Stillness, but I’m still breathing!

It has been several months of stillness, but I’m still breathing. I may not have written about my experience living on the West Coast of South Africa, but I continue to live my purpose: to live my life to the best of my ability and to do good. 

If you’ve read my blog, you’ll know moving for me is a very traumatic experience. I don’t like change, and I don’t like the unknown. The fear has always been about losing what I have. An old saying fuels this fear: You know what you have but don’t know what you’ll get. Of course, I’ve moved many times, and I still believe the worst move ever was from Bulawayo to Witbank in 1980. This does not make my most recent move seem less traumatic. Trauma is trauma. It wasn’t easy to leave the bushveld in Limpopo after living there for over 21 years. I was leaving behind so many memories and close friends. What made the move harder was the fact that I was already traumatised. I was going through two stages of loss: the loss of my health and career and the double loss of my brother (death) and mother (she moved away). 

My desire to move to the West Coast started when I stopped teaching on 7 October 2020. During the time I was waiting for my retirement to take effect, I mostly stayed at home. There were a few occasions when I went out for tea with a dear friend, had my hair and nails done, or visited various doctors and therapists, which was required for the ill-health retirement application. I also cleaned the house, removing everything I didn’t want anymore. I was experiencing the same stages one goes through when dealing with grief: shock and denial, pain and guilt, anger, depression and loneliness, adjustment, reconstruction, and acceptance and hope.

I was still trying to cope with my newly diagnosed illness and the end of my career when my brother died on 25 October 2021. Both my mother and brother were living with me at the time. My mother moved in November to live with my sister on the West Coast. It was a united decision that she move away from the place of trauma. With my brother and mother gone, the house was too big, and the emptiness made me more determined to move. So, I started packing in December. I wrote the following poem about my mother’s move to help me cope at the time:
 
Parting with Mother (76)
 
Feet follow swiftly ghost trails of habit
To stand at Mother’s closed door
With news of something insignificant –
But she’s not there anymore.
 
A seven-year rhythm was established
For a heart wanting to share;
I’m left alone to ponder loss again
And left in total despair.
 
I quietly question life’s teachings and
Reflect on what’s left behind;
I consider the paths ahead of me
And the lessons undefined.
 
Moving forward with courage overwhelms –
The school of life has taught this once before; 
I’m shaped and fashioned to wait for the day
To walk again through her door.

At the end of February 2022, we finally moved, and we’ve been on the West Coast for six months.

Why haven’t I written about my life on the West Coast? After all, the move has done me well, and I live in a beautiful part of the country. Simply put, I haven’t been writing because all the trauma has had me hiding from and fearing many things. As a result of my illness and death in the family, I have become more aware of my mortality, and now that I’m here, I’m trying to keep my health a priority. I’m taking beach walks and resting. This helps in many ways to keep the ghosts of the past from staying too long to haunt me and gnaw away at my sanity, especially when I move through the stage of denial. I’ve stopped trying to figure out where my health went wrong because I’m focusing on acceptance. My illness is hereditary. Nothing I could change in the past would have prevented the illness and saved my health. Of course, it’s not only the stage of denial that repeats. The other stages of grief for loss are all cycles of my life, and each stage can last a while or pass quickly. Still … the healing has begun. Everything is new and fresh and makes it easier for me to let go and move forward. I’m processing, processing, processing. And I’m getting there.

The sand of my mind-dunes is shifting every day! I’m learning to keep the doors closed that I’ve already closed. I’m learning to stop rewriting the chapters of the past that have already been written. The stillness will probably continue for a while because I have no desire to blog or write another novel. And today, I just needed to share what is going on in my life.