Losses and Gains
Thinking the thing / saying the thing / doing the thing / meaning the thing
The problem with me is that no one can entirely trust I’m being sincere. Those I’m closest to will understand when I say this. The way a comment, expression of love or genuine praise can, by the time it makes its way from my heart to my mouth, sound disingenuous. Sarcastic, even.
I don’t mean it.
What I mean is to tell them with my words and my face that I love them. That I’m missing them. That I’m proud of them. I mean to look them in the eye without hesitation. Let them see that mine are brimming.
Sometimes what I mean gets lost, though. What is it that I do that makes them second-guess how I feel? Can I fix it?
Wednesday.
A day into October, somehow.
The work started at 10 with a three-hour poetry session with Caroline Bird. Though I’d jauntily instructed her to “destroy” me when we chatted over Monday night’s dinner, the warm-up exercise she had us do an hour later made me question the foolhardiness of my demand.
As a way, then, to avoid sharing dreadful “poems” that could only expose me as someone largely incapable of creating, following and ramping up an image in the manner Caroline (and the poets here) excels in, I volunteered to be her assistant during the first exercise. She’d be showing me pieces of paper with different kinds of smiles written on them. My job was to demo them and the gang shout out what kind I was doing.
“I want all your wrong answers as well as the right one!” she said, flashing a smile that would be described on a piece of paper as “wild”.
“Matthew!” She wheeled her bomber-jacketed arm in the fiction-writer’s direction as though cranking him up for the task at hand, “Write them all down! All of them! Good, bad, whatever! OK, everyone! Go! Go! Go!”
For the next five minutes or so, she flashed words at me and I revealed myself in ways that I never would have if I’d just written another poem.
“Disappointed” someone shouted when I was demonstrating Loving.
“Bored” when I was going for Sad.
“Condescending” when I was doing Worried.
and, most concerningly, “Disgusted” when the paper said Seductive.
It was all good fun, really. A chance to play about with intention and interpretation. Surface and depth. The space the writer must leave for the reader. And it was a good distraction, too.
When I’m away from home like this, I tend to be properly away. I check out, domestically. Maybe I compartmentalise to stop from missing them all? This time, though, the lines were blurred.
For an hour or so before dinner that evening rather than write like everyone else, I sat on WhatsApp. The barn has the only WiFi at Arvon’s Devon home, Totleigh Barton. There’s no signal at all in the house and no mobile reception until you walk five minutes or so up the steep farm track down which we rumbled in a shared taxi on Monday afternoon. I’d intended a largely offline week but 500 miles away, our old cat - Ivo - was being put down. It was time. He couldn’t be made to hold on until I got home. It wouldn’t have been fair.
I’d been glib last Friday as I scratched his wee chin saying I might not see him ever again. My first baby. Aww. I was smiling then, deflecting from the emotional import of the matter.
It was very hard watching him die on my phone but not as hard as it was for my spouse and my kids. After all, they had been the ones who’d sat stroking him on his last day as they told him their favourite Ivo stories. They’d written haikus for him, decorated his box and decided where he’d be buried. They were the ones in the room with him as he stopped breathing. They’d given themselves over to the emotion and ceremony of the day while I’d been making silly faces and writing shit poems. I was sad not to have had that day with them but wondered too whether I’d have been able to live up to it. Would I have trivialised it? Tried to make it smaller for them? Maybe I was best out of the way.
“That’s him gone,” the last of the messages read. Outside, the cow bell clanged for dinner. I would leave them to get his body home in the improbably small shoebox, I replied. I stood up, put my phone in my pocket and arranged my face in a way I hoped this time wouldn’t give me away.
No one wants to be that person at the table.
It’s not that I didn’t talk about it. I did. But I wonder how I talked about it. The ways I make a habit of avoiding the emotional centre of things not just for others but for myself. Is it that I can’t be trusted to match exterior me to interior me because I’m trying to hide it for my own benefit as much as for others?
At my end of the table, reflections on how a pet makes a home. Makes a family. I’ve said before that I only have this family because I basically forced the runt of the litter upon my reluctant boyfriend while visiting a friend’s farm 14 years ago. Within the year we were married. Eight months after that, Freya was born. Thanks, Ivo. Stories of dead pets flowed like wine and I did my best sympathetic face for many run-over cats I never knew. I resonated with the story of a beloved dog buried in a shallow grave so the skull can be exhumed. She wants to be able to rest her palm against it again. I could see the comfort in that, but the tears that sprang so readily to this new friend’s eyes when I told her my own story of finding solace in running my fingers through my dad’s ashes made me wonder why I wasn’t crying with her. Was this a sad story?
