Moving out, moving back, moving on?

So (again) I’ve moved back to my mum’s old house, and it’s brought up new emotions and fears. The fear I think is going back to feeling miserable, exactly how I felt last time I lived here, when she died. This house has a power over me. Maybe it will make me feel like a child again, as I was when I grew up here, except this time without a mum. This house holds so many memories, the most recent being the worst. I’m sitting in the room where my mum spent the last few months of her life, except everything is stripped out, everything but the bad memories. They hang around like a spirit, the house is haunted by them, no matter how much clearing out and painting I’ll never be rid of them. Maybe that’s why I want to sell the house so much, I don’t want these bad memories anymore, I’ve had enough. I’m looking forward to the day when I have my own home, where I can unpack all my mum’s things and have them in my house without all the darkness.

The flat I have been living in for the last year has been some kind of holiday home, a respite from misery. It felt, for most of it, like a sanctuary, a safe place to be, and a fun place to be, with many friends around me. I was worried about leaving, feeling isolated back in North London away from this, and the kind of community feeling the flat and area gave me. But I was forgetting I have all my (remaining) family up here and really good old friends I regret I haven’t given much time too recently, too obsessed by my own crap really.

I felt the urge to write this evening, to make a bit more sense of all the jumble going around. I’ve just unpacked all the boxes in my room so perhaps I felt it was time to unpack my head. It’s helped.

How funny that, completely unplanned, the last thing in my old room were dying red Tulips.

And this is only the 2nd of 10 cheques like this I have to send him just to be able to keep my mum’s house. C****!

The aliens have landed…in South London.

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Another sense of loss.

It was exactly a year and a half ago last week since mum died, I was surprised when I realised it was as it feels like only a few months ago, perhaps it always will feel that raw like it only happened last month or something. But actually as I write this I realise it doesn’t feel anything like that, or more I do not feel anything like that. I remember what I felt like a month or so after she died, I don’t feel like that now, I don’t feel like I wish I had died too anymore. Things do move on, you don’t really want them to at the time as it feels like you are moving away from the person you love so much, but they do, they have to really. The last year and a half has been the saddest time of my live. My problem is  I’m good at appearing to be ok and getting on with things while inside I’m dying, I’m sure many friends didn’t realise how shit I was feeling, my problem is i don’t talk about it. I think it is just too hard, especially when people haven’t been through the same thing, but also it’s so fucking painful I don’t think I know where to start. But I am trying to stop being so annoying ok all the time, it just takes time.

Everything does seem to be on the move a bit at the moment, there have been quite a few new things in my life at the same time as saying goodbye to other things. My bereavement counseling ended last Wednesday, after a whole year of going every bloody week. I always thought I hated going, like it was something I knew I should do but never really thought I was really making any improvement, but I can see I really was, it has helped in so many different ways. She warned me a few weeks before it ended that once it had I may experience the feeling of another loss. I didn’t believe her, but she was right. There is definitely a space in my life now, it’s all so final as well, like some kind of relationship break-up, like we have had an argument and refuse to speak to each other, in fact it’s a bit like another death. Knowing that I will never see her again, never talk to her again, all the things I said to her and things I opened up about all those moments are gone and all I have are memories. Also because of where I used to have the sessions has effected me on top of this, returning every week to the same building where my mum had died, on the same floor only 3 rooms away from the room where she took her last breath while lying in my arms. Returning to the Marie Curie hospice for my sessions was hard, but then on the last day rather than feeling relieved I no longer had to go there I felt sadness at not coming back to the place again, like I was in someway abandoning my mum again. When I left the night she died I really hated the fact I had to leave her body there, I tried so much to not think about her body being moved from the room to the morgue and it being there until her funeral, I hated that. On my last day at the hospice last week I walked a different way in to the building, around the side, and I passed the big black side gates which I presume are only used for undertakers coming to pick up people’s bodies. I thought about the fact my mum’s body would have been driven through these gates, and that she would have been alone, I wasn’t with her, I felt I abandoned her. After my session I felt those same feelings as I walked out of the hospice for what would be my last time, I felt I was abandoning some part of her again. But what was confusing is I also felt the need to keep walking, it felt things were finally moving on some way. I remember looking round at the building just before I turned the corner, I saw the big concrete building as some kind of symbol for all the horrible pain I had felt, and I was now somehow leaving some of it there, so I turned the corner and walked in the direction of Heath to go and visit my mum’s ashes. This is her final place, not that sad concrete building.

So I think, for sometime now anyway, come 3pm every Wednesday I will feel another sense of loss. But I will try to use that hour I would have spent talking to someone about myself and what I am feeling to do something else just as helpful to myself. This week to mark the time I went and sat in the park for an hour and just thought about things, without anything to distract me I sat and thought about my mum and how I was feeling and it felt good.

Happy birthday mum…where ever you are.

