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On grief, loss and broken hearts

‘Go to your broken heart,’ by Jack Hirschman.

And ‘if you don’t have one’, Hirschman urges us, go ‘get one.’ But how to get a broken heart. How to let yourself know when you’re hurting and how to meet that broken heart. 

‘Be sincere’ Hirschman reckons and more besides. 

To go to my broken heart, I need stillness away from the noise and hullabaloo of other people. Extraverted by nature, I still need to shear off time to be alone and still.

A stillness I find mostly in the quiet dark of night, cocooned safely in my bed when thoughts can tumble freely into my mind, or in other moments when I allow myself to sit before the blank screen of my computer before putting down words.

My broken heart. Memories: 

Scene one: Seven years old lying in bed alone, my sister asleep and my mother has promised to bring me a final cup of tea as she poured several for her house guests that evening. Aunts and Uncles. I waited and waited. Still, she did not come. It did not do to get out of bed to remind her and cop my father’s rage, so I lay there and waited. Till sleep softened my pain. 

Scene 2: Seated on a bench at the East Camberwell railways station three years later, still with a younger sister, waiting for our mother to return on the train after work on a Saturday. No longer willing to stay at home alone with our drunken father, even in the presence of other older siblings who were terrified as well but some better equipped to escape, though not our elder sister, whose fortune was dictated by birth order. Next inline after our mother for his abuse.

Train after train pulled into the station. And like the trains you see in movies, the person sought after does not alight and the waiting continues. 

I have long adopted an approach when I’m caught in a situation of needing to wait, I will do something else to while away the agonies of the uncertainty. When will they arrive? Will they arrive? Will the hoped for event happen or will the worst come to bear?

How to visualise a broken heart:

 As Catholics we were introduced early. The Sacred Heart of Jesus, red and encircled, with a wreath of thorns round its widest point and crucifix in its cleavage. 

Considered ornamental by some. I can imagine it cast in silver and draped around some girl’s neck on a fine chain. The broken heart, again the heart shape children learn, regardless of religion, with an arrow struck from Cupid with his bow. It’s meant to suggest a person hopelessly in love. Hopeless because love, like a broken heart ,can enchain you against your will for longer than might be comfortable.

Another word for broken heart of grief, that thing with feathers, according to Emily Dickinson or others who try to emulate her words. Sorrow, the dark night of the soul, the broken heartedness of unrequited love, the loss of your beloved.

During the mysterious phase of life called childhood, it’s hard to grasp the complexity of our broken hearts. To even know what it means when we are sad and hurting. Our bodies tell us, but our minds cannot always offer words to share the experience with trusted others who might help us carry the load, especially when the hurt is caused by others. Witness my mother’s failure to bring me that late night cup of tea. 

These wounds pile up. They enter  the storehouse of your memory. Sealed off. Then the danger they might sneak out years later when other griefs emerge to piggyback on the first. 

They pile one on top of the other when something tiny can trigger us. We might wonder why and if we have the chance to explore the brokenness of our heats with a helpful therapist who listens, is curious and tries to understand us better, then we might go further in unpicking the overload. 

The overdetermined overload of our experience which narrows into a knee jerk response even when something tiny upsets us. That is, if we can’t find better ways of coping with our broken hearts, other than stockpiling our griefs and grievances to the point the cruel hoard of our memory cannot hold together anymore and spills out onto helpless others. In our misguided rage, it swallows us up in unresolved grief. 

So, as Jack Hirschman writes, 

Go to your broken heart 

and if you think you don’t have one find one. 

To get one be sincere. 

Learn sincerity of intent by letting life enter, 

because you’re helpless really to do otherwise, 

even as you try escaping….

In the library of my heart

Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads – at least that’s where I imagine it – there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.

― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Your own private library, what a treat. If only it was possible. And what about the sections we avoid as against the places we might visit regularly. I’d avoid war, horror, violence and go directly to sorrow.

This surprises me. I had thought first up of romance and fantasy, but these days I’m into the sorrowful mysteries, not so much of the rosary, based on the death of Christ, more on the miseries of the underdog. The one who misses out. The one who struggles unfairly against oppressive regimes. 

But I do not want to see sorrow mashed into hatred and regret. I want it to be constructive. A grief that takes wings. And helps us rise above the ordinary despair of life in the trenches.

