I look at the last decade as a death, in toto. Of many things but identity was the worst because of the number of deaths I went through.
Losing your parents is the hardest. For me that was my mother.
The year 2000 began a string of losses of people that I loved. So this picture of me is about that — how one manages to carry on, lift the veil, make other descisions about survival and what one is going to need for all that.
Chiaroscuro — light and shade.
Someday I will be able to write it all but not now because it is far too close.
Yesterday, I said a mantra to myself on the beach — that I didn’t want to die. Of grief.
I don’t.
Everywhere around me are things that are making me sadder — these are the memories of houses, places, my family, this town.
It seems to me that I began stopping in 2000 when my dearest person passed. I’ve been very lost without that friendship in my life. The deep contact we had as writers.
One of the problems with writing is that you see and feel too much and sometimes it almost kills you to have to know that much about life. Or people.
What you want to try and do is leave behind some good. But in order to do that you have to show evil as a contrast.
I’m not sure that I can do anything other than write from now on. This was a silent decade — a decade of the inward turn of the soul and a cloister in a way.
This has been a decade where illusion has been stripped away.
So, I thought yesterday that grief is like a wall one must climb, and jump to the other side. We are all going to go through it in one way or another at various times and over various things — it’s just that I had to go through a whole tide of it and it has darkened my thoughts. Anyway, was thinking of Hemingway this morning.
Want to write The Seaheart, but not sure what is there instead…
It’s very hard to look at the stills of my family because I miss them so much.
Right now it is a matter of placing one foot in front of the other and just trying to stay alive and not be sad.
It is 11 years past 2000 now. Eleven years since my dearest friend has been gone and I feel hollow like a ghost in these rooms.
What is helping is swimming laps. There is a cool slide of water and it rushes by your ears — the pool is warm. There is the beach and the sun and the things the tide throws up.
There is the concept of drift, and of life as it drifts — decade to decade. Your parents never told you how to cope precisely. I know this though — my mother never coped with a decade of so much loss as I did, so quickly. Sometimes I’m not even sure how I am still standing.
VALENTINE BONNAIRE - WRITER 