I’ve been wondering when I’d show my face here again. Sneaking in the back door to drop you a note before sneaking away again and maybe peering through the letter box to make sure you saw it. In reality, it was a full 5 months before I could get my head around a follow-up to the last letter, one that I’m so grateful I wrote.
Because we never regret writing. We never regret an act of creation, a step towards ourselves, do we?
I write a lot - I’m a morning pages fiend - but I’d always like to write more. This morning my daughter asked me what I might do if I wasn’t a photographer and completely unimaginatively I replied ‘an artist of some kind. Probably a writer?’ I mean, I already am an artist of some kind and I write almost every day. Doesn’t that make me a writer? It still counts even if it’s only for me. And look as someone who purports to be these things I should probably have a better imagination in answer to this question but maybe I’m just on the right track, baby.
In the last newsletter I spoke about the summer of change which we had just cycled through. My Mother in Law, Beth, was leaving her home to move to assisted care and we were in constant motion, saying goodbyes to places and things, and holding each other gently yet close.
We were grieving for the living whilst also desperately holding on to what was still alive.
And so it had been on my mind to write to you, to conclude that letter in the way it was for concluded for us, with her death. We had no idea how close it was. How much time we would have left, how many more days we would spend with her. It turned out to be much less than we were preparing for, I think. When the inevitable is so close, time loses all meaning. It can stretch and bend and contract in ways you forget are possible. Because really, how much time can you prepare to have left with a person you want all the time with?
Beth’s death was, from what my husband tells me, beautiful. But that’s not my story to tell.
So instead I’m going to circle back to what I wrote up there about writing and not regretting acts of creation and tell you another story.
…..
The morning after Beth passed away, me, my husband and his sister in law sat in pyjamas on her living room floor and started looking at some things that had been cleared from her house months earlier. In a brown A4 envelope was a thick stack of hand-typed poems that none of us had ever seen, didn’t know existed. The stack of poems, 97 to be exact, were all written by her. They told the story of some of her life - mostly the years of mothering and middle age. They shared with us her innermost thoughts and casual observations via the medium of humour-filled prose. Things I had never heard her talk about in real life were all of a sudden in our hands and typed out with dates from the 1980’s. She wrote about living in Africa, politics, her self-esteem issues, and love for poetry itself. About being a mother to three boys, being reincarnated as a bird, about men and manners and clothing.
We took turns looking through and reading them to each other, surprise and awe and pure gratitude to have her thoughts in our hands and words on our tongues. There was something about having access to the most agile, most imaginative version of her, after years of Alzheimer’s, that brought us all visceral delight. That even though we were facing this very new reality of a life without her physical presence, these poems felt like the most perfect gift we could imagine.
She wrote about my husband and her deep, devotional love for him in a way that was so light and casual it plunged us all into sobbing messes right there on the floor.
She was a poet.
…
My husband remembers her having a small notebook by her bed when he was younger, always close by so she could write the prose as it came. She had this skill to make light her deep, innermost feelings - where I feel like I can swerve towards all serious, earnest right angles, she could soften her thoughts with a playful humour that’s pure skill.
I knew her for sixteen years and I didn’t know she was a poet. The others may of had an inkling - but them being teens during what seems to be her most prolific writing years, and so naturally occupied with themselves, and her being a middle-aged woman and therefore somewhat invisible, her poet life went mainly undetected. We never spoke about poetry. I knew she liked it, she had a stack of poetry books by her bed until the end. A few years ago I gave her a Mary Oliver book, namely for this poem, but we still never really spoke about poetry. Maybe it was too personal, maybe it was something she needed for herself, maybe I arrived too late. It seems like it was a midlife love affair where she reclaimed a part of herself. She laid herself bare, and getting naked isn’t something you do easily and for the masses, especially her. Those poems weren’t for other people -in that way that art is so vital to the person making it, it seemed like a need. The evidence shows us she was dedicated to it. She loved it for a while, maybe forever, but definitely in those years.
I guess I’m wondering now about how if a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound and Schrödinger’s cat is probably on the table somewhere too and how things can be beautiful and sacred and still art even if they’re just for you and no one else. For the best part of 45 years. How she was a poet and we didn’t even know it but she was a poet, absolutely. How sharing is a choice.
In this current timeline, it can feel like process and the act of making and the outcome of those are almost seen as pointless without the Instagram feed to prove their existence. Maybe even the substack (eyes self). How today we might know a person making things and call it a shame or a waste that the thing they’re making isn’t being seen, winning prizes or being monetized or garnering fame. Are we forgetting that the mere act of creating or the existence of it could be, should be, enough?
I don’t know what, if anything, it means that I never knew this side of her. I’m inclined towards it meaning nothing if I’m honest. She who finds meaning like her life depends on it!
But I get why you would do a thing and be a thing and love a thing and not feel the need to share the thing. It speaks to me. Maybe the doing and being was enough without sharing. And a part of me knows that this maybe wasn’t the true reality of it either, but that speaks to me too. Life and art, it’s complicated.
Maybe we should all have our secrets. And a secret love affair with art might just be the most poetic of them all.
Hi Laura, I miss seeing you on Instagram and I still share my love of the community you built of us fellow, morning pages devotees...it’s wonderful to see you here and to read your words.
It’s really such a beautiful and emotional insight into how you must have all felt holding those pieces of poetry. What a revelation!
When I am writing or drawing or paining and no one sees it, I am reminding myself constantly of how it makes me feel. And how it makes me feel is more connected to myself (and my higher self). And a reminder too, that I’m not here to be discovered. I am important in the 5am writing as I am in the things I press publish on in here.
I have no intention of returning to the ‘gram anytime soon but I really do hope to see you and your words on here more often 🙏🏻
This is really so, lovely. I worry often about not "being" a thing I long to be unless I'm exposed in real time doing that thing. This is such a soft and loving reflection on a life as a human and an artist. Thank you for sharing it. ♡