A Journey through Mourning

From PART I; an excerpt from an interview by Belinda Harris in the British Gestalt Journal

(....)
In 1986 my youngest son Dara died of leukemia. He went very, very quickly, exactly two months and one week from diagnosis to death. This totally threw me. One of the many consequences of this was that my wife completely crumbled and eventually was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and because of the complications of the medical system in Sweden there was no way in which she could be prescribed treatment, or helped unless she agreed to it – or I threw her out, if I literally put her outside the door and phoned the authorities and said there’s a person with grave difficulties, somebody homeless outside my door, then they would come. I actually had this debate with various authorities. At the same time she was and is the mother of our oldest son. So there was a period when I was living in an apartment with my wife who was becoming my ex-wife, because in the middle of all this she divorced me, and my son who had lost his little brother. The circumstances were extremely demanding. One of the consequences of my wife’s condition was that she reversed day and night totally. So she was up all night and slept all day so everything was chaotic, there were always separate lives being lived completely out of sync in this small apartment. Eventually after much maneuvering and in cooperation with her former employer – the hospital where she worked part-time and where our son had died – they managed to create a situation where they could pro-actively take care of an employee and arranged for a period in a kind of residential treatment centre. That created a situation where there was a little bit of space, so I had a grieving process going on for myself, and supporting my son, my ex-wife who now was clearly in the middle of a very severe grieving process...

I had started writing poetry in my very early teens, in both English and Gaelic, and have continued ever since, though nowadays in English and Swedish. I had only ever published three – two in English and one in Swedish. One of the two in English accompanied the BGJ interview. It was my celebration of Dara’s 21st anniversary. I say “celebration” in the sense that every recognition of his influence on my life is indeed a celebration of the meaning of his life. So – yes, a celebration, no matter how much sorrow or regret or shame each poem expresses, or humour or joy. These poems, over a period now of 22 years, have become my “Journey Through Mourning”, with all its ambiguity...

Over the years, these poems have simply emerged, sometimes complete, sometimes in parts over a day or days or even weeks. I became used to being open for a line to emerge, and, when it sounded, tasted, felt “right”, I would see what followed. I have committed few of them to paper until they were finished in my body.

My intention here is to select from them as I, for the first time publicly, explore my mourning and its meaning with the poems as my guide. The only changes I have made for publication are concerned with clarity, never content. This selection is intended to capture the main themes which have emerged over the past 35 years, and will include my first and my most recent poem.

The first one came within days of Dara’s death. Someone had asked me, in Swedish, how I was. Directly translated, this particular phrase would be “How is it?” This became the open- ing line of my first, unexpected poem:

1.

there is nothing it is like.

it is. it

is the gaps we leave still in our conversations.

is your place at the table empty but still set sometimes and unset again.

is the rocking chair you’d sit in, observing sat in by someone the day of your funeral shock of him sitting on top of you there.

the gaps we leave still in our conversations the place beside me at the table empty rocking chair you’d sit in, observing
shock of you not sitting there to observe us.

there is nothing it is like.
it is all of these and more of them and none of them.

it is.