My Own Family Sticker

You see them every-bloody-where, but they’re most prominent on the rear windscreens of people-movers and 4WDs. They depict happy families: dad, mum, eldest child, second child, sometimes third and even fourth child, dog, cat, goldfish: the works. All smiling faces.

I did a bit of a search on the web, but was unable (not totally unexpected) to find the sticker that describes my family. They don’t seem to have drawings for a very sad father or a grieving mum, not to mention the drawing of a plaque in the cemetery where the eldest daughter is buried. That does not sell too well, I suppose. So I guess we’re not within their targeted market segment, and somehow that feels kind of a relief. Honestly, it is such a banal concept, but of course everybody seems to fall for it.

If I were to make an accurate drawing of our family, I’d go for something this: try and picture a taciturn, sad dad who is regularly woken up too early and sits down to write in an effort to stop himself from crying his heart out; a desolate mum who chooses to punish herself at the gym so she does not have to think too hard; two boys who love each other but fight each other all the time because the gentle judge who would sort out things between them two is no longer there; these twin boys look indeed quite happy and healthy. Anyone who has seen them in action will say so, but I bet inside their minds they would rather be forgetting what happened to them and their sister; I bet they both see the future (the rest of their lives) in a totally different way to that their two parents see the rest of their lifetimes. One can foresee some serious conflicts down the path of years to come.

I’m quite certain such a figurative drawing is almost impossible for anyone to imagine. Too dreadful. Not nice. But what is probably worse, for some the reality such an imaginary drawing would represent appears to be almost unbearable to look at or to come anywhere near to.

The Brief Crack of Light

‘Common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.’

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited

Though I attended a Catholic school as a child (or perhaps, precisely because of this?) I admit I’m not religious at all. I used to consider myself as an agnostic, but what I witnessed on 29 September 2009 has now firmly established my membership of the atheistic club.

With regard to my daughter Clea’s death, one of the most insufferable comments anyone can make is the rather trite “You now have a little angel in heaven” or “She is now in heaven, the little angel”. I suspect people who say such things to me simply want to feel good themselves, and regrettably have no understanding of how their words make me feel.

The day after we returned from Samoa on a Polynesian Blue plane that carried the coffin with Clea inside, we had to go and meet the staff of the company that were to organise the funeral. The lady asked us if we wanted to read (or for someone to read) a poem. I asked what the poem was about and requested to see it or hear it before I agreed to it.

The good lady started reading and halfway through the poem I heard the words “for I am needed up above”. I immediately (yet politely) stopped her. I did not want to hear any more. My daughter could not be needed anywhere but with us, with her two brothers.

That night I sat down and wrote a brief poem myself. I read the poem at Clea’s funeral, and later it was placed inside the card we mailed to hundreds of people:

At the time I didn’t know I was beginning to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): poor sleep, nightmares, failure to concentrate, stress, inability to cope with multitasking, etc. I guess much of the poetry I have written has helped me go through the grieving period. But the poetry has also flourished under PTSD.

I guess I agree with Nabokov’s dictum: we are but a brief crack of light between two everlasting nights. Clea loved her crack of light, but it was all too brief, and ended violently. Surely no ‘angel’ deserved to go that way.

Why this blog?

Cupid and Psyche, late 18th or early 19th century, in terracotta
. Claude Michel, 'Clodion' (1738-1814).
Photograph by Barry Green.

Why this blog?
For many reasons, among them the perceived need to separate the fundamentally literary stuff from the more personal issue of grief. Another reason: because I'm about to quit my job of 4 years and will have (should have) more time for myself. Yet another reason: because I want to challenge silence, and throw the gauntlet to indifference. Yet another reason: boys don't cry?

Why the name?

It comes from one of my poems, the second of the 'Four Sonnets' I wrote in 2010 and published last year, in what was an attempt to describe the despair and hopelessness I felt after waking up from the most beautiful dream I have had since Clea died. (By the way, mostly, they've been nightmares, not dreams). But in this dream of mine, Clea and I were again playing, she was chatting to me in that giggly girly voice of hers, I was once again holding her arms and spinning her around the way I used to do when I dropped her at school in the mornings – Clea just loved that. Timeless swoon defines the state I’d prefer to be in: an endless sleep where everything is right again, where my life is the way it was before 29 September 2009, a dream from which I would rather not wake up, not ever again.

Why in English? 

Why not? I'm not afraid of words, are you?

What will appear here?

Blood, sweat and tears.