What choice do I have - I'm Staying Alive...

As it is in life, with each other, we move, we shake, we laugh, we cry, we shout, we are still, we live and we die.

I'm staying alive...

The Spiral of Dreams...

"Sometimes, the most beautiful thing...

The most innocent thing, and many of those dreams,

Pass us by,

Keep passing me by..."

Words from 'Angel' by S. Nicks

I've been sleeping very badly since I got the news... Mind whirling in spirals, consumed by whirligigs.

...Not knowing is the worst.

Anticipation and imagining is just awful.

What to expect, what might I find?

And, even worse, what's not going to be there, where I expect it to be?!

I've called the Council Tax people. Apparently, I owe them over three hundred and fifty squid. I'd guess that's just for starters. Roll on the gas and electricity bills!

And I've found her obituary online on t'Internets. Not even my dad's name is mentioned, but her family are. And yet she chose to be buried with his name... Odd that. ...As if he never existed. (As if I don't still breathe oxygen too). ...But I, and my family know differently...

We went to her daughter's home to collect the keys... GJ donning the mantel of The Guardian of Keys...

Meanwhile, I 'wandered lonely' in an up-market supermarket nearby, buying some clothes and toys for my niece's birthday. She's Emily, and she's tiny, all of 4 this month. There's something positive to look forward to...

I chose some frilly cool cotton tees with bunny rabbits in gardening gear on them and leggings for her, looking forward to brighter, warmer days. Everything I chose is white, lavender and pink. Now she's also got a pink Barbie-stylee car complete with little blonde doll and black kitty. "Suitable for ages 3+". So that's okay then.

Lovely.

A good friend, whom I'm meeting for lunch again soon, told me ages ago that the reason I gather so much pink about me, even tho' 'I was never a Pink Person', is because of an absence of love. She feels that I'm trying sub-consciously to draw affection and love to the central gap in my shimmering aura... As I live on without the love, or at least the presence, of my dear parentals...

She may be right.

And so I treated myself to some new DVDs while I was at the supermarket... I buy things to comfort myself, to cheer, there's no doubt. They say women are prone to that, don't they?

I know Mutti was... And one of the reasons, I think, that she went to her hasty, 'twirly', grave (= 'Too Early'), was her fear of being submitted helpless to hospital, meaning she wouldn't be there to intercept the post before my dad did of a morning...

...That he'd find out she had a credit card bill, with what we'd regard today as a modest amount, outstanding...

My dad was the mildest of men. The month she died, I even had to teach him how to use a cash-point card. The ATM machine was so foreign to him... He had a card but had never used it, my mum gave him pocket 'money...', with which he was wholly satisfied. And I know he may well have grumbled and whinged about her perceived weaknesses, her spending too much money on daft things, and me...

He would have gone quiet on her for a bit, but he would never in a million years have stopped loving her. For he never did.

He was always fond of telling me that he had room in his heart enough still to encompass his Joanie, as well as me, my family, his dog and later, his new partner, who was to become my own 'Bette' noir in so many ways...

I came about fifth down on that list in terms of pecking order. I used to joke with him about it... I came just after Sophie the dog!

He adored her. Soph' he called her.

And when he was laid a-bed, delirious and dwindling away himself, he dreamily said, among other things, "I'm going to see Joanie. ...Soon..."

He said that. With witnesses to tell me thus at his bedside. I think there are some things that we just will never understand in life.

Nor ought we to try.

Such as the time when my infant son whispered to me, when he was very small himself, and innocent, wholly without guise or guile,

"Don't you remember, mammy, silly mammy...

Back when I used to sell papers on the corner of the street?

Don't you remember - When I was a little boy?!"

He was a little boy... What memory could he possibly have of a past life lived? At three?

There are some things we should never try to understand, to explain away.

Like continuing with love, while living has gone...

Mea Culpa... I've Been Waiting For You...

By the time you read this, I'll have started the work of clearing his house, after her family have travelled over it and through it like a biblical plague of starving locusts, I've no doubt.

Such is the path of life, non?... Such is the path of grief, as some of you wise people leaving wise words have had the sense, and I'd guess the experiences yourselves, to remark upon...

