Post One Hundred and Fifty Three: Adventures and Undertakings.

Oh yeah, that's right. Life is short. Especially when you consider how long this majestic planet has been around, and how long this majestic planet will continue to exist after the breviloquent years we find ourselves alive in. These waking days are all we have, so why not use them irrevocably?

I want for adventure. I want to keep this enthusiasm of mine, all the time.

Eulogies keep me on my toes. Especially tragic versions of life events, stacked together like the elemental atoms in DNA. Connected by complex moments, like polymers, and made succinct so that the story itself is easily explained.

Freedom. Connection. Devotion. Joy. Charity. These things. A focal reminder, while we can.

Peace.
S.

Post One Hundred and Fifty Two: It Takes Two, Baby.

Driving the hearse today I felt a surge of sentimentality. Two years is a reasonable length of time. This time has been peculiar, and resultant of very little determined intent on my behalf.

I took a phone call today from a man who has just lost his two year old. And this, directly following a weekend birthday party that I attended for a set of two year old triplets. I don't spend much time with children so this came at a particularly challenging time for me.

Taking that call was agonising. I didn't know how to prepare for when we were to meet face to face. I wanted to look like I had the answers for him.  I wanted to revisit all my notes on infant death so that it'd appear like I dealt with dead children all the time. I was so nervous. I wanted to help.

When I worked solely in the mortuary I was in my own environment, but now I'm in family homes, sipping their tea and spelling their names out. It's often surreal.

My days are like this. I have a funeral directors voice now. I wear pantihose, and ladder them no less than twice a week. It drives me crazy.

Assisting the grieving has been the greatest challenge of my life. This, and learning how to master the roads of Melbourne in a hearse with a cortege in tow. Without a goddamn GPS. Moving has been unsettling, as has been swapping the crocs for heels, and the morning hours of the prep room exchanged for late calls in the night by weeping widows.

Stay with me.

Continued peace and love,
S.

Post One Hundred and Fifty One: Tell Me.

What's the secret to a happy marriage? 

I ask this of many of my clients. My new ones, the grieving and the breathing ones. I used to ask people their opinions on the secret to a happy life, but when you've arrived to a house armed with a calculator, a box of tissues and a coffin book my original query seems malapropos. 

I visited a newly widowed school principle recently. She said that the secret behind the strength of her thirty eight years of wedded happiness was that she let her husband be who he wanted to be. I wondered if that meant that he liked gimp masks and koala costumes. I smiled, thought about the super talented Tom Gabel (soon to be Laura Jane Grace) and I moved on. 

When they acknowledge my question they get a look in their eyes, a particular poignancy.  What follows is a pregnant contemplation of stand out moments, like a mental flick book of special events.

It's nice. I take them away into a peaceful meditation, if only for a minute. 

There's something in having a one and only, even if you have to make up your own rules to get there.

Peace. x  

Post One Hundred and Fifty - Acquiescence.

I had a great night out on the weekend. I let go. I was reposed, my self consciousness relieved like a piss after a long drive. I talked to strangers. I held hands. I made plans. I went home alone without feeling like I needed to cry into a bucket of haagen dazs. My life is not yet a bad country song.

It has taken me far too long to acknowledge my fear of being alone. I've heard mates say that they love to be alone, but to me these people present like patricians taking vacation into a third world country. I imagine that being constantly surrounded by people would make solitude and withdrawal attractive. Yet, there's only so many dinner reservations for one that you can withstand without wanting to stab a hospitality worker in the temple when they say "Only you?"....

Yes, dickhead. Single people need to eat too.

I'd much prefer to show someone else the shapes on my plate that I can make with my mashed potato. You can't read books on your iphone convincingly, no matter how much you try. Eating alone just isn't as fun. And life without honest reflection is a life still of wanting.

And then you get to this stage, where I am, where you long for company but also despise conventional niceties. Making small talk with people that exhibit social bias. Trying to fit in, when assimilating is the worst thing that you can do for your own strength of character.

I asked an eighty year old widow today what the secret was to a long and happy marriage. He replied with great joy "Forgiveness for being human."

I don't think that it's necessary to apologise for ever being human. I think apologies are only for when you've been stupid. We sell ourselves short. I do everyday.

Be good. Be safe. Be mindful.

S.

Post One Hundred and Forty Nine: The Young Ones.

I'm a changed woman now.

I say with full sincerity that Wednesday was a definitive day in my career. I felt in control, professional; an administrate of death ritual in the most agonizing of circumstances. Baring witness to a community rocked by calamity, I realigned my perspective. Life is good. Death is bad. I'm lucky to have a lightness of being and breath in my lungs. And I want to turn into a giant mother bird with soft feathered wings so that I can wrap up the bereaved to keep them safe from harms. But that's just silly talk. Instead I will do my biznezz with honesty and compassion.

