“Sometimes our own stories are the hardest ones to tell. But if they are not told, they become something else. Forgotten.”
Words have always held a fascination for me, the rhythm, the rise and fall, noisy consonants carrying light swirls of vowels like sighs. As a child I loved books; sitting in a corner of my parents’ library gleaning words from dusty pages till they danced a voice in my mind. Perhaps this is why I connect them to thoughts.
When Oliver died, spoken words stopped for me and thoughts piled up in their place, running across each other at such high speed until it felt like constant collisions. My mind was so full that I craved silence. I couldn’t be around my father for example, who had always been a storyteller, and continued to fill the silence in an attempt to salve and soothe; his monologues battling for space that I didn’t have. As CS Lewis said: I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.
The dislocation of early grief made me retreat into the unintrusive, calming world of literature. I was greedy for quiet mutual understanding and to know that it was possible to get through the primal pain I was feeling. At a time when every fibre of my body was screaming silently, it was important to know that other people had gone through the same and survived. What surprised me was the sparseness of literature surrounding grief. It is surprising how many books with pictures of hearts and poems can be found when you need a book that delves uncompromisingly into the pain and also the hope. But the books I did find gave me comfort at a time when I needed it the most. Elizabeth McCracken, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, CS Lewis. I am grateful for those writers who bravely bared their souls to describe what is so seldom talked about.
I like to think that we steer our own stories when we make conscious decisions about how these things will shape us and how we will carry them forward. I hope that Oliver’s story will be multi-faceted: not a single story but an overlapping one – his siblings will know about him, and as such he will be linked to their stories as well as his own.
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