I thank you for your wisdom, your helpful words, and your kindnesses shown to me. Bless you.

And yet I sometimes fear that history repeats itself, does it not?

I know there are things there that belonged to him.

There are trinkets and treasures I recall that belonged to my mother.

That belong to me.

That I hope are still there...

I don't know yet what we will do with the old house... The house that nobody has ever lived in since new but my family, because they are still my family. I don't feel up to selling it just now, and it's not really a very healthy sales market at present, but I don't necessarily want to leave it empty and vulnerable - To attack or to crime...

I would like my dad's tools, that he handled and cherished.

He used to fix things for me with those tools.

Things that now remain unmended tell his story...

There's an old hand-drill with a red handle that belonged to my maternal great-grandfather, who might have brought it back from America... Maybe in the Twenties, or before that... I think it's marked 'USA...'

My dad and I found a record of him entering Ellis Island... We really don't know what happened next, but I don't believe we still have any relatives in the US. (Unless you know otherwise, mes bloggy buddies Over The Pond?! Fingers crossed, eh?)

I would like to hold the cheap china unicorn that was one of the last presents that I gave my mother. ...She loved it.

I want their photographs and memories back - Home and Away, black and white pictures and happiness of here and abroad. Me as a baby, held on a varicosity of knees.

Me, the wan podgy toddler, standing feisty and proud, hands on hips, on an upturned boat at the beach in the village where my maternal grandparents lived -- The north sea breeze blowing on, and me with a sharp blonde bob. Some things never change!

There's me as a blushing bride in a romantic knee-length white lace dress that my dad helped me to choose, the week before the wedding; Twenty pound notes pressed frantically into his hands by my mother, impatient for me to,

'Choose something decent, and do not let me down!".

Here, I'm holding on to a white straw boater in July's bitter north-easterly wind - I'd bought that hat with its white streaming ribbons on a break at our friend's in Suffolk the previous spring, long before I'd even found THE dress. ...Well, it was the Eighties, and ever the Fashion Victim, there's me holding THAT short white wedding dress down against my knees and the breezes too!

I'm looking forward to seeing the treasured brief moments of my mother and father as fierce, proud grandparents to Grizz, whom they lovingly called "The Boy"...

My Mutti didn't see Grizz's fifth birthday... She would have loved him to bits. She wanted 'to eat him up for breakfast', she loved him with all of her battered heart...

I'd like their love letters, full of imaginings and Fifties' British and American movies -- Love at long distance while my dad was stationed away from home in the RAF.

These, I know, were secreted away, secured with white ribbon and surreptitiously slipped in amongst their wedding memorabilia and those Welcome Baby, and Baby's 1st Birthday cards that celebrated the arrival of me into their lives - I remember baby pink cards and silver horseshoes and, now-silent, bells in paper and card, all stashed safely away when my mum was 17 and my dad 21.

I had come along to spoil their happiness, do you see, to be the apple of my dad's eye, around twelve years later. ...Conceived in a foreign land that I'll never visit, it's just too dangerous. That was the first time she'd ever flown in a 'plane, of course, a ramshackle one at that...

I'd like to see their photo slides. Men in beige uniform standing to attention, and sometimes relaxing in the scorching hot climate, nervously scanning the dusty ground for scorpions at their feet...

I understand you can have slides made into DVDs these days... I'd like to do that. To resurrect their memories. Their lives.

Young Love.

Love's Young Dream.

As I tippy-tappy here, I don't know if any of this is still there in the house... My childhood home from the age of 8 hasn't received any heat (or probably electricity so I'm taking a torch!) over the coldest, dampest winter we've had in over forty years...

I hope that none of this has been lost to the elements, to foxing and fogging, to lack of heat and to damp... I hope I can save what I'd like to save.

For prosperity. For me. It's all I have left of them...

It feels like it's all I have left of me...

And I don't know what I'll be encountering... But I'm floundering, an adult foundling...

And I feel for their loss as a family... But I'm still holding on to mine.

It's very much my loss...

And I'm not afraid to admit that I'm scared.

Art, as before, by Ann-Julie Aubry - "I've Been Waiting For You" - I want to buy some of those prints, to secure my own artistic legacy for my child, and my future grand-children, perhaps...