On grief, and the life we almost miss

The horse chestnut at the edge of the lane is shedding its conkers early.

I photographed them the other morning – small, unripe, jettisoned by a tree under stress from the heat – and felt the familiar tightening in my chest. The grief that comes when the natural world shows you its distress in small, specific ways that are somehow harder to bear than the headlines.

I was standing there with my head down, turning it over in my mind, all we might lose, all we are already losing – when the scent of wild honeysuckle reached me.

I stopped.

That perfume. Extravagant, delicious, completely indifferent to the heat and the stress and the weight of everything. Just there, in the air, for pleasure.

And I thought: I almost missed that.

— 🌼 —

It brought back something I have been sitting with for a long time.

My mother was diagnosed with a rare leukaemia when she was about sixty. She died at seventy-four. For around fourteen years I lived with a particular kind of anticipatory grief – memorising the shape of her hands, closing my eyes on the phone to hear her voice more clearly, her laugh, her particular turn of phrase. Trying to fix her in my memory while she was still alive to be fixed.

The irony is that a part of me was already grieving her death while she was still living. And in doing so – in holding her at the distance that pre-grief creates – I missed moments. Not all of them. There was joy, real joy, between us. But there was also a kind of glass between me and her, the glass of anticipated loss, that meant I was never quite fully there with my living mother.

Fourteen years. And now she is gone, and what I remember most clearly is not the moments of pre-grief but the moments when I forgot to be sad and was simply with her.

Those are the ones I’d give anything to have more of.

— 🌼 —

I see the same pattern everywhere now in the way we relate to the planet.

The posts about what we are losing. The heartbreak – and it is real heartbreak, I feel it too – at the thought of a world without housemartins, without coral, without the particular smell of a woodland after rain. I watch the tiny housemartins peeping from their nests beneath my eaves and I am undone by the thought of them suffering in the heat.

But here is what the honeysuckle reminded me:

Anticipatory grief, if we are not careful, does to our relationship with the living world exactly what it did to my relationship with my mother. It puts glass between us and what we love. It means we are mourning the future loss while the thing itself – the housemartin, the honeysuckle, the unripe conker – is right here, asking to be met.

— 🌼 —

I am not saying: don’t grieve. The grief is real and it is right and it belongs to us.

I am saying: let it move through you rather than solidify into the story that everything is already lost.

Because it isn’t. Not yet. And even in the midst of what is genuinely, enormously difficult, the honeysuckle is still flowering. The housemartins are still peeping from their nests. The wild strawberries are still, if you find them, the most extraordinary thing you have ever tasted.

Notice. Savour. Be here for what is still here.

The grief will come when it comes. In the meantime, there is this.

The scent of honeysuckle on a hot morning.

The shape of your mother’s hands.

The small, urgent, irreplaceable life of right now.

With earth beneath my feet,

Wendy