I endeavour to keep things real here for you.
And for me.
It keeps me grounded.
What a shitty thing for us doulas and death-workers to espouse the idea that deaths should be inspirational, romantic even.
Dying and death can, indeed, be beautiful.
And peaceful.
But sometimes, amongst all that beauty and love, it’s raw, it’s ugly, it rages and it is anything but peaceful.
And I tell you this so that, when the capacity to make memories reaches it’s limit or becomes suffocating, when the overwhelm or suffering becomes all-encompassing and when you encounter the raw, the ugly, the rage, the bitterness of that metaphorical pill, of things left undone and the internal noise of it all that, you don’t think that you are doing it wrong.
You are not.
You are not.
This is dying in all it’s humanness.
And no matter how spiritual, religious, easy-going you are you will very likely be taken by surprise at the strength of it.
The conscious and unconscious, the internal and external pressure to make as many memories as you can in the time you have when time is short, when you or your person are diagnosed with an untreatable, life shortening illness that memory-making ideation can become all-consuming, overwhelming, exhausting and unachievable.
Of course you want to make memories.
For yourself and for your people.
And yet, here is what my doula heart will tell you.
Go gently, my friend.
Make space for it all.
Making memories is not so much in the “doing”, in the photo opportunities, in the forced or choreographed inspirational moments or in the physical legacies but in the “being”.
They are built in who you are.
They are not built in what you do – they are built when you are able to just be.
Being in the quiet moments.
Being in the very ordinariness of togetherness.
Being held in a space of love in tumultuous times.
That’s what makes the most precious of memories.
And sometimes, strangely enough, it’s the times between the deliberate making of memories that become the richest, most exquisite memories of all.
The moments between.
Spend time there too.
This is what will hold those still living in their times of grief.
With deepest love
Nancy xx
HELD 