Keep on Looking For The Open Lighthouses

Hello my loves

Greetings from Waiheke Island, Aotearoa. (There are venue updates coming for the NZ & Oz shows, all the dates have held but the locations have shifted slightly. Hold the phone, it’s the holidays…)

I was going to write on an entirely different subject this evening when the thunderclouds of darkness descended. We were in the middle of making dinner for the kids when that sort of text came in.

Can you give me a call when you get a minute?

Which, 90% of the time, means we’ve lost someone.

Well.

We’ve lost someone. Too soon and too tragically.

And I remember a dozen plus years when we lost their partner, and I was somewhere just as unlikely on the wide surface of the glassy globe. Poetically, also right on the sea.

And here I am, getting the news, like we get news, in the middle of some other life, some other timeline, some other moment.

Plötzlichentodesondermeldung.

Sudden death news interruption.

As above, so below.

We lose who we lose when we lose them and we have little choice about how and where we find out; what we are doing.

Any landscape on earth can become the backdrop to sudden good or sudden bad news. A supermarket. A familiar parking lot, a restaurant foyer, a friend’s house on a faraway island, a tour bus lounge, a yoga retreat receptionist’s desk, a dank dressing room, a theme park bathroom, your own safe bed.

Those exact places are then changed forever, etched with the permanent memory graffiti of shock.

I have been in all of these places when I have learned about my friends dying.

Who you are with, how they can hold you, what the ingredients are?

You have little choice. You have almost no choice really.

You could just stay home forever and wait for the news of everyone you ever loved dying, one at a time, and even then, your home would be the backdrop to all the grief. There’s no escaping.

I do advise: if you keep constant company with people who cannot hold you when you receive sudden and shocking news, your number will eventually come up. Maybe don’t spend a lot of time with those people if you can avoid it.

Perhaps, a design for living: surround yourself with those who can withstand the news of sudden death.

We passed a lighthouse a few hours later, on our family walk, a lighthouse with gnarled roots carved from the arms of a pohutakawa tree.

Remember the Hotel New Hampshire? Remember “keep on passing the open windows”?

Keep on looking for the open lighthouses, my friends.

They are there, in the storm. Maybe obscured, maybe distant.

But I swear, they are there.

Hold steady on the waves of grief. Hold steady in the storm.

This time of year has a stronger riptide.

We lost a good one today.

This book grows too many pages, but I’d rather have a thicker book than nothing to write about.

I love you all so.

X

Amanda

P.S. The story, and…do not climb on the artwork.