Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been decorating the guest bedroom. We don’t have any visitors coming for a while, so it’s been possible to moderate my pace and to fit the preparation and painting around all of our other demands, which currently includes helping promote the play No one Here is Me.
I’m grateful for not having to work slavishly to a deadline, so that I can be a little more contemplative and listen to podcasts, while I’m in the zone of focus you need, to cut in a smooth line of paint.
Gar was a restorative decorator and, as you’ll know from my other blog about that (link to blog pending), spending time decorating is a now an unsettling, mixed blessing for me. I always feel Gar very close while I’m painting and, of course, that’s absolutely wonderful. However, emotionally it feels like my head and heart are being prepared for surgery, without anaesthetic.
And while that sounds as painful as it actually is, those of you who have been, or are currently going, through a similar experience, will know exactly what I mean when I also say that, from out of the pain, come counterbalancing moments of wonderful beauty and reflection.
This week, while I was stuck in traffic, I was listening to my Spotify list of favourite songs and Steve Miller’s Circle of Love came on. It’s been my ear worm for a few days now and, as you may know, these things are not just by chance. They are a gift from spirit world, wanting to attract your attention with something very relevant to you.
The album and track were released in October 1981, a good three and a half years before Gar was born, and it doesn’t hold any relevance, or significance, for me with Gar. There is, however, in my later life at least, a joy I get from the flow, vibration and arrangement of the song, which clearly puts me in a reflective, meditative space.
And WHAM! Out of the blue, I was back in the hospital, on the night Gar was born, holding this amazing, fragile, crying little being and feeling the emotions about him that I know I didn’t feel and wasn’t capable of feeling at the time.
Sitting in the car, I was flooded with the bliss, joy and wonder of holding this tiny being. A new life, who I was actually only going to be able to hold for 36 very short, precious years. The shortest of times. And every day since he took his life, I have wished, with all my heart, that I had understood the limit to the time I had with him, after the taking of this picture when he was just 2 weeks old.
And as my tears flowed in the car, I could feel Gar around me with his own circle of love, reflecting back the wonder of his being. And I understood with astonishing clarity, that it’s very possible to travel back to these most precious of moments in life and relive them with a new, heightened presence and absorb the bliss with a new, more experienced and mature heart.
Gar’s Birth
Gar was a few days overdue, when Gill went into labour in the evening of 16th May 1985. Greenwich Hospital, where he was born, was literally over our back wall. So literally, in fact, that after Gar’s arrival, I could stand in the garden and wave to them both!
Like all first time parents of that era, we’d read Miriam Stoppard’s book and had our birth plan and music cassettes to hand. Sadly though, after 9 hours of labour and several tracks from Kate Bush, the doctors decided that an emergency Caesarean was needed and Gill was taken swiftly into theatre.
Clearly what father’s go through in those moments following, is a trifle in comparison to what happens to their partners. But my experience of those next 40 minutes, is all I can write about and are what came back to me while I was sitting in the traffic queue.
Back at the birth, it’s 2.30 in the morning and, after the rush of adrenaline I’d been fuelled with for the previous six hours, I’m now running on the stress and worry about what was happening to Gill. I was also beginning to fight that sleep deprived, mid-Atlantic flight, brain fuzz, that can make everything seem completely unreal.
The next thing I know, a nurse has appeared from theatre, wheeling a 2-layer trolly, with a baby in a plastic box on top and a kidney bowl with the placenta on the lower level, that bizarrely decides to jump off and splat on the floor. That’s the placenta that makes the leap, not the baby, by the way. This really is like a weird dream and in a daze, I follow the nurse, as instructed, because apparently this baby is mine.
I’ve no idea how I get there, but I’m now in another small room, with the nurse and she’s passing this tiny baby to me. Gar is crying and looking very bewildered. The lights are bright and must be as big a shock to him, as holding my son for the first time is to me.
This is the moment that floods back to me while I am sitting in the traffic, listening to Steve Miller.
And I remember. Gar stops crying and he looks at me for the first time, through his dark, watery eyes that are trying to adjust to the light, while his tiny body must be processing the overwhelming number of sensations flooding through him. His mystified expression is one of confusion and wonder, as he begins to make sense of the intense stimulation coming in. We more than catch each other’s eye and I know we connect in a way you can make contact with someone across a room. It’s an event that happens in a split second and is undeniable. You know they have seen you and you have seen them. Not just noticed their shape and presence. It’s as if a laser beam from the centre of your eye has entered the very centre of their eye and being and visa versa.
I’m sure that Gar and I exchanged a huge amount of information in that first connection. From the power of the feeling, we might even have had a cinematic style flash forward through all of our future life together.
Work in progress. To be continued . . . . .