Heart of Stone

Earlier this year, my family experienced a bereavement that wasn't entirely expected. Not a sudden, out-of-the-blue, without-warning departure, but a death we hadn't realised was quite so close.   He was 78 years old, plagued by relatively poor health, but with heart stents, daily medications and the remarkable ability of modern medicine to keep us going, none of us expected him to pass quite so soon.

This is not a piece about loss, nor of how fragile our lives are – which, of course, they are. Nor am I dwelling upon the familiar reminders to cherish every moment, to reconcile strained relationships and never leave things unsaid. All perfectly valid sentiments, but none of them explain what's been occupying my mind?

Instead, the thought rattling through my brain, the one I often reflect on and sometimes question, is why some people appear to react to these sad events so differently from the stereotypical grief we have come to expect. Why was I able to process and reconcile this loss with a somewhat blunt, these things happen kind of attitude? Why were family members standing beside me, wailing in despair, while I remained almost expressionless?

Did I care less than those around me? Did the loss somehow carry less weight, or did the symbolism of this man mean something different to me? 

When the doctors and medical professionals informed us his end was near, I recall feeling as though something cloudy had entered the room. Not so much a darkness, nor anything spiritual, but a narrowing of focus. The beeps and buzzing of the modern world seemed to fade away, the shutters were coming down on the usual distractions that surround us.

It was as if my body and mind were working together, telling my usually tough exterior that perhaps it was time to lower the protection systems. That it was OK to be vulnerable, to experience something life-changing without needing to rationalise it.

But the question I still ponder, all these months later, is whether I actually lowered those shields. Did I expose myself to the grief and loss that seemed to consume those around me? Did I truly allow myself to measure the importance of the moment, or were the doors actually open but I was still unable to feel the cold wind circling the room?

Here I stood, not for the first time in my life, beside the bed of an important character in my story, watching nature take its final snapshot. No more smiles or laughter would be witnessed. All that had been said, done or left undone was now being transformed into memories we now carry alone.  No more new pages could be written.

I stood in awe of the moment, knowing this would be one of those days I'd rather forget, yet somehow knowing its memory would make me stronger. But therein lies the dichotomy. Had I prepared myself so thoroughly for events like this that I'd inadvertently created a force field so strong, so rich in protection, that I could no longer reach beyond my own cocoon?

I'd always strived to be strong, to be the bearer of stability and calmness when others needed it most. But had I overshot? In being the steady one, had I become the cold one too?

I've long recognised that I process my world through reasoning and rationalisation, accepting these things as the inevitable components of existing. But has that somehow made me void of feeling what it actually means to feel?

Then there's another uncomfortable possibility. This person was an important character in the story of me, but not always in the traditional way you might expect. Over decades, our relationship had become difficult to label. We had our family-awarded titles, but a title doesn't guarantee the bond it implies.

Would my reaction have been different if it had been someone else? My instinctive answer is no. I suspect I'd have been much the same with most people. 

And perhaps the evidence was already there. My stoic exterior was almost a carbon copy of the first time I experienced such a close loss, 26 years ago. I never cried in that hospital room when my mother was taken from us at the young age of just 50 – the age I’m almost at now.

And here I was, over a quarter of a century later, the same demeanour still present, giving little away. Once again, my concern shifted towards those around me, while my own emotions remained somewhere I couldn't quite reach. Sadness engulfed the room and the days that followed, yet I remained unflinching. Was I simply incapable of showing the emotions others seemed to experience so freely? Worse still, did I even possess the capacity to feel them at all?

But is showing emotion necessarily the same as feeling it?

Was my rigidity simply another form of masking? Had my own self-projected rebellion stripped me of something? Or did I really have what my sister once called a heart of stone? 

I suspect I'll never truly know what having a heart of stone means for me. What it's given me or, perhaps more importantly, what it's stolen from who I could have been.  I'll continue to wrestle with whether I can, or even should, be different.

Despite how I handle these moments in life, it doesn't change the fact that my father is no longer here. There's now an empty chair at the table, no more jokes that only he understood, no more disapproving sighs that somehow offered a strange sense of reassurance.  Regardless of how I might appear on the outside, he has passed and that's simply one of the inevitable sad facts of life.

I began by saying this wasn't a passage about bereavement, but perhaps it was about loss after all. Only I can't really say what I've lost by having this heart of stone. Perhaps I never will.