July & August : Polaroids
A heap of broken images, splintered by grief
If you’re new around here, these polaroids are a place where I journal through small windows. They’re more personal than my longer form essays and (usually) more regular. Out of all the places you could be, thanks for being right here.
Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats…
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
I.
In 2017, Hurricane Ophelia whipped across Ireland, felling an immense tree in the garden of my grandparent’s house on the Wild Atlantic Coast. The tree had held my foster-sister’s swing who had been adopted by another family years earlier. It was here that we’d spent hours of summer overlooking the Atlantic Ocean with her, teaching her first words, taking her wetsuit shoes on and off, seeing her legs learn to wobble, walk, run.
The complexity of the adoption into her permanent forever family meant that my siblings and I were never able to see her again after our time fostering her had ended and the adoption was complete. The night after Ophelia’s storm, years after she was adopted, I woke suddenly. It felt like the weight of a fallen tree was crushing down on my chest. I wept, missing her.
Where was she? Who was she becoming? Was she alright? Unanswered questions stretched like branches into the sky.
II.
This year, Western Australia sweltered through its hottest summer on record ending in April, the Noongar season of Djeran. Djeran brings dewy dawns, cooler nights and light breezes across April and May.
At summer’s end, I willed my roses to wait until the winter rain, spraying the pests off their branches every morning when rainfall wasn’t forecast. Dig out your roses, they can’t be saved, the online gardening forum told me. Every morning, I went outside to defy the experts. You only need to wait a few more weeks, I hushed over the bushes. How hard could it be to prove that life could return against all documented odds? How hard could it be to bear grief in one hand and hope in the other?
III.
One of my precious friends, Sam, left Earth in April.
The same week that his life abruptly ended, I couldn’t stop thinking about the two military horses that, startled by construction noises nearby, bolted out of their regiment and through the streets of London. They ran for miles across the city, unshackled.
For the last three months, I’ve been unable to sit down and write; I only hear the inflections of his voice every time I do and hearing him without the thought of seeing him again, here, is too much of a heartache most days.
When I edited Sam’s writing, especially one specific project we were working on, I told him his sentences needed to rise and fall like a river, Your reader needs rhythm and rest, I’d tell him. When he was editing my work, he told me not to leave my reader behind me, Carry your reader with you, he’d say.
During some of the most difficult days of his life, and a few days before his death, he wrote to me, reminding me to be like a tree who puts down roots near rivers, not worrying during hot summers, never dropping a leaf, staying serene in drought, bearing fresh fruit in every season and drinking from God’s water source that never runs dry.
I wish that I could have carried him with me as he reminded me to do with my readers so many times. We all do.
V.
Have you ever seen a meadow buttercup bend in the breeze, tall and top-heavy? I wonder how they bear the wind’s buffeting over time. I’ve not been back to my home country in May for five years, nor seen buttercups in the meadows for a long time.
In May, the start of British summertime, I watched my son run the hills with his cousins, bursts of golden laughter flickering between their feet.
Bearing the weight of grief and reaching into the widening futures of children I love, for a brief moment, I was J.D. Salinger’s protagonist standing on an open plain,
“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all…I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.*”
VI.
At my childhood home, I searched for shoeboxes of old letters and journals. I found my tattered poetry books: Blake, Eliot, Shakespeare. April is the cruellest month, wrote Eliot; the memory and desire housed in these words somehow makes me feel safe. Each page scrawled with my handwriting from over a decade ago; almost foreign, almost someone else’s.
I find old cards and letters in Sam’s handwriting, less foreign than my own. He left those he knew with a legacy of language: book reviews, letters, cards and a staggering collection of essays. In one essay he wrote,
“Are we driven by our desire for visibility to be recognised for who we truly are? Or rather, can we be liberated to live out of a place of abundance…out of an identity of security, in the arms of a greater love than could ever be grasped?”
Now, when I write without him, I think of these words and try to write, and pray, that I can live fearlessly, roots planted in a source that never runs dry, branches stretching into the sky, bending in the breeze.
As always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflections.
Just stumbling across your words here and soaking them in. Thanks for sharing. 🖤
Thank you for putting your grief and love into words and sharing this with us 🫶🏽