Caught Between Past & Present

Day 1069.

For a bereaved mother, time and tense is elastic. For a bereaved mother become elastic.

There’s a new place in this world for us all. We have no word in the English language for us, no title.

We are neither widows nor orphans.

Is that because there is no address in our society for our unbearable state?

Tense is elastic.

Did I have two children?

Do I have two children?

Is Luke, or was Luke?

Am I the mother of two? Was I the mother of two?

In daily conversation, I switch from past to present tense intermittently. 

In daily chatter, people will ask “ How many children do you have?”

Is that ‘have’ or ‘had’?

Sometimes I spare strangers from the darkness of the information that I have a dead child and go with one child. But it doesn’t really work because in the end, it feels untrue, disloyal to Luke.

If I start the other way around, with two children, inevitably I will eventually come unstuck, leading to an explanation of Luke’s death. It’s not always the conversation you want to have as you sit there sipping your latte or getting your nails done.

Back and forth it goes, often several times in a day, every day. Penduluming from one to two, present to past and back again.

My place in this world swings back and forth too, because for me it’s not so much how I present myself to the outside world, but also how to know for myself, what I am.

I am dysregulated in this.

I am lost, myself, between the tense of past and present.

Time is fluid too.

Luke has been gone forever and an instant.

And yet, he’s not gone at all.

You’d think I’d have it down after almost three years, and yet I cannot find my place.

Is this a matter of defining myself for me? Or a matter of defining myself for others?

This situation, so terrible, that despite the centuries of Mothers who have lived on without their children, a condition so unbearable, there is still no word for us, leaving us undefined, hanging in purgatory with a longing so deep, enjoying those we love in life, here in the present, whilst yearning so deeply for the child no longer with us.

Caught betwixt the two sides of mortality in both present and passed, lost, past.

The TEDx talk “Dead is Dead” examines the language of death, the euphemisms, spoken to avoid the brutality of the truth. The wording “passed” and “lost” is inappropriate to me too. Yet I often use the word lost, why?

Luke isn’t lost, I didn’t forget him somewhere, unable to find him.

If he passed, passed to where? 

Can I go there?

He is dead.

Others shudder when I say it.

It shudders me.

Because it’s true.

Yet I can envision him at any given moment, walking in behind me, coming round the corner, or receiving his text or a call.

I am exhausted, listening out for him, my internal Bluetooth seeking him constantly. It’s what I want most of all - to find him.

Is that what the lost part is about?

Not a softening word, but that I cannot find him.

I cannot reach him.

So much of our world is about avoiding truth and reality.

So much about diverting from hard, inconvenient truths, things we can’t bear to think of.

The tangible and constant loss of a child puts me in a place that’s neither present nor away.

The thinking about the unthinkable is what I do constantly, whilst trying to enjoy my present, which is both achievable, and yet coated in the veil of my grief, somehow not.

Am I here?

Am I there?

Am I lost?