memory
I didn’t realise that the almost imperceptible cooling in the air could elicit such dark thoughts. I didn’t realise that pulling on a wooly jumper to go for a walk could immediately return me to September 2019, crunching through the fallen crispy leaves in black leather boots as I made my way to the hospital once again.
As summer bids its final farewell and the nights draw that tiny bit closer, I am agitated, restless, nostalgic and full up with memory. The change in season is always a transitional period I enjoy. I like newness - my wardrobe calling out for a fresh, unnecessary, weather-appropriate outfit. I like change, especially when it means embracing candlelight, soft blankets and hot chocolate. This transitional period doesn’t feel as soft as it normally does, though. It is frayed at the edges - I am frayed at the edges. I am unfurling and uncertain, finding myself lying awake at night thinking about the past and the future in existential ways that are not altogether productive. How has it been two years since my dad’s heart transplant? Since he nearly died. Since we spent day after day making our way down those same hospital corridors to see him in a state that haunts me. What have these two years meant? What is time? How is it already September?!
Yesterday I decided that the feelings I’ve been feeling these past couple of weeks are ones that can no longer be squashed. They are uncomfortable but they are as necessary as their more cheery counterparts. My natural inclination is to distract, distract, distract. Not wanting to contaminate my good feelings with the bad. I have a preoccupation with death and illness. It is completely paralysing - I have such a severe health anxiety I struggle to get out of bed some days, so convinced I am, that I’m dying. Yet it’s also deeply fascinating to me. I have a whole bookshelf devoted to books about mortality. Some I’m too scared to read, but they sit there patiently. Waiting for me to be ready. The ones I have read have comforted me. I am at once desperate to understand, to prepare, and terrified to face the inevitability of it all.
As the seasons change and summer becomes autumn, I am painfully aware of the passing of time. The past year has been so strange because in some ways we’ve felt ‘on hold’ and in other ways (the most fundamental ways) we have very much not been. Time has passed just like it always does. And while I don’t feel that it’s been a waste of time in the slightest— I truly believe a good life to be a collection of the little, simple moments, not achievements and grand adventures— I wonder if it has compounded this unsettled feeling. The shock of waking up and wondering that awful question: have I spent my time well enough?
In short: yes (though that’s not the full story). Of course. Because every Zoom call with my family, every time I get to see my baby niece, every cuddle with Jeremy and every cosy night on the sofa with Tim gets stitched together into a blanket of goodness I can wrap myself inside. Yet. And yet…
That knowledge, that blanket of goodness— they don’t erase the other stuff. The inevitable, necessary other stuff. I have so much anxiety and fear and sadness coursing through me at the moment and while it’s scary to even admit that— naming it doesn’t make it worse, it doesn’t make what I’m afraid of any closer. It doesn’t erase the wonders around me. My sadness doesn’t contaminate my happiness. They co-exist.
Transitional periods are full of emotion. They hold promise of what is to come and they hold the sadness of what we leave behind. I am finding my memories of my parents’ illnesses to be more vivid than ever. I have been trying to escape them for two years but no more. We can survive the wintering* of life.
We carry on.
* please read Katherine May’s book Wintering. It is utterly brilliant.