I know Death well. As someone who speaks to the dead fairly regularly it has never been something I was afraid of. Of course I grieve when someone I love dearly dies.
It's hard to pinpoint when I first saw Death, but I remember sitting on the floor of a stable in dry straw feeding a sickly calf. H wouldn't drink from the bucket but if I stuck my fingers in the milk and offered them to him he sucked them clean. I don't know how long I did that for. He seemed to brighten. He nuzzled me affectionately. He died before I came to find him in the morning. There had been this light, this smell around him over the smell of hay and damp and earth. Something else. Almost sweet but not the milk either. It was Death.
I remember sitting waiting in an A+E once watching this glow from a very elderly man with a cut on his head. I even went to speak to the nurses who snapped at me. He was dying, just sat there already staring at the other side.
My "mother" and I had always had a difficult relationship but we hadn't spoken for over a year, mostly down to my sister. My heart was sore and I grieved. I mourned. I healed. Then I had this dream one night. It was so vivid and it was so violent!
I was standing in my "mother's" bed room and I was watching me beat her over and over with a golf club ( a golf club, no-one I know plays golf). Blood sprayed everywhere, up the walls, along the windows across my face. There was almost nothing of her left. Just the smell of her cigarettes and clean sheets.
I awoke mortified. How could I have dreamt such a horrible violent thing? I cried tried to explain it to Ken and he just shrugged.
"Just a dream."
I love Halloween. I love almost everything about it. As a witch and mother Samhain is like New Year, Yule and Day of the Dead and Halloween all mixed together.
I love the crafting and making things, the dressing up. The way mirth and reverence brush up to each other mischievously in the dark.
As a family we spend more time and money at Samhain than Yule in general. We tend to have a big party with friends coming from all over the country to eat, drink and be merry. There are dangerous alcoholic cocktails, mulled wine, loads of food and fireworks too.
I don't know why none of that happened the year my mother died (of course I began decorating very early and making papermache pumpkins) I just planned on having a quiet one. A little trick or treating and our own altar of missing loved ones.
I was asleep when the call came in. I had not taken any of my medicines so I was foggy.
It was a day or so before Samhain.
I got most of the conversation. My mother had had a bleed in her brain, she was being taken to Liverpool. A special hospital.
I was very quiet and very calm (something I kind of have to be). This was interpreted as indifference. I had no way to get to Liverpool (it was something like 4 trains). I also couldn't figure out why my sister was already there. She would have had to come past where I live to get there. So many things didn't make sense. I also was looking after my soul sister's boy for Samhain.
I knew I couldn't drop everything and run of alone to Liverpool. I had only just come out of hospital for near kidney failure and I knew my darling little angel of a sister, would emotionally beat the shit out of me. She had done it when my father had taken sick some 10 years ago and I knew I couldn't risk it.
I tried to be polite and civil, apparently this made things worse. I got the details of the hospital but as soon as my sister got there she told them she was sole next of kin and told the nurses to refuse to tell me anything about my mother's condition.
This went on for about a week.
It was torturous and even in the brief snippets I was "allowed" to know she was getting much worse. In the end a friend offered to drive me. I accepted only to be informed my mother's life support was being turned off the only day I could go.
I waited all day to hear news.
In the end 36 hours afterwards I received a text message.
She was gone.
If I thought that was painful, she had only just begun.
All of her pain and grieve she channelled into refusing to allow me to grieve my mother in death.
She threatened the funeral home (I rang every one in North Wales) with a law suit if I was given any details. I was not considered family.
I had been disowned before of course. It was one of their favourite punishments for me.
I tried to focus on my daughter's birthday but I was a struggle.
It was as though her death ripped open the oldest deepest wounds in me. It was an agony and my daughter suffered too. She was unable to grieve.
We held a Bardo, my mother had been nominally Buddhist. We bought a Buddha statue and meditated and chanted for her. I found some peace with her passing. I found forgiveness and hope.
It took a few months. I couldn't write. I found it hard to settle. I had nightmares of finding my mother's body almost every night. I would be walking and trip and I would find her that way. Time passed.
The Veil of grief was lifting from me.
I get a phone call and my sister informs me my father is dead. In fact he was found dead yesterday morning. No more. Call ends.
I try to swing into action. Everyone allies round but she threatens us. Gets the police to call us twice.
We were doing nothing wrong. Nothing illegal, in fact she was keeping my father's body from me, which was just as illegal as last time.
I travelled to his home. I tried.
In the end I was barred from his funeral too.
It is one thing to be disowned in life but disowned in death rips something from you.
I did better with my father's death because I could no longer believe that my sister was incapable of such cruelty. The sweet girl I knew, my sister, was also dead.
What ever the monster walking around in her meat suit was beyond help. Beyond reason. Once the rage ebbed from my body and soul I felt an odd pity. That her response to losing someone who loved her, who adored her was to cause pain. That her lesson in grief was madness and destruction.
She took no joy in the special personal bond they shared. Or that she was the only person my mother ever truly loved. She took no comfort at her charmed existence in the warm glow of that maternal light denied to me all my life.
It took sometime to heal again but it was the Fae who lifted me when I was ready (along with my wonderful family and friends).
They leaped back into my life. They told me it was time. I started meditating every day again. I called on them and their wisdom and care was endless.
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