Writing and Loss

I'm thinking about how writing influences memory and feelings of loss while reading Virginia Woolf's , Moments of Beingg but wonder how could I write without the creative connection I feel with my mother? In some way she is my muse. I feel her even when I'm writing about another subject. I think I write about  and with her to keep her close but in truth, I'm compelled to write about her. Is your experience writing about loved ones and loss an effort to contain the memory or are you like me? Do you write to remain connected? Since Virginia Woolf committed suicide, I think the losses she experienced were not resolved. I might be presumptuous to assume I know her in any way but that's how reading influences many of us. We feel we know the writer- especially if she writes autobiographically.

Virginia Woolf

Loss upon loss
Fears the greater loss
Still.

Imagine Virginia Woolf at thirteen. She lives in a busy household that centers around her mother, her mother who is forty...her mother who takes care of seven children-no eight because there’s one yet at home… a child not spoken of… a child who will disappear soon…a child who is called an idiot-child by Virginia as was the custom of the day. Imagine her mother is married to a man, her second husband, who is fifteen years older, a writer, and demanding. Imagine Virginia at thirteen in this busy house of guests and happenings… the same Virginia we all know through her writing… the Virginia who loses her mother on May 5, the same day of my mother’s death. Imagine Virginia at thirteen. She carries the presence of her mother (as I do) while her mother is long gone. She wrote in Moments of Being:

“I could hear her voice, see her, and imagine what she would do or say as I went about my day’s doings. She was one of the invisible presences who after all play so important a part in every life.’’ (80)
And as Virginia pours out her heart-words both troubled and turbulent in To the Lighthouse, a work of fiction that’s autobiography, she becomes empty and unbound to this once compelling presence of her mother. She asks, “Why, because I describe her and my feeling for her in that book, should my vision of her and my feeling for her become so much dimmer and weaker?” (81).  

And while writing again about her mother, 

she worries that she will erase her completely.

Columbine surrounding the bust of Virginia Woolf, sculpted by Stephen Tomlin.
Photograph by Pamela A. McMorrow

A selection from this post originally appeared in Oasis Writing Link.

Make your last thought a pleasant one

Also posted on my blog.

What is the last thing you think about before you embrace sleep?

I usually review my day or make plans for the next one. If there's something nagging my mind, I try to see it objectively, rationally.

This is the time when my mind wanders wantonly. Without structure. Without boundaries.

I float back and forth in the past and present with a part of my brain looking through a keyhole into the future.

Last night, as I was tossing and turning after a rather aggravating day, I decided to focus on one thing: the one positive highlight that made me feel good inside. That introduced joy to my heart. That made me smile.

It was a tiny green hummingbird outside my office window. It flitted above the flower-less bushes just long enough to leave me mesmerized. Even if for a couple of precious seconds.

Wound up in all the commotion of the day, I hadn't even given that short-lived experience a second thought. Until that time in bed.

I recaptured that moment in time. Rewound it and saw it in slow motion. Lived it again.

I felt peace sweep over me.

Content, I drifted off.

This morning I decided I would make it a nightly exercise. When reviewing the day in bed, I'd think of the one thing, as trivial as it might be, that gave me a moment of happiness. A sight, a smell, a taste, a gesture ...

Small things sometimes light up the gloomiest of days. Things we most often fail to notice. Things that register, but not quite.

It is in the simplicity of everyday moments that life's true beauty is revealed.

I'll leave you with a poem I wrote many years ago about the essence of life:

A cuckoo on a mango tree;

A spider’s web; a buzzing bee;

A blooming bud on a thorny stem;

Dewdrops sparkling like little gems;

The sun rising in the eastern sky,

Flocks of birds soaring high;

The full moon spreading its radiant glow,

Stars that shine all night through;

The neighing of a grazing horse;

Walls covered by a carpet of moss;

An ant carrying a grain of rice,

Ever heard the talks of mice?

Butterflies romancing with the flowers;

Buffaloes chewing the cud for hours;

A kitten’s purr; a sparrow’s chirp;

Snails crawling round a herb;

A rabbit twitching its pink nose;

Water in the river that incessantly flows;

Wind blowing the pollen grains;

The smell of the earth when it rains;

A puppy lapping milk from a bowl;

Ever noticed the burrow of a mole?

Life is work and work is life,

Man always walks on the road of strife,

But – pause a moment and look around -

A treasure of beauty you will have found;

And you’ll cherish these moments for a long time to come,

These gifts of nature can never be summed.

The burden of work is overwhelmingly gripping,

But, these are the things that make life worth living!

© Mansi Bhatia.