The difficulties of the last couple of weeks have really been plaguing my brain.
There have been many niggling things in my head that I just haven’t been able to get my brain and grief around.
But helpfully my parents have been down for a week to get kids back to school and us back into a bit of routine.
Surprisingly the fine weather allowed us to go for a walk or two. Including attempting a mountain in the nearby Grampians National Park.
The Grampians have an utterly bizarre triggering affect on me. It has been as big a surprise to me, as anyone.
When Pete was alive it wasn’t like we visited them often. But there is certainly fun and love attached to them.
For Molly’s birthday in February last year we bought her an experience at the Hall’s Gap Zoo in an attempt to make her smile and laugh and escape from the grief that losing her Dad only 4 weeks before had delivered.
It was the first time we had travelled out of town since Pete died and I was so beside myself with wanting the kids to have a good day that I put myself into an anxious mess that left me speechless, unable to eat, shivering, and even visiting the chemist to get a blood pressure check just to reassure myself my heart palpitations weren’t me actually dying.
The day back then was, by the way, perfect and the 11 year old who was so sad was made so happy by patting and feeding and sitting with wombats for 40 mins.
So when Mum and Dad were down we thought we would tackle an easy walk in the Grampians.
I was ridiculously impacted by this. I got so anxious about a perfectly civilised walk I could hardly dress myself. I couldn’t eat. And there was certainly a lot of mind over matter happening as I tried to walk AND talk to my mother on the way.
We got 1/2 way up what is considered one of the easiest mountain walks and had to turn back mostly to a knee replacement in Dad that couldn’t tackle the terrain. I was definitely ok with this. The mountain was too big to climb for me that day.
Mum and Dad left yesterday and I returned to having an empty house.
And I was so empty. I was back to my sad reality.
I cooked last night and cocked it up monumentally - burnt steak, terrible veggies, borderline sauce...
I revisited something I had written trying to work through an issue that had vexed me more than any other in the journey I am on - it vexes me still.
So I woke up this morning and I felt so strongly that maybe my life is currently like that hill that I just can’t seem to get to the top of. That no matter what I do, and how much people help, I just can’t seem to get to the top. That there is always something that stops me.
I needed to get myself up to the top of the hill physically just to prove to myself I could get to the top of it ... eventually. I knew climbing the mountain wasn’t just about that physical sense, it was about the metaphical and emotional sense, too.
Because I have so often felt like every time I think I get near the top, I just roll back down to the bottom.
And that’s ok.
That’s part of the journey.
But surely, at some point, you can get to the top without falling down to the bottom again?
So today was the day I needed to prove that to myself. Lest I completely lose my mind.
I woke the kids up after a sleep in and asked (begged) them to walk up the mountain we hadn’t been able to get up last weekend with me, today.
I reasoned we could take some of Pete and scatter him so he overlooked the workplace region he enjoyed so much down here.
It‘s what led to the decanting ashes ridiculousness - you can read about that HERE
So up we went.
We got past where we had to turn around last week and took a deep breath when the sign said there was 400m to go.
I was emotionally exhausted from the morning.
I haven’t slept well all week.
There was lots of internal discussion in my head while walking up the mountain... about not needing to do it; absolutely having to do it; how tired I was; that this was ridiculous because we are walking up an actual mountain (granted it was a little one) when there was a choice to do that... it seems like a silly choice; grief and actual mountains are similarly hard; except for one of them I had a choice - what was I doing dragging us all up here; it is very windy in the mountains; that sign definitely lied and this is further than 400 metres; I have said I am not angry in this but I definitely am angry about some realities at the minute; why am I trying to prove I can walk up a mountain when everyone tells me this grief mountain could be years of climbing; just keep putting one foot in front of the other; stop whigeing - it’s the smallest mountain in the Grampians; god I am unfit; how come I am carrying the bag with an iPad in it that I said not to bring...
It’s a crazy place, the inside of my head.
But we made it.
We got to the top.
I got over myself and all the ridiculousness in my head and complaining about being a ‘flatlander’ and not able to enjoy a walk with one foot higher than the other.
The view was lovely.
I think Pete will enjoy the view.
The bits of him that I didn’t bring back down.
Because I had lugged a jar of him up there to scatter and it was super windy. So the kids and I sat for a bit working out wind direction, it’s swirling, and where we would scatter the ashes.
Like many things, there’s a laughable element to this.
I waited until the wind had died down. Stood upon a rock.
And threw him out into the universe ... just as gust of wind blew up and he covered me completely.
I’m quite sure I have brought most of him back down on my jacket, in my scarf, down my shirt.
Though I do hope that I scattered most of him off me onto the path - a path he would have walked with the kids so happily when he was fighting fit.
I’d like to think the bits that were stuck in my bra that I decanted on the path near the lying sign about how much further it was, were part of his legs which had carried him so well through his life - at their best when running amok or with/and his children.
Helpfully, Pip recorded the whole thing...
And I’d love to say that at the end of the day I felt calm. That I felt like climbing the mountain had, indeed, helped and I felt happy/ relieved/ accomplished/ satisfied.
I did at the time. I really did feel like getting to the top was a good thing.
The reality also was: Getting to the top didn’t change anything... I tumbled right back down the mountain and I cried and cried and cried.
I wrote about my experience in an attempt to get my head around it.
I wrote reams of emotional jibberish to a friend, who I’m quite sure thought I might have been losing the plot, but instead offered kinds words and some expletives as I sobbed into my phone about how much I hate all of this weight I have to carry and how it’s great I can laugh about the ashes but in reality, oh my goodness my heart hurts and my body aches from the weight I’m carrying. And despite all of the love we are given, how ungrateful I feel when I say it’s not the type of love we need to fix this. And how I don’t really know my place anymore ... I was so secure beside Pete and I still feel so rudderless without him even after this long of doing it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the last nearly 18 months.
But we got up the mountain.
And so after tumbling down, again, we will get up, get dressed for school and have a shower and start putting one foot in front of the other, again.
Mostly because the inconvenient reality is that we have no choice, but also because we need to more forward.
We have to move forward. Even if sometimes its a shuffling, ash-covered, emotional circus.
One foot in front of the other.
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