Things we lost in the fire and...

things we found in the ashes

This one’s from the heart, on August 11th, ahead of setting light to some words on paper on a fire that I choose to burn and watch.

This one is about the grief we place on top of the grief cairn we already have. The one with the infertility stones in. The one with every grief we ever had, the heartbreaks, the wasn’t meant to be’s - the parallel lines..

…but really, this one is about me.

My Dad loved Bonfire Night.

He loved boxes of fireworks, cheap and disappointing and, because he loved it, so did I. Unless it rained, every year we’d build a bonfire in the garden vegetable plot, he’d wear his boiler suit and be my Dad, illuminated. It gave him joy. I never fully knew why - but on that day, he was always happy.

We knew last November that this would be our last bonfire together.

With help, he built the fire. With help, he ignited the fireworks - we splashed out on the Good Ones for the first time ever. We drank a glass of very expensive wine together and, we knew, it would be the last glass of wine my Dad drank. He was happy that night, I think, even though he was clearly in pain. Resigned. We all were, with discordant feelings of emotions that don’t really belong together but we wore them, clashing, anyway.

Standing on the ashes of that fire in January, a few days after his funeral, felt like a death of my own. We didn’t move them for the longest time. My Dad grew the veg. At some point my Mum raked them into the soil. She scattered thousands of wildflower seeds over the place that for my whole adult life had annually had beetroot, runner beans and radishes. None of which I actually like. But that never mattered.

Last month the flowers bloomed unlike any garden display of wildflowers I have ever seen. They’ve bought my Mum a lot of peace. She sends me photos of them, I’ve added one here. I haven’t been to see them. They feel like both a gift and a terror. They aren’t runner beans twisting around canes. They are beautiful. I resent them.

Things get lost in the fires of our lives. Lives get lost. Pieces of us get lost. We lose photographs, memories, songs, friends, lovers, precious objects and things we care little about. I was asked recently that if I was presented with all the things I had ever lost, what would I look for first. I know the answer to this for object and for person. I’d like to see it all though, laid out, a curation of the mislaid and the taken.

There is a photo of me on my wedding day, aged 33, dancing and looking behind me to the camera. This is the version of me that had no idea that babies don’t always get made on honeymoons. She was lost in the fire long ago. If I looked for her and found her, in this room of lost and found - what would I say to her and where would we begin?

I do recognise this isn’t really a metaphor for infertility that wholly works. It isn’t one fire, more a series of incessant wildfires we can’t seem to put out, in spite of all our efforts. But the ash isn’t irrelevant. We don’t just lose things in the fires, other things are forged and found - more subtly shaped than a phoenix. Friends we never knew we’d meet, objects we love, new favourite songs, new things we do with bodies and hands, new places that now have new meanings, new homes, new jobs.

If I was presented with all the things that have come into my life since… what or who would I notice first?