Two years is a blip in a historical context - not even a fraction of a blip, but two years without a parent to advise you, console you, encourage you, admonish you, counsel you is a long time. At least it has been for me.
The parent-child relationship is a special one and very different to other relationships. Jacky and I share worries, successes and failures and we lean and support on each other as other couples do.
Never-the-less - I miss the opportunity to have a conversation with my parents, to share a worry, or celebrate a minor success, to lean on someone who has known me all my life. And it's actually more selfish than that - just knowing he was there was all I really needed. Now for two years he's not been there and that particular need has gone unfulfilled. I believe it's called a void.
I realise that I needed to get away from my old self and old life in NZ after he passed away in 2009. I needed to shed a skin. Now I realise that I am getting myself ready to shed another skin and I am preparing myself for a new life back in NZ with Jacky.
As I wrote in the previous post I loved watching Rob Brydon in The Trip. During the trip he quotes from Wordsworth's poem White Doe of Rylstone when they visit Bolton Abbey. It's a poem about grief that seems eerily applicable to me:
Action is transitory--a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle--this way or that--
'Tis done; and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity.
Yet through that darkness (infinite though it seem
And irremoveable) gracious openings lie,
By which the soul--with patient steps of thought
Now toiling, waked now on wings of prayer--
May pass in hope, and, though from mortal bonds
Yet undelivered, rise with sure ascent
Even to the fountain-head of peace divine."
Love and peace indeed - Warren
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