Quicksand (not pulling your leg)

When the person you love most dies it becomes second nature to have tears stream silently down your expressionless face in public. {I look in the mirror now and see the lines in my forehead which were etched over many years from wincing with the pain of loss}. Strangers would walk up to me in street and say, “Smile, its not that bad is it?”

Anyone who has experienced grief will tell you that the words “heart break” derive from an actual physical pain. It is as though your heart has been wrenched from behind your breast, leaving a gaping bloody hole.

As the days pass into months into years, people don’t know what to say to you. They don’t want to ask, “How are you?” and you don’t want them to either. What would you say? “Life will never be the same for me again.”  

After my brother died, all my emotions went through some type of metamorphosis. They were felt and expressed as anger. Sadness and despair were anger.

The lead up to anniversaries created a surge of bittersweet reflections. For years, I haven’t been able to look at his photo, listen to his voice on tape, read his poems, or touch the one item of clothing of his that I kept, or listen to particular music. What I didn’t realise was that I was very depressed before my brother died. I had been in a hole. Now I was in quicksand.

I was very lucky to find a place in Sydney called the Bereavement Centre. The therapist there recommended that I start seeing a psychiatrist again. I shopped around and decided to see the first Doctor recommended to me.

I remember being in my mid twenties, I had youth on my side then. I remember walking down the street towards the doctor’s practice and I felt very good about myself that day. I remember feeling flirtatious and sexy; I hadn’t felt that way for a long time.

I turned to look towards the road and (in what felt like slow motion) a car came to a near stop ahead of me as the lights turned from amber to red. I remember feeling enamoured by the man behind the wheel. I wanted him to see me.

I stared at him for what felt like forever, until he looked my way. Then I very deliberately fluttered my long lashes, slightly raised an eyebrow and then pulled off a perfectly feminine flirtatious flick of my hair. He held my gaze and we shared a smile in that moment. In that slow motion moment, I started to feel myself sinking but not metaphorically.

My feet were not on hard ground, as I continued to walk. It felt as though I was being absorbed into the ground beneath me. I looked down towards my calves and they were in fact obscured by surrounding wet concrete as I tried to walk through the hole I was in. Now I was actually in quicksand.

In that moment, I raised my vixen no-longer, humiliated head to see if I had been spotted. I saw that the drivers in the now waiting heavy traffic clapping and laughing at me. With the remaining grace I could muster, I held onto a nearby tree to pull myself out.

I had five minutes to make a $220 shrink appointment and a mission to find a water tap to wash the concrete from my clothes and shoes. I ran frantically to a side street, from house to house in vain. I had to sit down on the grass and literally rub my legs and feet across the grass. I would then move down the nature strip to find “cleaner” less quicksand soiled patches of gr

ass to clean myself with.

Conflicted and yet ever conscientious, I walked into that appointment with that clichéd comedic line buzzing around my head, “A funny thing happened on the way to the studio…”

I sat down and the Doctor asked me why I had I come for therapy. I tried to begin the story about my brother and my grieving but she was transfixed on the pasty grey muck on my legs, which were rubbing against her couch. She would occasionally look up into my eyes as though checking for signs of pure insanity.

Needless to say, I had to find another shrink to get me out of the quagmire.

“All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness and others by sense.”

François de La Rochefoucauld