I nipped out as dinner wound up so I could check on the girls. They were coping in their own ways and I wasn’t worried for them despite what they’d gone through. My spouse, though. He’d had to carry it all without me and felt the weight of both my and Ivo’s absence. He told me he couldn’t bear to close the lid of the box which reminded me of how I’d felt when I stood with my dad’s dead body in the funeral home the day before he was cremated. As though it was me doing the leaving. I comforted him. His tears were for Ivo, yes, but also for what that cat represented. Stability. Continuity. Our youth.
The evenings are for tutor readings. I ran a hand over my face and joined the others. For the next hour, I sipped my tea. Listened as best I could. Snuck out to bed when it didn’t seem rude to do so.
Unlike the other mornings, it’d take my alarm to drag me from my sleep on Thursday, any brief forgetting in those smudgy moments between sleep and waking dispelled as I came to.
Friday morning.
Our last full day together until we meet again in the new year.
I lay in bed and listened to another chapter of Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman’s new book. I’ll paraphrase, but he’s arguing that the dream of becoming a better, kinder, more generous person is just that… A dream. It’s not about becoming it’s about doing. Taking the step the instant you feel moved to. Deeds not words, essentially. Action not intention.
He takes the example of thinking fondly about an unwell friend and vowing to drop them a message when you get a minute. You don’t get a minute (well, you do but you use it to scroll or whatever) and so the message doesn’t get sent. Then a few days pass and you think fondly of them again, remembering this time also that you meant to send them a message. You’ll do it when you get home, you say. Spoiler: you get home but you don’t send the message. Until you do it, you’re burdened not only by the unsent message itself, but the guilt that you’ve not been a good enough friend to prioritise it. It rumbles on, as these things do.
Instead, he says, act on impulse. That way you don’t have to worry about becoming a more engaged friend because by dint of doing something about it when the thought strikes, you are a more engaged friend. It’s not a future state to be reached, but an act in the here and now. I liked this, and went straight over to the barn in my pyjamas to send my daughter a picture I’d found of her as a baby, Ivo sitting beside her.
On the final night of any residential writing retreat, it’s over to the group to read. In Scotland, we call this a ceilidh - it’s a party. People get instruments out. There’s often a piper and haggis and a single malt. In England, there is no piper. Haggis was Thai green curry with vermicelli noodles. Whisky was unctuous red wine. These nights are both vulnerable and exciting. It’s more performative than workshoppy. You rehearse it. If you’ve brought nice clothes, you put them on. Swipe a smile across your face with the lipstick you have in your makeup bag. We agreed we’d read something from our works-in-progress so everyone was equal. Nothing too polished or over-worked. No more than five minutes.
Two of the group volunteered to be our hosts and, at breakfast, presented us with an additional writing task they’d just thought up:
It felt pure Burkeman. Think the thing, do the thing. Feel the thing, say the thing.
I took my sheets and sat down in the poetry library. It wasn’t a hard task at all; there was already so much to say about each of the writers and tutors I’ll be working with for the next two years. The week had been as much a lesson in trust as craft and it felt really good to write things I’d (admittedly) struggle saying to their faces without worrying how they might interpret my meaning.
At the end of the evening, we were each presented with a stuffed envelope with everyone’s nice words folded up in strips inside. I put it in my notebook without peeking and took myself outside away from the group. The sky was beautiful.
I stood until my neck hurt. Under the sky I thought about the loss, yes. But also the gains. That being open to the possibilities creative and emotional vulnerability offer is actually an act of bravery. There is yet more work to do and sleep came only after lots of late-night scribbling.
On the long journey home yesterday, I opened the envelope.
Next week…
A post for the Membership community stuffed with memoir-writing prompts and the invitation to Thursday October 17th’s live Seasonal Session for Autumn, 8-9pm BST. All details about these sessions, the Membership in general and upcoming live and recorded expressive writing courses in this post.
So long, wee Ivo 💛
Thank you. It sparks many memories for me and helps me be more tender with myself. Lovely night sky!