When you make the choice to fully immerse yourself in something, there is a shift within your cells that is terrifying and exciting in equal measure.

In the moment that you decide to go all in, to play full on, there is terror in the knowing that you will lose something of yourself in the process, and that you will gain something too. The fear is in the stepping off. In that free-falling moment when you don’t know quite where you will land, or even how. Will you spring as light as a gymnast on the lush grass, or will it be more like the first time you bring your Christmas-drone in for landing, shaky and off centre, with the no-rain-for three-weeks crispy weeds spraying out in all directions?

A fledgling project, an expensive purchase, a shiny new relationship. They all create the nervicitement of: new me/old me. And right there in the moment between the two, is where the juice is. And that juice is the sweetest and most luscious of all.

In a dusty box at the back of  my mind there is a creature called the Push Me Pull You. I think it could be from Sesame Street, or maybe it lives with Dr.Doolittle, but in my memory it has one body and two heads, facing in opposite directions. So if one head wants to move forward, the other must go backwards.

Jumping in feels a lot like what the poor Push Me Pull You must always have a sense of. In order to move at all, the backward facing head has to trust, and step into the vulnerability of not quite knowing where it’s going, or what the ground is like. It can only feel the irregularity once it carefully places its tiny cloven hoof on the uneven ground. And the forward head has to be sure to lead in the best direction, dealing with whatever comes up in each moment, and making decisions the backward head can’t help with.

Today I sat on the stairs and watched my little girl grow up before my eyes. She went into her bedroom in a flurry of iridescent flamingo pink, and emerged with only a blush of subtle rose on her shoes-a nod to the the days of childhood that she inhabited only moments before.

I sat on the stairs and watched her gather her bag, count her money and smooth her hair. I saw the confident step of the woman she will become, going out into the world without me by her side, her only compass the words we have shared over the years, and the direction she chooses to steer on her own.

I sat on the stairs leaning on my sandy summer-knees, pulled by the heaviness in my heart, as I thought of the way the world looks at her, both real and imagined, and the judgements she will face. I remembered all the times she has cried about how people stare at her, or ask her why she is yellow. And I guessed at all the times she didn’t cry, but pushed the dark feelings deep down into her gall bladder, and smiled the sunshine of defiance.

I sat on the stairs, and the stairs stretched out in front of me like a dark Dr.Suess movie, a conveyor belt of the endless nights and days where I will watch her take that ebullient step over the threshold, without looking back, out, out into her life.

As it should be.

I sat on the stairs and I knew in that moment that my little girl needs very little from me these days. She knows her own heart and her mind is stronger than a nine year old mind ever should be, and that is how this world turns. My little girl is no longer little.

I sat on the stairs and thought of a mother I know very little of, who made a choice this very day to jump off into the abyss of blissful anaesthesia. A mother who knew that no matter how long she sat on the stairs, her little girl was not coming back. I thought of Debbie and her broken heart and I had a tinkling of what that rancid loss might be like.

Can you die of a broken heart?

Can you choose when you step out of this world?

I think you can.

I hope for that mother, as she let the griefs lay all over her like a heavy and cool blanket, it was more exciting than terrifying. I hope she felt the relief.

I hope she got to taste the juice. And I hope it was sweet.

Vale Debbie. Vale Carrie. Travel well ladies.

Sometimes the beauty is in the spaces, isn’t it?

The pause between when you tell him you love him for the very first time, and you wait, one beat, another, and there is that delicious-scary anticipation, before you hear what he will say back.

The gap between the notes in your favourite song. You know precisely how long to hold the silence. You take your breath, before the lyric unfurls the next layer of story.

The very first moment when you become aware of yourself in the morning, when for a second or two you are no-one and nowhere, your brain is furry and unfocussed, and there is no cancer or death or pain that cannot be taken away.

The beauty of the space.

This week two more of my people died.

I know this is inevitable. That with every moment that passes, every beautiful space that passes me by, I draw closer to another death. A bigger space. Another one that can never be filled.

Those deaths take my breath away, every single time.

This week two more of my people died, and there is a space in my heart that can’t be filled, and nor would I want it to be.

What do you say when someone dies? Do you say: passed away, passed over, left this earth, deceased? I don’t like any of those. I say they have left a space.

And so I mark it.

In my appointment book, which is the thing that runs my days, I write their name, where the time for their check up would normally be. My Dad comes in most Saturday afternoons. Hayley comes in every second Tuesday night. Geoff comes in once a month on a Saturday morning, and Bob has 9.15am on a Tuesday, every fourth week. Don’t worry about my tenuous grip on reality, I know they aren’t actually coming in, but I can’t bear to erase them, to take away the space they held in my life.

