Rosie Jones

It’s well known that nothing prepares a woman for labour nor her partner for the emotion associated with the birth of his offspring.

It’s well documented.  It’s spoken of at ‘dad’s nights’ and play groups and over morning tea.

Nothing prepares us for birth.

Nothing prepares us for death.

Where the labouring female bludgeons from the pit of her body, bays to the sympathies of Mother Earth and endures, so might those in grief.

As the birthing partner looks on, often feeling totally inept and unable to wrench any control away from Father Time, so, too, will those confronting loss.  And while the final frenzy of ushering a newborn into an imperfect world is usually accompanied by sweetened anguish, searing pain and life-altering tears, so the grief-stricken will encounter a similar purging.

Birth and Death.  Beginning and Beginning Again.  Joy and Sorrow and a massive movement of your heart space that will never, ever conform to expectation again.

I didn’t know how to grieve.  I didn’t know how to give birth, either.  I don’t know how to grieve, and  I can’t remember how to give birth after nearly seven years.  Birth and Re-Birth. The two elements of life over which we have very little control – if we have any control at all.  Some might argue that we can prevent or delay birth via contraception, chastity, the ’smarts’.  Yet those who choose to believe in the concept of fate will suggest that nothing is ours to control.

She lost her sister two years ago and she still finds grieving so abstract, she wonders if it truly happened.  Where were the 5-7 measurable, time-lined stages of grief that she’d read somewhere, sometime?  Where were the clear delineations explaining how a sibling should grieve compared to how a mother should be affected?  Where was the wailing?  The acceptance?  The insight, the understanding, the comprehension?

She realized they were as accurate as the ’stages of labour’ and the notion of ‘what to expect when you’re expecting.’  Not predictable, not measurable, not specific to an individual.  Such unique pain.

So, she was lost.  There was no guidance manual, but there were helpful people mentioning grief counseling and the value of time.  Yet the thing she remembers most about that period is the bubble of vague her body enclosed about her.  She’d overheard that humans have a hormone that ‘does this’ – places the shattering, zombie of walking heartbreak into a physiological cocoon, so that the figure of grief wanders dully through the shards of sorrow left behind by the deceased.

She didn’t know that.  She wouldn’t have believed it possible had she not experienced it.  But what about the balm for the broken heart?  What about the antacid for the soul that threatened to rupture whenever the bereft woke to remember the passing?  What about the short-term healing.

Didn’t happen.  It’s the cross of the living to be left with the hole in their life.  They bear it until their time comes.

My sister died two years ago and I still can’t believe it happened.  We don’t know what normal is, but I still expect her to be on some sort of extended time away, and I’ll awaken one day to find her there – just like before – with advice, a cuppa, and a chat for the disillusioned.  Perhaps that’s right!  It’s what will happen when we meet again, the intervening years being a type of suspended animation until such a reunion.

But that’s a question of faith.  A question for another time.

Losing a special person in your life is bloody hard.  Ask anyone.  Losing a sibling is as difficult, and  I stumbled about for a while not really knowing how to define myself without her in my life.  Strange, that.  We might think the same thing happens when we lose a beloved parent – they have also been in our lives for our entire existence – but perhaps we (rightly or wrongly) expect them to pass before us.  It’s nature’s way.  They birthed us, and it’s their right to go before their children.

No control.  We don’t hold the remote control in this screening of our lives.

Lea bought empathy, creativity, love of people, the environment and learning into this life with her.  She conjured conversation and colour, she flipped the coin and experienced the downside of life too.  She teenaged in an era where The Who sang ‘hope I die before I get old,’ and she questioned and ran the gauntlet of convention on a couple of occasions.  She was typical, but atypical; loved a laugh, but loved her own space.  Could be outspoken, but also drank from the well of introversion.  She bitched and birthed, ran amuck and made amends, and took her rightful place in the hierarchy of a large family.

When she lost her sister, she lost touch with the familial structure that had defined her.  It was no longer there.  The foundations had crumbled.

I work to find my way.  We help each other walk in the shadow of her loss, and we miss her.

Rest peacefully, sister.