning miracle. Let’s number

our fingers and toes again.

Do I love you piecemeal 

when I see in your hand a valve-flower

like a sea-anemone,

or is it our future I remember, as the White Queen

remembered her pinpricked finger? All of you

that’s to be known

resides in that small gesture.

And though our days consist of letting go –

since neither one can own

the other – what still deepens pulls us back together.

Caitriona O’Reilly

I can’t spend today chasing yesterday or reaching towards tomorrow. If I am to really live then I have to learn to see and appreciate everything in my life right now, and so I will end with this from Lemn Sissay:

Remember you were loved

I felt your spirit grow

I held on for the love of you

And then for love let go