Loss

Ok... loss... been thinking about it all week obviously, and feel like I'm not really getting much further from where I started... We all experience so much loss in our lives... even if it's just a pair of shoes you really liked getting lost, or one of your best friends dying, it changes your life in varying degrees of subtlety and obviousness. I guess loss has always been a confused, unarticulated issue for me... being the youngest in my family, yet living 8000 miles away from them, death was a regular yet diconnected ocurrence. At the age of 5, 8, 10 the death of a relative that you only met a couple of times seems unrelated to everyday life; you cannot comprehend their absence, or the concept of their loss, and they become a faded figure in the crowds of acquaintences thrust into your memory. My grandmother was one such figure... distant... homely, always cooking and wearing an apron and rubber gloves, elbows deep in the sink, or insistently making plates of lemon cake... pleasant but unknown, unfamiliar to me and my life. I felt sorry for her death, but more keenly felt anguish for the pain I wittnessed from my Grandad at her passing. He loved her greatly. People never seem the same after the death of their partner in my family; they seem to fade out of existence themselves when their other has gone... I knew my Grandad. He visted me frequently in the Falklands and was an active character in my childhood. His death seemed more painful because I knew him, loved him; felt his absence, his removal from my world. Loss for me is losing what I knew, what I loved... what I actually comprehend that I can never physically have returned to me... is primary loss. As time goes on a more subconsious, slow- acting loss sets in... that hollow, empty feeling of the extent of wasted time... of mistakes... of what can only ever remain a memory. I think the closest I ever came to verbally describing how I experience loss was when I was 17 and in that precarious self- induced misery time of my life and procrastinating through the misuse of poetry... even though I was such a cliched writer, I still believe it is the closest I have got to describing the loss I felt at 15 on what I still believe to be the most obvious worst day of my life; I have just spent half an hour looking for the poem, the words that described most closely the umcomprehensible ache of the loss of one of my best friends... and seem to have thrown it away or left it behind in the Falklands. Maybe that sums up the way that I deal with loss... maybe it encapsulates the very reason that I cannot forget my losses... because however much time passes I still cling to the pain of their memories. In my experiments towards the finale of my piece, I hope to be able to objectify that pain and in that relieve its burden... but I already oibjectify it... by keeping it all physically and mentally locked away inside a small antique brown box...