Peace

Over the past couple of weeks, through conversations over coffee with various friends, I’ve realised something I probably knew for a while. And that thing is how important my peace is to me.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not in some zen like state where I have come to some sort of transcendental understanding of what happened to us and accepted it as part of a greater plan. I will always have the embers of burning rage tucked in the fireplace of my heart that this is our life. I don’t let the fire consume me, because that helps no one, but that doesn’t mean it’s not flickering in the background somewhere. That’s not what I mean when I talk about peace.

There are two meanings to the word peace. One is to do a state or period with no war and one is to do with freedom from disturbance. To some extent, I think I mean both of these.

Notwithstanding the atrocities happening all over the world right at this second, Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan, Myanmar, to get you started, from my privileged position on my sofa, I’m experiencing a state of no war.

But I also recognise, looking back, that there was a time that while my nation was at peace, I felt at war with the world, at war with myself. It’s a tenuous link, but bear with me. There were times that I was so emotionally conflicted that it felt like a battle to stay stable. It felt like the world had gone from a really safe and content place on the morning of New Year’s Eve 2018 to a place that I didn’t recognise and felt ill-prepared to negotiate, a path that had once been well-known now feeling like a route peppered with landmines, of which I was unaware, ready to explode and cause carnage.

In the throes of recent bereavement, that all-encompassing, soul-wrenching, physically-visceral stage of grief I felt both hollowed out, numb, and full of lava. The daily grind left me battle weary, bruised, feeling like a casualty. I couldn’t tell where the next assault would come from, whether it would be a the shrapnel pelleting of a torrent of grief triggers or a single well-aimed (and sometimes presented as well-intentioned) sniper fire to the heart. To keep living, building, solo-parenting, providing, functioning and making everything else function, seemed like too much, it felt like more than a skirmish to find the will to continue. Sometimes it felt like it would be easier to lie down and let the fighting continue above me. I didn’t want to not be here at all, I didn’t have plans to join Steve in death, but I also didn’t really want to be here if here was here….

I don’t feel like that now. I don’t think I did anything other than submit to time (and a bit of counselling more than once) but I have come out the other side of that depth of grief warring with my very existence. The grief monster is no longer the Jurassic Park T-Rex screaming in my face from above, so much bigger than me, baring rows of teeth threatening to devour me whole, nor the velociraptor with its sharp claws ready to tear at the depths of me, able to open the doors I think I have shut fast behind me; it is now more of a snake. I still don’t want to live with it, it can still infect me with poison, bring me down with one bite or make me feel like I am suffocating. But on the whole it won’t attack me unless it is really provoked, and it often feels like I’m best to follow the same advice emergency services give for a snake encounter – vacate the area and if it’s in the house and won’t leave block up all the doors call a professional for help (which both escaping to somewhere else for a break and therapy have been my wellbeing go-to over the years, so particularly resonate with me). It might occasionally wrap itself around me, but it might slither away to a corner and hide, hissing to itself in the dark but not making a spectacle of itself or stopping me go about my day, and it’s usually the latter.

Grief doesn’t feel like war anymore. I have peace.

But there’s also peace as the freedom from disturbance. And maybe this is the one I protect more carefully. Grief waging war on me there’s not a lot I can do about. I’m going to grieve the rest of my life. More grief will surely come. Building a shelter to hide in doesn’t stop the bombs coming. But freedom from disturbance is something I hold very dear, especially now.

Living for so long feeling like the only one responsible for the survival of the family, not knowing where the next blow-up was going to come from – would it be an unexpected need to replace an appliance threatening the budget, would it be a kid who is usually kind having a moment of madness in year 6 and saying something stupid about dead dads, would it be another night with sleep interrupted by the plod of small child footsteps as they came to check you were still breathing and then you being so aware of your own breathing that you couldn’t sleep, would it be a pandemic…. There’s nothing like solo parent survival to force you to embrace living in the heightened state of constant fight or flight and it is totally and utterly exhausting.

When you get to a place where you don’t have to live your life wound tighter than a very tightly wound thing, because despite all the signs to the contrary you have found some sort of normal which does depend on you and you alone, but you seem to have developed the Popeye muscles to bear the load (eat your spinach, kids), when you realise that you took a deep breath in and breathed out again and nothing went to crap in the meantime, when you lower your shoulders to a normal level and acknowledge that they may have been touching the bottom of your big hoop earrings for over a calendar year, then these are all signs that – by no matter how small the increments – your peace is returning.

Because here’s the thing. When one day, for no reason that you know of, you wake up and your life has taken on the script of an extra in a hospital show (complete with the Intensive Care doctor being far too good looking and with far too sexy an accent to be saying the words about massive internal bleeding and possibilities of imminent death that he is actually saying), when you have lived the high drama of telling your kids that their dad is going to die within months on a random Friday teatime in January while all the other normal families are arguing over whether it’s a nuggets and chips night or pizza for dinner, when you have stood in front of a room full of people and done the “inspirational young widow” speech at a funeral that your five year old decided everyone should eat Pom Bears and Costco cookies after, when you have lived high drama in a way that only fictional characters should…. why would you ever invite any more?

It’s interesting because a lot of people I have spoken to say their forties is the time when they became more confident in who they were and could make decisions for themselves being less bothered about what other people thought about it.

I became a widow at forty, so I don’t know how much of my couldn’t care less attitude is from my forties, and how much of it is from being a widow, to be honest. Or maybe the sheer volume of couldn’t care less-ness comes that I currently own comes from a combination of both factors.

