Some Kind of Liminal Space

This is a conversation about love and loss, about death and dying, about family cycles and family secrets. It’s about the power of coming together to honor someone’s life, the way it helps to mourn with a group of people who also loved the person you love. It’s about the way a place can elicit so many feelings inside you, just the way a certain smell can take you somewhere, instantly. It’s about people who love you all the way, and how it breaks your heart when they go, because of course it does.

It’s also about the havoc that is wreaked when a person cannot have the hard conversations. The way secrets linger and fester and leave mysteries for people to unravel on a basement floor in the midst of photographs and tears. My mother was like that, she edited out the things that were difficult, but life is not a Martha Stewart catalog. It made me feel sad to think she might have believed that if she showed her whole self people might not revere her anymore, or that maybe she wouldn’t be safe in the world. I wish I could have told her we’re never safe in the world, but you can be safe with certain people, and the only way to know is to show yourself and realize you’re still loved.

Her secrets are the things that slithered between us and made it unsafe for me to get too close. Her unwillingness to be uncomfortable, vulnerable, to ever admit she was wrong about anything or needed help - that is what cost her the most, and it’s probably at least some of what made her want to drink. Blur the edges, numb the pain and make everything look pretty again.

This is also a talk about some of the harder things. What a gift it is to the people you leave behind when you create a will. What it’s like to be in a room with someone you love as they are dying, and what it’s like in the hours after. These are not easy things to talk about, but when we don’t talk about them, we set ourselves up to feel unprepared and to be unprepared. I can’t go back and redo the hour after my mother’s death, but I wish so much that I could. I talked about it in the hope that I might spare someone else this feeling. It isn’t an easy thing to carry.

Sending lots of love to all, and a little extra to anyone who is grieving xx

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