In my library beneath the obvious section of lost opportunities and hopes, I like to crawl beneath the desks and enter the mouseholes of my childhood. Those small spaces where everything is new and challenging.

When my children were little and I interviewed potential nannies for the job of occasional care, to those who said things like, ‘I love children’, I scrawled a fat cross alongside their names. 

I am wary of such adulations. As if children are an homogenous mass of chocolate pleasure, and separate from the rest of humankind, by virtue of their size.

When children instead are as idiosyncratic and diverse as the entire human population. Some you love and others you resent. 

In the mouseholes of my childhood, these categories are more distinct, more black or white. In one of my earliest experiences as a fledgling therapist on social work placement at the then Citizen’s Welfare Service, my supervisor, Barbara, a woman not much older than me in years, but seemingly decades older in experience, urged me to write my own assessment of my performance. To set it alongside hers for our visitor from university in fieldwork who assessed my student progress.

I remember little about the bones of the report other than a point at which I wrote the words, ‘the otherness of others’.

I was twenty years old and it was a revelation to me that people could be different from one another in meaningful ways and that this might be a good thing. An endless source of curiosity about how differently we can view the world.

Growing up in a Catholic household with migrant parents from the Netherlands, my mother embraced her Catholicism as if it was an overcoat for warmth she tried to stretch around her children. 

One by one, we wriggled free, but not before we had been acculturated, at least for a time, in the exceptionalism of that religion, as all religions harbour an exceptionalism, that excludes others. 

Catholicism was the one true religion, the priests and nuns taught. Our beliefs were the one sure way we might access Heaven after we die. The only way to live a good, pure and moral life was through the church’s teaching, augmented by the bible, but more importantly the Catechism, the rule book of the missal, and all the sacraments. 

We learned it in song:  

When on my head baptismal water poured, 

I became a child of God and brother of Our Lord. 

God lives in me ‘cos I’ve been baptised 

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

I have a hymnbook of songs in my library section dealing with religion. I visit these days, awed by the extent to which I once believed as gospel. And when you look at these ideas from the vantage point of years and doubt, you see it all so differently, which is the point of a library, to gather alternative perspectives, the otherness of others.

I have never entered a library that did not fill me with awe. All these words and ideas. In childhood, the library on Canterbury Road near the park, in a house which seems small now and has been adapted as an infant welfare centre. The library moved elsewhere and swallowed up in other suburbs of Boroondara. In those days Canterbury. 

It was in weatherboard and you entered via a ramp. In these days late returns were fined by the day and to borrow books which was a treat could soon become a torture if said books disappeared under beds or unwashed clothes of my childhood home. This was easy enough a d my mother who assumed responsibilities for all her children’s borrowings must have had a hell of a time rounding up boos, when each of us chose a mountain within limitations permitted to take home with us.

My memories of the Cheltenham library are less convivial. A brick veneer building not far from the Southland shopping centre and flanked by the Nepean Highway and the shops nearby. It never held the charm of my first library encounter in Camberwell. And then we moved for a year to Parkdale and the library there, simpler than Cheltenham stretched along a main road not far from the railway line. But in every one of these establishments books lined the walls in promising display begging me to read more and never stop,.

But still I did by the time I hit university and could only read for the purposes of passing exams. Even in the English department which I joined for my first year at university, reading became an academic chore and no longer held the pleasures of my school days.

In the section of my library called literary analysis I go back to the archies to find notes on Leavis. The literary critic whose views on how to read books left me cold, so cold I could not enter his terrain. I wanted to read then as I read now into a view if what I take from a book, irrespective of what a writer might be saying or how others might interpret. I wanted my own encounter with the words to help me understand more about how other people live, but also to meet their otherness with my own.

All these lot possibilities. If I went back now, I’d blitz my subjects but then it was as much as I could do to pass. Besides the life of the world, of my world outside the library seemed more compelling and I wanted to engage with people away from books.

Not simply to hide away in the safety of a library where books can be read, can be opened and then shut, can be pushed aside or carried around like an infant. I wanted my life to operate as though I had a body, arms and legs, and not just words on the page. I wanted to live.

But now as I age the lustre of the library like a siren calls me back and hopefully unlike the sirens it will not leave me dashed against rocks, shipwrecked but reopen to the lost possibilities of my past.