But I think that when you have been pushed to the edge by something like watching your husband be decimated by cancer, by young widowhood, by the weight of grieving your partner and carrying grieving children – when you have stared off that edge into the abyss before you – I think that gives you an edge. It’s an edge a lot of people don’t like or hope that it will be dulled over time. But I have peace with my edge, and peace with the fact that some people won’t be my people because they simply cannot cope with it. That’s ok. They didn’t live on the edge in the same way I did, or they would understand why it’s there and possibly even appreciate it. But the edge enables me to care even less about what people think about the way I grieve, or parent, or exist, or survive, or live. I have peace with who this catastrophic life event (or catastrophic death event, more accurately) has made me, even if part of me will always wish I never became that person. I don’t need you to like me if I am at peace with myself. And that means I am not disturbed by what other people think about it.

I can only play the cards I was dealt. I will confess to often not liking my hand and feeling like it is a pretty crap lot to be honest. And they probably aren’t winning cards. But I can only play what I have. I have peace with that, and I have peace with the way I’m playing them. I don’t need to see everyone else’s hand because sometimes that can make me bitter about the way the pack has fallen and given me what I have. So I find peace by not peering over shoulders to see other the cards anyone else is holding. For me, that looks like not following anyone I know in real life on social media so I’m not constantly bombarded with the fact their cards don’t include the Jack of Cancer or King of Dead Husband. For me, it’s more peaceful to look at what I do have even if it’s a mish mash with no flushes, houses or any of a kinds.

My life may sometimes feel small – too small – and days may roll into each other because they are uneventful. But I experienced the highest stressor of life events and filled four months with a roller coaster of doom, and 0/10 do not recommend. I think I would rather be slightly bored than felled by tragedy, thanks.

Not to mention, that life brings its own drama, and I don’t need to invite any more. In the next eight years, five of the summers will see a child sitting GCSEs or A-Levels (one summer, we even have both at once), which is a testament to my naive offspring planning, but also recognition that this season in our household is not exactly undisturbed in and of itself. There will be plenty of disturbance introduced simply by virtue of having multiple teenagers inhabiting the same space. While we are definitely not a “pressured to achieve academically” family, we are very much a “you are still academically able so how about at least trying something that resembles close to your hardest please” family, and I very much anticipate that “free from disturbance” will not be our MO as we negotiate these milestones. All at the same time. With hormones left, right and centre (including myself, because, fun times).

And so bearing this in mind. Bearing in mind that five years may have passed but the weekend just gone proved that Fathers’ Day will inevitably see some sort of an emotional reaction from at least one child who is well able to cope with not having a dad on the day everyone else is celebrating theirs, but also wants their chuffing dad back. Bearing in mind that a child who saw their dad die before they left primary school will never be totally disturbance free, and that long-time grief added to the myriad of teenage hormones, idiocy, inability to not be right, and “interesting” situations that other teenagers bring is a mix and a half, then you better believe that I’m going to want protect my peace when I can.

Because there is only me to protect it for me – and my children – and so the next right thing is always to do just that.

At present, that looks like valuing my peace and the peace of my family over compromising it in order to share my life with a partner. I’m not saying that the right person doesn’t exist somewhere out there. But you don’t get to mid-forties without some baggage. I have enough that Ryanair would need me to mortgage my house to pay for it, after all. No baggage judgement here. But someone else’s dramatic baggage is not something that I necessarily want to introduce into my life at the moment. While the benefits of connection and companionship are marvellous and multiple, my life as is does not make finding ways to develop these easy, and the compromises necessary to do so bring disturbance to a family peace that really doesn’t need it, given everything else.

Right now, peace is more precious than a partner who could potentially bring as much pain as positives. I don’t need to be questioning in a relationship that hasn’t had the chance to be built properly because my life is complicated and chaotic and not always accommodating. I don’t need my peace rocked by anything that isn’t the best, and while I do still believe in the best and the best in people, there is an awful lot of not the best out there to wade through first. The wading is not worth the price of my peace when I don’t really have the capacity or the time to be the parent, colleague, friend, person AND the partner I would want to be, all at once.

Not only will I choose to prioritise my peace over potential partnerships, I will choose to prioritise it over what already exists in my life. I will not pick up drama or disturbance about which I do not need to concern myself, or which I could concern myself but cannot effect change and so still opt not to. I will not be putting myself in a position where a backdoor to disturbance is opened. I will not take on offence so I will always choose to believe that intentions were good even if the outcome was a dumpster fire and far from it, but I also will not be here for the “should have should do” opinions that somehow always find me wanting even if they come sugar-coated from those who haven’t lived what I have or haven’t loved me enough to sit with me in the rubble over these past years, and I will walk away if necessary. By all means bring what you like, because good things can come from all places, but I will not be adding anything that doesn’t lift me up, or seeks to set any cats among any pigeons. I already have a cat. He likes to sleep on my lap or, if there are people both upstairs and downstairs, he will sleep on the stairs to be near everyone all at once. He is the very epitome of peace. This cat, yes. Pigeon-worrying cats of drama, heck to the no.

I will happily binge-watch 9-1-1 and all manner of high drama stories. But I don’t want to live them. I did that. It sucked. The consequences continue to ripple out and I’ve got them from tsunami-level to gentle toe-lapping wave. There are very few things I now won’t do to protect our peace because I know that without my efforts to reduce the disturbances I am more easily impacted by the war that grief wages in the background. My peace impacts more than just me, and you better believe I’ll fight to keep it with that edge within me that has been sharpened beyond anything I would have imagined, even if that means hard decisions along the way.

Peacefully, of course.