In the beginning, the space is almost unbearable. The allotted time stretches out from my toes to eternity, and I think I will never endure the tock-tock-tocking of the moments passing. After the passing of months, that if joined together would wrap around the equator eleventy-million times, the space takes on a new form. The time morphs and passes faster, or perhaps it just has less barbs to be ripped out of the gentle skin of my forearms. The space holds itself, it never de-ceases, but I find that I have a fortitude, a fort, that I never knew I’d built, and I can sit in the space, and put the jigsaw pieces of my heart back together.

Some of the pieces are missing.

There are spaces where there once was a picture.

But there is beauty in the parts that are now missing. They are the memories of my very own. Invisible to another, but clear to me.

And they are wondrous.

…From The Ashers

My friend had breast cancer.

When you have cancer, and somehow the body that grew those rogue cells is able to overcome them, people say that you are lucky. That always makes me cringe. I know they are talking about the fact that you had the Big C and are still here to tell the tale, but from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t look very lucky.

Have you ever looked at cancer cells under the microscope? Even if you know nothing about histology, when you see them, you know something has gone terribly wrong. Under the microscope, there is an organisation and structure to normal cells, and in fact, the cells of each organ have distinctive features. So you can tell the difference between a thyroid cell and a liver cell, a heart and a lung. Cancer is not something from the outside, it is those self-same cells, but they are in a death rush to end it all. They are multiplying and dividing and multiplying again, in some frenzied tornado of reproduction, so that they become some mutated, ugly cousin of the original cells, hideously echoing the family traits.

Their evolution is like Gremlins, but they have the malevolent fury of something from the other side of the Pet Semetary.

I despise them.

My friend had breast cancer.

It ravaged and contorted and shrank her body, killing her from the inside out, just as mine swelled and glowed and created a new life.

She used to talk to my fecund, streched skin, right up close, whilst I was doing for her the only thing my hands know how to do for people in pain. I would rub away on her tissues from the outside, hoping that I was erasing some of those cells deep within. She would tell my baby all sorts of things, and I now realise I was squirrelling those stories up, like quotes in one of those “Words of Wisdom” books, saving them for the Winter of my empty.

When someone you love dies, that is all you have. Photos, stories and perhaps some things that they used to wear. Nothing new gets added as the years mount up, so you have to save up those fragments and slips of ideas that you shared, and store them deep inside, for it is all you will ever have. Nothing new will be added, not ever. So those fragile wisps must be wrapped lightly in the most delicate of tissue papers, and stored in a box with plenty of air around them, so they can breathe and retain their shape and stay precious and safe.

When my friend used to talk to my ripening abdomen, I was often struck by the thought that we were both growing things within us. She talked to mine, she told it to be good and healthy and strong and creative and funny and to pop out at home in a rush of bursting life. I talked silently to her’s and told it to fuck right off and leave her alone and have our business done and done and over and done.

Mine listened. Her’s did not.

So now I count off the years gone, in the milestones of my daughter. Every December as Christmas draws near, I wait for the punch in the guts and I struggle and claw myself past that day on the calendar fearful that if I go down, it will kick and kick me, as I cower on the floor. I hold myself rigid as I think of the people who have more right than me to grieve, the people who share those very same cell lines that took her down. And I think of the love of her life, and the hole that he has somehow filled with wonderful things, old and new.

I don’t even know what to say to them any more.

My friend had breast cancer, and she didn’t let it stop her one bit. Until it stopped her for good.

She was not one of the lucky ones.

None of them are.

RIP Rick. Miss you. Still.

…From The Ashers

Today was a bit surreal. But I made it through, and that has to count for something.

I only mildly embarrassed myself when I was giving blood and I saw the poster calling for stem cell donors and had a cry and the phlebotomist thought I was crying about the needle so she came running over to check on me, and I said, “No, no it’s not the needle, I love the needle, well not love it, I don’t like it at all, I’m not some kind of sickie you know, I’m crying about the stem cells, but not really the stem cells, but about my friend, who is dead, and has been for ages, a year today in fact, and it feel like so long ago and hardly any time all at once.”

So that went well.

And I only told off two innocent people for things that were mildly annoying, but as Liam said about one of them, “Don’t worry Mum, he was a bogan anyway. I knew he was a bogan because he had a whole arm of tattoos, and I’ve found that you don’t have to be a bogan to have a tattoo, but most bogans have tattoos.”

So that went really well.

And I only completely and inappropriately poured my heart out in the comments section of someone else’s blog, but it was Eden’s and she won’t mind. In fact she will totally get it, because Eden gets me, and this deathaversary stuff.

So that’s not so bad.

And then I drank the cherry beer that I’ve been hoarding for a year, over on my mate’s balcony, and I didn’t cry, and we chatted about Hayls and life and death and the afterlife and souls and how people look when they’re dying and then later when they’re dead, and how I met Hayls and how I friended Hayls and how I miss her so much more than I would ever thought was humanly possible, and how I don’t feel even one tiny step closer towards accepting that I won’t ever hear her laugh again.

And then we saw a shooting star, and it was around the T.O.D, and we took it as a sign.

So that was pretty good.

