Anniversary

Today is the anniversary of mum’s death. It’s also the week my baby is due.* Often I find I can’t sleep much in the first two weeks of October, and it takes a little while to Detective out why, and remember the date.

That’s an interesting feature of being human isn’t it? That your body should know something your brain hasn’t remembered yet. I guess that’s all reflex and instinct are, except in this instance it’s tied to calendar date - which is a made up thing, right? (It’s not just seasonal cues! This happens when I’m overseas too).

Anyway, today I listen back to the podcast I did with mum, or look at photos, or go and swim down at redleaf pool, where there is still a mural of her on the wall. I try to make space to think about her, in ways that I’m sometimes afraid to do in normal life, for fear of getting caught in sorrow. But now it’s been some years, I can have more of the good memories, instead of being pulled back to the worst and most tragic parts.

The feature of time on sorrow is that it’s like a pull-back; it gives you scope.

I did a sibling podcast with my twin brother called “I wish I was an only child”, which is here: on Little Wander and we talked about/replayed the biggest fight we ever had. Which was about my show Savage. If you want to hear how Fraser Siblings Argue, it’s towards the end of the episode. It’s a situation where we both totally get why the other person feels the way they do, and yet, neither of us will change our position. We just understand that we are in this painful place.

I think it’s a good example of how understanding someone else’s lived experience is sometimes not enough to resolve something (I said very good example and then deleted very so as not to sound arrogant about the object lesson I provide). I mean, so much of my work and life ambition is predicated on the idea that if we can just *explain* something well enough, a conflict or frustration will disappear. But of course, that’s not quite true. You just lose the joy of unalloyed righteousness. Everything gets a little bit sadder if you both really understand each other and still can’t … ‘solve’ something. It reminds you that sometimes, solving something isn’t the point.

I think that there’s a … fear (?) of understanding that also underlies a lot of people’s unwillingness to accept the fullness of their opposition’s pain and humanity in political arguments - that they worry humanising the enemy will gut their own resolve. My friend Laurie recently got in trouble with both sides of a very heated debate (imagine the most heated debate there is online right now - it’s that one) by making the point that it’s important (if you want discussions to be productive) to acknowledge your opposition’s pain and fear as real, even when you think their pain and fear is unjustified by the facts or even when you think their pain and fear is deserved. Pretending someone else’s pain isn’t real is self indulgent - a good way to protect yourself from feeling accountability, and a great way to cultivate cruelty.

All of this is a tangent from talking about my mum, except that it isn’t. I think our duty to the dead is to carry on what was good about them into the future, and that one of Lucy’s great qualities was attentive kindness. She was infinitely generous with her understanding of other people - not always to forgive them, but always to give time and thought and attention. Now, in a world where attention is the product, the thing that’s bought and sold and stolen and traded, I think of her as a sort of visionary. Someone who always instinctively knew how much attention was worth.

Anyway, those are my morning thoughts. Here’s a poem I wrote about grief overlooking Redleaf pool on a grey day:

Xxx A

*Yes this is a strange thing to think about, and has caught me in a dizzying sense of how strange it is that people (whole people!) arrive in the world (starting inside other people!) and then also people just… leave the world. This isn’t a particularly profound insight, it’s just a view over the edge of the galaxy that’s suddenly making me dizzy. I imagine it is like being on mind altering drugs, because my friend Dave tells me that it is, and he loves both mind altering drugs and being a parent.

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