Down, down goes the ledge.
Close again.
Where is the hand to help me up?
Blind, blind, blind you all are.
No one can see my pain and fear.
Oh, if only life was better at throwing the dice of luck,
I'd be elsewhere.
But it is what it is.
Give me a rope for ****'s sake!

When great aunt Maggie passed away years ago, the one thing I really missed was her angelic voice.
The swaggering, sing-song lilt of the mid-Derry accent was as sweet as the confections she used to pass out to us as kids:
The inflection, the intonation, and the slight lisp she brought to it was so gloriously unique but was never heard again.
I often wish I could go back with a tape recorder to capture it in all its glory and relive how wonderful she was.
Now all I have is a untranslatable memory that can't be brought back to even vaguely approximate what it meant to me.

And now here I am again with the same obstacle.
The same tones, the same inflections albeit through a different light have just been extinguished before me.
This time there was no digital device rushing in to capture our time before it ran out.
No instinct for preservation was forthcoming - we were too busy having fun & 'being here now'.
No, once again I am bereft:
All I I have is here (in my heart) and and here (in my head)
The loved sounds I miss will always resound there albeit without backup
Voices lost but not forgotten.

It's a phrase I often playfully use to describe my queer self.
("Were you ever?"my beloved Alison uniformly says in jest).
But now it seems unusually apt in another way:
As I swann around this empty house, the decor, the photos, the ornaments and old perfume bottles overwhelm me.
My head is brimming with memories as I glance past these fragments of our shared lives.
My loss is palpable and yet inescapable under this roof.
She surrounds us on the walls, hanging over us with her beaming smile amidst the family photos.
I want to escape but I can't:
In a mad way I want to believe that something of these relics around us can bring her back somehow.
She did after all carry something of the old Irish paganism with her.
But, no, this ancient shamanism is sadly absent in a room drowned out by every token of Catholicism you can think of.
It's all too much for this first born to take and yet she is still here in the tiny gaps of these precious artefacts.  
Hidden away where you can't see her.
So, no, being honest right now - I'm not quite straight yet.
The head and heart will realign soon but not with this gnawingly painful grief.
Pray for me.

Breathe In, Breathe Out
Breathe In, Breathe Out

The background silence is deafening against the sound of your own awful struggle.
The inevitable is patiently waiting in a darkened corner of the room as we sit around your bed in reluctant readiness.
A noble hardy vigil but one that, unlike the others, I must confess is new to me.
I had consciously avoided receiving death all my adult life and now here, my greatest champion and comfort was being dragged into the snare.
The last hours were truly stifling - I wanted to scream my lungs out and tear down the walls.
How could it have come to this ******* pitiful ending?
But no,
knowing your calm patient Christian ways the only righteous path for you my sweet, was to take your hand and whisper our last words of love to you.
It was the only way for you, mother.
Death is not the stuff of over-dramatised fiction, it's the quietest test we face for those we love.

How often do you hear the expression "there's never enough time"?
Too much to fully comprehend its full ramifications:
The lost moments,
the endless "what if?" of unrealised human experience that simply vanishes in the ether,
the cold antiseptic realisation of death and one's grief for the time not spent with loved ones.
The misery of losing out to it all.

I say stop.

Embrace your family & friends while they are still sharing the same breath as you.
Forgive them for whatever trespasses they have & find a new commonality in love.
Tell them of their unmeasurable worth to you and all the others in their demi-monde.
Endlessly compliment them on their radiance and sheer uniqueness in the face of adversity.  

But don't forget to relish the gloriously diverse life all around you.
Or seek out the beauty of humanity's immense creativity and start to participate.
Sample how life can be truly transcendent if you just pay attention.
There is more to us all that waiting on the "right", convenient moment to connect.
Because, my friend, there is enough time for us all:
you just need to change the direction as time is no friend to our fragility.

November 7th 2018