…From The Ashers xx

I have a bit of a problem with loss. Not things, I have two primary school aged kids, I’m down with that, I mean people.

In 1994 I watched a movie called ‘The Sum of Us’, and there is a scene, not really related to the rest of the movie at all, where two ‘Spinster Aunts’ are sent off to different nursing homes by their families.  The scene is in black and white, and in my memory it has them being torn apart, gnarled hands clutching and trying to hold together, voices wailing as their hearts break open.  That scene had me sobbing like it was my hands, my love, my loss.

In 1993 I read ‘Bridges of Madison County’.  “Over-stated romantic claptrap”, I hear you say.  Not me.  I was crying so hard, so vigorously at the sense of loss and injustice at the unrequited love, that I physically couldn’t read it, I was so blurred and bumpy.  I even shed a small tear when Clint and Susan portrayed it at the pictures, albeit not as much.

In 1983 I saw ET.  You know it: I was a blubbering mess when ET went home. I know, I know, he was ugly.  I know, I know, I should have been relieved he was leaving the clutches of Keys and the scientists, but ET.  Home.  No more Ell-i-ott.

In the late 70s I saw Lassie Come Home at the drive-in.  I was beside myself, bawling in the early scenes when Lassie, in fact, did not come home. I can’t remember the rest, I guess it was redemptive and Lassie went on to make many more movies, solve crimes or whatever she did (what did she do?) but I have no recollection of that.  All I have is the loss, and the tears, and my Dad trying not to laugh at what a big baby his no-crying daughter was turning out to be.

Because that’s it. I have a no-cry policy, for the most part. If you’ve seen me cry, you’ll know why, it’s not delicate or pretty or endearing at all.  It’s all snot and dribble and red eyes and rivulets of mascara.  And if I get started I just might not stop.  Ever again.

As much as I’m not good with movie loss, I’m not good with actual loss.  Particularly death.

I don’t really know how to handle it, so in order to keep my no-cry policy upstanding, I have to trick myself that they are still alive and I’m just not seeing them today.  Or the next day, and on and on, forevermore.  I try not to think about it too much, but the problem is, I keep getting shocked when the loss hits me.

Today I looked at the teapot BabyMac gave me when Hayls died, and instead of being uplifted and happy to receive such a thoughtful gift, I just cried.

I won’t be having any more cuppas with Hayley.  Or my Dad.  Or Nath’s Dad.  Or Ricki or Jane or Sam or Marjorie or Melby or Jean or Jack or Sandra.  The roll-call of the dead.

I have something in my house to remind me of every one of my lost ones. Things that I just can’t throw out.

However, last week I decided I would throw out some of my Dad’s clothes that I scavenged when Mum was ready to let that stuff go.  I kept the last things I bought him, I don’t know why that’s what I kept, it’s not as though they were the best of times when he was wearing those last shirts and shorts, but I did.  They didn’t smell like him any more, and they were taking up space, so I put them in a bag and took them down to the garage for my next trip to the Salvos.  Then I changed my mind and brought them all back up.  Then down again.  Then back up.  I don’t want those clothes any more.  They aren’t him, in fact they never were.  No trace of him is left on them, but if I don’t keep them, what is there left to mark his place in my life?  If I throw them away, will I be throwing away one of my memories?

I’m scared of running out of them.

And I have a bit of a problem with loss.

A thing happened today on Twitter.

I found out that a lady who I have been reading for the last year or so, has had a tragic suicide in her family.  I don’t know this woman, not really, not IRL.  But I have been following her life for over a year, both on her blog and in her tweets, and so I feel like I know her.  I’ve watched her travel, seen her grieve, been sad happy glad scared relieved, as her life has been laid out before me.  I have laughed and cheered and cried right along with her for quite a while now.  In fact, I suppose I feel like I’ve shared more of her life than some of my IRL friends.  I even know things about her past.  Her wedding day.  Her childhood.

We have corresponded a few times in the comments section of her blog, and then via email.  Not much, really, but I feel like I get her.  And so when my friend Hayley died, I made sure I told her.  Because I feel like she gets me.  And she did.  She said exactly the right things (typed exactly the right things).  Just like I knew she would.  She cared about the right bits.

Today I’m so sad for this person I’ve never even met in the skin.  I want to make it better for her, disappear some of her pain, just like I would for a flesh-friend.

I suppose she’s like a pen-pal in days gone by, but accelerated due to the immediacy of our post.  We can get to know one another so quickly, in 140 characters, click, send.

Today has reminded me of the power of the written word, in the ways that it can touch our hearts and make us feel.  Transform us even.  Make us laugh.  Or cry.  Wring us out.

Letters, books, emails, posts, tweets and texts.  Somehow we can get a sense of knowing someone that we’ve never met, not in real life.

It’s a strange thing, this brave new world we’re in now.  Strange days indeed. Most peculiar. (John Lennon: prescience?)

Vale Eden’s Brother.