Friday morning, 4.30am

I’ve been awake for over an hour. I just took a sleeping pill. As I wait for it to take effect, I write. This is how it is.

***

‘Don’t do what feels good. Do what feels right.’ Audre Lorde.

Or: ‘Don’t do what others expect. Do what you hope to expect from others.’ Me.

***

What is truth? Nature, the world, the body, poetry, literature, (some) people.

What is fiction? News, politics, media, (some) people. The mind.

***

I know what truth is. I simply lack the courage to believe it. Help others. Do no harm. One day I and every person or thing I love will die. One day everything I ever did will be forgotten.

A Chinese study found that the people terminally ill patients in hospital most frequently asked to see were their youngest family members. They’d choose the six-month-old baby not yet able to speak rather than the people closest to them. The researchers explained this finding in terms of a yearning for immortality, a belief that by looking upon their youngest progeny or the furthest continuation of their lineage, they could imagine the extension of their own life through their descendants, perhaps indefinitely. Do I hope to achieve my own immortality through helping and working with young people? Are they proxies for the descendants I won’t have?

‘How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.’ Annie Dillard. Days, not years. Or eons for that matter. But even a day seems at once too long and too finite. Everything meaningful in life - love, wonder, joy, sadness, connection, grief - is measured in smaller increments of time. Of course, we may love, or grieve, for years. But it is the moment by moment loving and grieving that brings us closest to meaning. ‘Love is an activity, not a passive affect,’ Erich Fromm wrote. A verb not a noun. And a verb implies transitoriness. Love arises through momentary activity. As does joy and wonder. And grief.

***

Last night the evening crept in as I drove down Gillies Road on my way to meet Kim and I saw the silhouette of a bald hill cast against a grey sky with a few white streaks of cloud. It was beautiful. And it was not true. The scene was real but my feeling was forced. I wanted it to be beautiful. I wanted to feel something.

Are feelings truth or fiction? Do I feel too much that I involuntarily stop myself from feeling anything? Or am I simply devoid of all feeling? What do other people feel?

I want to watch a sunset, listen to birdsong or stare at a Monet without feeling like I’m waiting for something to happen.

***

Truth or fiction? Is it ironic to write about truth and fiction on April Fool’s Day? Truth. Probably.

***

Sixteen days ago my dog died. Jumpa had been my companion for thirteen years.

‘You have a hole the size of Jumpa in your heart,’ the woman at the Wholefoods said to me. Yes, I said. But later, once I’d reflected, no. It’s not a hole. More like a formless emptiness that pushes up against my ribcage, ever so slowly suffocating the air from my lungs.

The Aztecs used to rip out the still beating heart of their human sacrifices. I think it feels a bit like this. Not a hole in my heart but my heart in its totality ripped out leaving an empty space. Negative space.

***

Grief is not a conversation starter like the weather.

Of course no one wants public displays of tears or wailing. But it wasn’t always like this. We used to have a word for it: mourning. People wore black. We had rituals. There were prescribed periods of time. Now I hear things like, ‘it’s good that you’re busy and have plenty of distractions.’ I even hear myself saying it. And, never said but implied, he was only a dog; isn’t it time you got over it?

I don’t want to be distracted. I don’t want to get over it. I want the time and space to remember him. I want to mourn him.

Others care but don’t know what to say or how to act. I was once like this. We don’t want to offend or trigger and so we say nothing at all. ‘Language is erosive,’ says Luljeta Lleshanku. But an absence of language is tectonic. It shifts and breaks the ground beneath us.

***

Grief is not depression. I get up, I go about my day, I enjoy my work. My life has purpose. I am grateful to love and be loved. It’s just that the things that used to make me happy no longer do. At least for the time being.

Kim understands. As do the dear friends who bring cake, light candles, draw pictures of him, and then stand back, not pretending that nothing has happened but waiting for me to come back to them when I’m ready and knowing that I will still be the same person. I’ll just be carrying a little more space inside.