This lone moai from Rapa Nui (aka Easter Island) represents perfectly the state of mind I find myself in 8 months or so since my beloved partner Janet died unexpectedly (as is the way with accidental death) and left me to fend for myself.
Being alone is not all bad. And I’m not totally alone anyway. My neighbour Paul, and wife Edwina, have been so good to me to the extent I cannot repay them. To Brent and Gabby also I owe recompense I’ll never pay back. And much of my small community of Keppel Sands (and beyond) have felt the call of duty towards me in one way or another and responded accordingly. But, when it comes down to it, I am very much on my own, and mourning Janet big time.
Yes. Grief will come and mourn I must.
The initial shock and the subsequent ongoing grief has taken it out of me, both emotionally and physically. I wouldn’t have believed the emotional and the physical could be so intimately connected had I not experienced it first hand. I am managing to address my loss of physical capacity through regular sessions of (1) yoga, (2) physiotherapy in the gym and in water, and (3) regular walks on the beach.
Mourning, however, invites in the Black Dog, aka Depression. And, for a while, I had no defence against this beast. Then I fell upon a strategy which helped me out enormously. I mention it here because you, reader of my blogs, might come to need it some day, perhaps (but hopefully not) in similar circumstances.
Meditation.
I learned this technique decades earlier (when I lived in Melbourne), in a form known as Transcendental Meditation, a form that is a Western adaptation of the Buddhist base. Among other things, it is effective for clearing the mind of obtrusive thoughts. It turned out I was good at it, but had no particular use for it at that time. So it lay in abeyance.
Now, in Keppel Sands, when I tried it again as an foil to the Black Dog , it worked a treat. The Black Dog retreated. Two sessions of meditation per day of thirty minutes each did the trick. The Black Dog was still sniffing round the meditative fortress I had created for myself, but mostly couldn’t find a way in.
Over the months, my grief has subsided to the extend I can function better with everyday tasks. But the grief will never totally go away. Nor would I want it to. Janet was a precious person in my life for 33 plus years, and it would be a crime against nature for me to suppress all my fond memories of her.
Now, to an extent, grief has been replaced by loneliness. Since birth, I have hardly ever been without the company of women. I was my mother’s favourite, and a love child to boot. Then there were girl friends, my wife of 17 years, then more girl friends. Then Janet. I treasured these moments of loving and being loved by a woman, and now they are all suddenly gone. Temporarily, I can only hope.
So, now I look for strategies for coping with this loneliness, and my need for the love of and by a woman …
… until perhaps a moai of opposite gender comes loping across the grassy plains, shanks and haunches grinding – stone rubbing on stone – to join my lonely standing figure.