Thoughts on loss

Friday Fragment #59

I chose a large bowl from the middle of the table. Rupert had brought a collection of his father’s ceramics to the farmhouse building in which we were all gathered, inviting each person there to take a piece of pottery or glass home with them. He half-joked that it was an efficient way to partly clear a house, but each of us knew that we were in some small part extending his father’s life in this world. The bowl is beautiful, quite probably impractically large, but I’ll nevertheless ensure that it is photographed and in use very soon. | All photographers and writers are navigating loss. We capture things so as not to lose them: a shaft of light that cuts through slats or fog; an autumn floor sprayed red and ochre; the voice or glance of a loved one in a shared second of tenderness. Art makes loss bearable. | A few weeks ago, I removed two steel brackets from the bedroom wall that once held a radiator in place. I peeled away four shards of decades-old, saffron-painted, embossed wallpaper: evidence of an idea of home that had once existed for someone else. Beautiful in their own right, I held onto them; it seemed wrong to discard them too quickly. | I was describing the diaries of Derek Jarman to a friend, writing that they were, ‘so sad and yet so very beautiful’ and afterwards reflected that the words ‘so sad’ alone are enough to imply beauty. Sadness doesn’t need that further qualification: it’s never not beautiful. | There is music to which I have been returning again and again these last few months. There are several songs that ‘save me’ when I need them most. ‘Hobart Paving’ is one of them – the most melancholic song about a failed relationship. The chorus repeats, ‘Don’t forget to catch me’ – a promise of support in return for a risk taken. I’m lifted every time that I listen to it. | With Mum, over these last few months, we have been prepared for loss by people who know much about medicine and what the body can and cannot endure, but who don’t know her. A fear: that I have been wasting time and energy waiting for a light to go out when I should be enjoying the warmth of a flame still flickering. Each visit that remains is a chance to sit with that glow, and I’m resolving to hold onto that thought much more tightly. | Loss is a process never completed – that which was once loved, enjoyed, held onto can never easily, realistically, truly be that which we can let go of. Loss, most accurately and contradictorily defined, is that which we will forever possess.

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