Tag: erasing
Beautiful fading pebbles
Beautiful fading pebbles
As with so many of these posts I don’t really know where this one is going. I know there is something inside which needs saying, but I’m not sure exactly what it is or how to say it… So the only thing to do is to start and see where it goes.
As many of you may know Claire absolutely loved the ocean, it was her dream to live by the sea but she died three days after we found a new house just 15 min walk from the beach, she never got to live in it or realise her dream… She is so very nearly made it!
She was also a bit naughty whenever she went to the beach, she used to pick up a pebble, take it home, write on the date and location, then place the pebble in a ‘little shrine to the sea’ in our garden in Hertfordshire. She would very often sit by the shrine, looking at all the pebbles she had collected and remembering the happy times she had spent by the sea. I guess it was her way of anchoring those happy memories, all she had to do was look upon the pebbles and she was back at her favourite beaches around the UK.
When I moved I carefully picked up all of those pebbles and brought them down to Dorset. They’ve been in various places around the garden here but I’ve just built a little planter in the garden as an edible garden and those pebbles have found their way into it.
But those pebbles are beginning to fade.
The writing on them is now almost illegible.
Claire’s touch upon those pebbles is dissipating.
I have a terrible memory, I don’t remember visiting virtually any of the places where she picked up those pebbles… But I do remember her writing on them.
There’s something about the writing fading which seems beautiful. I was tempted to overwrite them to keep the places and dates on them, but that wouldn’t have been Claire’s writing, it would have been mine and so it seemed wrong.
The writing on the pebbles fading is beautiful and yet full of contradictions.
The writing fades but the memories don’t.
The writing fades but Claire’s touch on my life doesn’t.
The writing fades but Claire’s memory doesn’t.
Those beautiful fading pebbles have a meaning, but for now they are keeping it to themselves…
It means what I want it to mean and no more
It means what I want it to mean and no more
Today I feel disconnected – like there’s something important missing, the only way I can articulate it is to say I feel like I’ve had something amputated.
There’s a part of me missing and it is the strangest sensation.
I don’t really want to give the missing part of me a label as that will begin to lead how I feel, that part is clearly Claire but beyond that I simply can’t articulate how I feel – and that’s the first time I’ve come across that problem.
I think it’s all tied up with the ‘erasing’ process. The other day my mobile rang and it was the home phone calling, so it popped up saying ‘Claire is calling you’ – that felt too weird so I had to delete her from my phone. Such a simple and actually meaningless task, yet I gave it meaning… OK – coaching mode kicking in now (I just spotted the complex equivalence trigger word in that sentence for any NLPers reading this), now I’m understanding it… I’m giving things meaning which don’t have any meaning except in my head.
- Deleting Claire from my phone doesn’t mean anything, other than she’s not in my phone.
- Putting widower on an official form doesn’t mean anything other than to tick a box for someone else.
- Calling her ‘my late wife’ whilst on the phone to the pension companies doesn’t mean anything other than a label that they can understand.
When I start out writing these posts I genuinely have no idea where they are going, I just type and see what happens and often in the middle I get a little light bulb go on and I reach a new understanding.
I understand now what I was doing, and I’m not doing it any more. It means what I want it to mean and no more!
Erasing the Past
Erasing the Past
After registering Claire’s death on Friday and arranging the funeral I’ve now had to inform the authorities via the government’s ‘Tell Us Once’ service. The registrar said it would be the quickest and easiest way to let libraries, passport, HMRC, DVLC etc know – and then to amend their records – and indeed it was easy, from a practical point of view at least.
It took me about 10 minutes to erase Claire from the ‘system’.
It was horrible, it seemed as though with every page I clicked through to I was slowly erasing all traces of Claire – Passport, erased. Library card – erased. Drivers licence – erased.
Somehow it was TOO easy, you can’t ERASE someone with a few clicks of the mouse – and yet in today’s world that’s what it has come down to.
Click – Gone.
I woke up this morning not feeling too bad, the girls slept in their own beds last night (they’ve been on blow up beds in my bedroom since Claire died), the sun is shining and it’s a new day. Then I decided to do the government thing and it’s not such a nice day anymore!
There’s only one thing to do on days like this – tidy. And today the airing cupboard gets it!