Development in Rose II by Anni Albers
I had a half-written blog and was resisting its completion because I felt that I’d written enough about mourning and mortality. Then, this week, I learned that my first boyfriend had died, just days short of his 56th birthday, and next heard of the more public loss of Jeremy Hardy. Poignantly, the topic recurs and is ever-present. So I returned to my themes.
In as much as one anticipates mourning, I think one foresees it as a fixed-term contract: stages to move through, to process, and then it’s completed. The experience is, of course, less clear,
less tidy, less predictable and more fluid. Sometimes, often, other urgent demands mean that it is pushed to one side and postponed. We have to return to it, or it returns to us, later. After all, one thing about death is that it is not constrained by time. Those who are already dead wait patiently for us to give them our attention once more.
Mourning has its processes and patterns which, however common, we discover individually. For me, when immediate consciousness and overt awareness has faded, the person who has died moves into my dreams. They appear as an occasional companion in otherwise unremarkable reveries: their presence is rarely the focus, but nor are they incidental; we are often occupied, doing something together. I have no control over this happening – the occurrences seem completely independent of my daytime thoughts – but, when I wake, these dreams are welcome, for all they give me pause and make me reflect again on the loss. I am glad they happen.
The dreams start after about a year. They are never frequent, I feel they become rarer over time and, of course, one is replaced by the next, as is the way of things. So I dreamed of 
my father, next of my mother, and then, with an absurdity which never escapes me, of the dog. She died in June 2017 and so since last summer, Jay has haunted me. Whereas, with people, what is restored by the subconscious is particularly the act of conversation – the sound of the voice, the ability to exchange ideas – with Jay it is tactile. The silky spaniel ears, warm breath and body. I can feel all of these again, vividly. I wake with an acute sense of restoration and loss, simultaneous and co-mingling. Perhaps that is why these dreams are more painful. My finger tips still register the contact until sense is both withdrawn and restored.
I don’t expect to dream of Benny, or of Jeremy Hardy – what I feel is merely sadness at talented, worthwhile lives cut short. I don’t know who will be my next dream ghost. Thank goodness. And in the meantime, all the clichés are refreshed and the old poetic tags repeated, that we must cherish each other now. and each day must be seized with hope and appreciation. And 
mourning each loss is a new thread to be incorporated in the weft – if we are lucky, not to overwhelm the pattern but to be blended and balanced within the whole. We went recently to an Anni Albers exhibition and I have a new respect, a new admiration for the complexity and beauty that can be achieved through the interweaving of disparate materials; I can hope that the same will also be true metaphorically.
Some people hope to meet again in an afterlife, whereas I feel that we are more probably bound by our earthly existence. But I gain comfort from my kindly consciousness, which means that those I loved are not lost to me. While we live, we have ‘thoughts that wander through eternity’, able to create, connect and, in sleep, restore by night what is lost to us by day.
and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
lesleyjonesberry 