Suicide is devastating. Most certainly alarming is that of an intelligent, self-aware and virtuous teenage girl.  Such a young lady died last week and this has been the subject of my deepest reflections. Her life, her death, her challenges. Her parents, emotions hijacked by grief and torment.  Her little brother, pensive and forlorn. A sixteen year old has enough on his plate to deal with. Perceptive of this, I felt a desire to protect him most of all. If this is a maternal feeling being fostered, so be it.

I visited the family home on the morning of the funeral with the task of driving them to the church. As I knocked on the door I pulled my spine back from it's slouch and inhaled with all the power and intention that I could. I wasn't sure how the journey was going to fare with me as their driver, looking like a teenager myself with zits on my chin and dark hair not dissimilar to their own daughters. Would they be disturbed by my youth, if they had subconsciously expected a more mature funeral director?

Instead the father insisted that I have a cup of tea with him while his wife tweeted about the cat running rampant between the dozens of floral tributes sent to the house. We talked about snack foods, music videos and Melbourne's traffic problems, during which time I couldn't arrest my wandering eye from the open door to my left. Her bedroom. Her place of reflection and rest. I wished that she could go back there and close her door. And live.

The schoolgirls, her friends; their farewells full of apology, guilt and sorrow. Hundreds of young lives changed with the shock loss of their companion. And for what?

I'm employed to ensure that a 'memorial event' runs as scheduled. It's not my job to make people feel better. It's not my job to ponder about the why or why not's of one's mortal toil. But for some reason, it's the reason why I'm sticking with it. And I can't go back to the mortuary, for now I know that I can improve other people's lives in a time that really, fucking sucks.

Rest in peace, young lady.

S.

Post One Hundred and Forty Eight: Good.

Ladies and Gentlemen, no more pity party. I feel energised, and something good is a'cookin.

What in the precious father's name happened back there?

Let me tell you.

I've been single for a while now, bar a few month long stints in poorly conceived and thus ill fated romances. I'm friendly with all my ex's, and seemingly an ex to too many of my friends; and it's been tough for the old ego, falling for babe after babe and then, quite swiftly, being rejected.  This rapid repudiation made me a target for a quick fix. And quick they were.

Transitioning from a serial monogomist to a whirlwind courtesan in the space of one year is an interesting personal experiment at 27.  To be honest I miss the intimacy of having a one and only, but as I go on I can acknowledge that settling down for the sake of that comfort is not enough to stabilise and satisfy my own hankerings. What I really want is to fall in love; to give love, and accept love, from people that make me feel inspired and motivated.

And that's as girly as I get. I just think about love a bunch because it seems that grief is the downside of love and I deal in that business directly.  To face a challenge to my own mortality alone would be scary. I hope not to base my entire romantic inclinations on this concept, but I can't promise anything at the end of the day. Maybe it's a universal truth, isn't it the reasoning for the rubbings together of Adam and Eve?

So yeah. That stuff happened. And in and around all that I moved. And was broke. And moved in with an odd stranger into a house that consistantly smells of kangaroo.

Nothing has changed in the external world to arouse this change of mood. I just feel good recognising that I've had a shit time. I forgive myself for losing confidence as a result of the dumpings. And I vow to move away from the kangaroo commorancy.

All is well.

Peace.

Post One Hundred and Forty Seven: I Forgo Thee, Unholy Nectar.

I love to have a drink.

I can have one single unit of beer and feel a slight laxity of composure. Two drinks in and I have the laissez faire and overstated confidence of a six year old at a wiggles concert. I level out after three or four beers into a state of entertainment, but any juncture after that is consummately reliant upon the environment at hand and the selection of poison. I get ripped easily, and frequently, and I think it's time to consider where that road can take someone, i.e. me, without much notice.

At 27, I've been drinking without a break for ten years. Most weekends without question. If I haven't sunk a couple on a Friday and Saturday night it's been due to that fact that I've been working or hung over from the night before.  Is my experience that different from most other people in my peer group? I think not. I am the poster girl for binge drinking 2012.

We enjoy getting together to share happiness and hubbub, and a drop of whiskey can lubricate our egos just enough to talk about the concepts that we haven't got the confidence or forthrightness to speak about sober. In some occasions, these areas of conversation shouldn't be entered into at any time, especially when under the effect of alcohol. Still, being a shy girl at heart, feeling free from social constraint is pretty fun and I can see why most weekends I so easily picked up a stubby and swayed my way into most Saturdays. 

Small but sure wrinkles are beginning to creep outwards from my eyelids. My face is slowly and certainly losing the apple shape that I used to hate.  Of course the crap that I'm putting in to my body, especially after ten years, is starting to have an effect on the supposed 'windows to my soul'. It's time for a regulation, a self check, before things go to far. 


About once a week I deal with a family who's mum/dad/sibling has died due to alcohol related disease. They often hide the real cause of death, but you can see in the shattered family dynamics that to have a loved one addicted to booze is to not really have them there at all. 


I'm not saying I'm an alcoholic. Family and friends please do not call an intervention. I'm just glad that I've noticed an involvement in a part of youth culture that is not always good, not always bad, but not always thought about proactively. 


Peace (and moderation). x