life itself going on

Last night and this night saw both Grandma and I in tears in the lounge.

Yesterday, I discovered a box of old photographs. Most were stuck in scrap books or filed into photo albums, but some were loose, and I decided we ought to slide them into albums to keep them safe.

So as I wrote out quotes to memories from Four Quartets, Grandma looked over pictures of October 1997, when Auntie Sarah visited Auntie Sheila. 

I heard a sharp intake of breath, and saw Grandma's lower lip curled in as she looked at a photo pf Auntie Sheila bathed in sunlight in Braemoray. My tears came quicker than I thought they would.

Tonight we watched one of the old home videos Dad would make and send to Grandma. This was of a holiday in 2000 in England, and the camera moved from Lowestoft to Great Yarmouth to Silver Birches (oh, Dee Dee and his wheelbarrow) and Auntie Sheila playing badminton with Hannah in the garden, and Auntie Sarah carefree with us, and Uncle Roger and Auntie Michelle there too.

Silver Birches and England was such a formative part of my childhood - to escape every two years to a place where I'd play hide and seek in wheat fields as high as my head, and you could run out into the back garden and fly a kite, or climb the pear tree, or be chased by an Auntie with a wheelbarrow.

As Grandma said, 'What a lot of water has gone under the bridge since those days.'

I don't know if having Grandma remember those happy days is good, since these days her life is so closed, the expanse of Silver Birches shrunk to the small Ixworth house which she doesn't like to leave, so many people have left, so many different life experiences have changed her and the people she loves for better or for worse. But I feel like it is important. It is important to open these avenues to grieve - it reminds me that my own grief journey is far from over. It is important to remember the beauty of heady summer days and slow walks and screams of laughter and to realise that spring has come, and summer is almost here, and I can make those days live again. It gives me the strangest notion of life going on - "They might be islands of light- islands in the stream I am trying to convey; life itself going on." - of how soon it will be my mother watching videos and crying for a lost sister and my children in the wheat fields and then it will be me watching videos and crying for a lost sister and my children's children in the wheat fields and then I will be gone.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started 

And know the place for the first time. 

When the last of earth left to discover 

Is that which was the beginning; 

At the source of the longest river 

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for 

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.