My mum would have been 68 years old today. Not really too sure how I feel today, I’m sad that she is not around, it’s a day we would have celebrated together in someway. But I feel the need to not be upset, like she wouldn’t have wanted it. It’s all a bit confusing. I hear her in my head telling me to carry on with everything, in her over-confident and happy way in the world, but then I also hear other voices telling me it’s ok to feel sad. At the moment all I feel is confused and a bit numb. I didn’t think I could face going to visit her ashes on the Heath today, so I went yesterday instead and planted some flowers and lay under her tree in the sun. I wanted to do something to mark the day today in some way though so I brought a big bunch of her favorite Tulips and made one of my favorite recipes of her’s, Pissaladiere, which I’m going off now to eat right now…

Here’s a nice picture of her I found, cooking in her restaurant L’Escargot in Soho sometime in the 1980′s.

Happy No-Mothers day to me!

Oh how I love a bit of self-pity. No, I’m  actually glad of this yet another commercial day that encourages people to buy more shite they don’t need, as my mum detested it and demanded we never brought her anything for it, and if we ever did dare she would bin it straight away, and I loved her even more for that. I  miss her everyday, no more today than any other, but today it’s actually made me smile, it makes me remember her great no-bullshit attitude to life and makes me laugh, so today I’m celebrating ‘No-Mother’s Day’, I’m sure she would approve and have a chuckle! x

No cameras please.

“Your a photographer, where is your camera?!” Was my brothers reaction to me being camera less today, but in fact I quite like it.

I started the proper clearing out of my mums house on Monday and kept having this nagging doubt that I should be documenting it, like I’m missing an opportunities to preserve her life in someway, like I can never get her house back, I need to record it. But why do I think that taking a sterile photograph of something is the only way to remember it? It’s not. I’ll always remember the warmth my mother’s house had, the comfortable feeling you got when you stepped in, the feeling you were home no matter how many years you had not lived there for, the sense that everything was going to be ok. I can’t take a picture of that and why would I try? To stick in a photo series and enter in to a meaningless photography competition or have an exhibition? no thanks. Why do documentary photographers (and I am so guilty of this) want to record every bloody detail of someones life or worst their own. This is turning into a rant, not sure why, I’m not feeling angry or anything. In fact I think I probably had one of the best days I have had in the last 2 years.

I had an amazing afternoon. After a (long) hour with my bereavement councillor, I decided to walk over to Hampstead Heath and visit my mum’s ashes. As soon as I came out of the councillors I felt brilliant, like someone had vacuumed out all the shite that was going on in my head. I walked over the hills of the Heath listening to really loud old rock and roll songs that had connections to my mum. Everything felt good, like I was on the best drug I have ever taken, it was like something was telling me everything was going to be ok. The Heath looked more beautiful than I think I had ever seen it,  the colour of the clouds and the grass together were like walking through a Turner painting. There was no one there, but so much wildlife around. A bright red-headed woodpecker flew right in front of me. After my walk I laid under the tree where my mum’s ashes are buried, it’s this beautiful Silver Birch tree, with huge cascading branches reaching all the way down. I lay at the base of the tree, looking up through the branches, and felt a kind of warmth I used to get from my mum, it was as if the branches were hugging me, I felt safe, it was like I was in the womb or something (not that I remember much of that time), but it was fucking mental, I have never felt an emotion like that. My councillor told me I may start experiences different emotions, ones I have never felt before, and fuck she is right. My emotions and general mental heath have been in a state of mute or numbness for so long, way before my mum even got ill, but now it is like something is finally awakening them. As I was laying there a dog ran up and licked my face, her owner shouted over “Just seeing if you are alive, are you ok?” I really was, I really felt more alive than ever.

The epiphany today was realising I had no desire to take a photograph of what I saw or what I felt. A photograph could not even come close to show the emotions I was feeling. God this sounds all a bit wankey, but I am not trying to be all arty and conceptual, not that there is anything wrong with that,  but I am not.

Last night I went to a talk of one of my oldest friends mum, Phyllida Barlow, at Tate Britain. Hearing her talk about her sculpture work was so inspiring. She doesn’t make sculptures about ideas or concepts, they are about the action of making the pieces, about touching things, feeling the materials and making a mark and an object that will exist because of what you did (well that’s what I got from it). It made me start thinking again about photography and how I feel I’m missing out on something. It’s a robotic action, you press a button, you don’t touch what you are photographing, to me that’s not enough. I want to get dirty, roll around in nature, dip my feet into cold water, not press a button while watching someone else do it. Sometimes I struggle to be a documentary photographer, I hate peering into other people’s lives, it feels rude and voyeuristic. I want my work to mean something, but not have to do that by telling it through other people’s lives. Man I don’t really know what I am saying, I’m not saying that I don’t want to work with photography, just that it’s perhaps not enough, I need more senses stimulated. I need a studio so I can throw shite around and see what happens…then I’ll probably decide I hate it.

I did a project years ago about the marks in the land people make unintentionally, I think it was the start of a much bigger project I should pursue, I’m going to dig it out and see where I can go from that.