Get on with it!

Things are slowly getting back to 'normal'. I wake up every morning, remember that my mother is dead, then get up and have a shower and get on with the day. I am having fewer moments where the enormous weight and total unreality of the situation hit me and knock the wind out of me, but they still happen. One of the worst things is that I keep thinking things like 'oh, I must tell her that' or 'she'll think this is hilarious'. Once I even got my phone out to call her whilst I was walking to the train station.

One of the things that bothers me is feeling like a walking cliche. The simple fact that grief is so universal, which I suppose I should find comforting, just pisses me off really. Every thought I have about my mother seems like it has been thought before (and written about with far more eloquence than I could ever muster).

I sometimes can't believe the sky can be so blue, that the trees and fields on my train journey can be so beautiful, that the night sky can be so clear and above all that life itself can still go on, when she isn't here. Where is she now? But that is just another cliched grief question which can wait for another day.

The following poem says a lot about how I feel right now, although again I feel that the words and sentiments are somewhat tired and over-used (its reading by John Hannah in Four Weddings and a Funeral serves to add to that well-worn quality). It just feels right to reproduce it here, knowing that WH Auden was once feeling exactly as I do.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead.
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West
My working week and my Sunday rest
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood
For nothing now can ever come to any good.