ellen bell

She is undoubtedly a good woman.

She was looking out for me as I walked towards her front door. “It’s been so long,” she said, “that I wasn’t sure if I’d recognise you.” She’s rake thin. A child-woman. Tall with unaccountably thick ankles and feet encased in rather unexpected navy blue plimsolls, she wears her hair in a style akin to Shirley Temple with a row of curls along the bottom. A pink metal grip hold some of it away from her face. And her voice is child-like too – quiet, understated and high. I like her. There is goodness there. Her husband death three years ago doesn’t appear to have destabilised her. She is pragmatic, clearly. She keeps going. In her eighties now, she still walks everywhere, though she admits to finding the last bit of the hill up to her house challenging. Her thinness is due to her diet. “I’m gluten intolerant, so I live off toast and jam.” She can’t stomach fresh fruit or vegetables, she says. She bakes cakes with a special flour. “David used to say that it cost a pound a slice.” The cakes are for others. The students. She meets them at church and invites them round, one, an American even has a key. He stayed with her for months when he was recovering from cancer. “There’s plenty of room,” she says. Such openness puts me to shame. She talks about gathering for coffee after the service on a Sunday and used the word fellowship. It sounded so incongruous. She told me she loved to hear the liturgy. “The language is so beautiful,” she said. One of her daughters was training to be a priest. “I don’t hold with the use of the word priest,” she said, “to me Jesus is the only priest.” The daughter, the smiling one who lives a couple of houses along from her, gave up half way, the Welsh Church was too political for her. She’s a canon however and still ministers to others. “You’ve told me nothing about yourself,” she said, as I got ready to leave. As I said in reply, she is so much more interesting.

Bless her and keep her.

I drew her room yesterday. I drew its collections of paraphernalia and objects she has salvaged from her long life – the teddies mostly. She is a strange mixture of toughness and softness. She looked well. “I’ve never been beautiful,” she said. She looks pretty though. And she maintains a diffidence and feminity that is characteristic, at least for as long as I have known her. She is clearly well-liked. The carers joke with her and call her soft names. She in turn keeps her door open so that she can hear all their noisy comings and goings. There is acceptance now of where she is, though less so, perhaps of who or what she is. I know those latter feelings all too well. How I like her, even love her. Keep well, my love.

It floors me. It reduced me to tears yesterday. I had had enough. I cannot get on to the system. I don’t understand what it is telling me to do. It is not my language. I feel kept out, alienated. He tells me it will be alright and that all I have to do is ask for help. Yes. I know this. But from whom? I know that it is a nonsense to get so upset. It is only a means to an end but it reminds me of my innate sense of incompetence and my even larger fear of being thought badly of by others. Can I do this? Am I big enough, brave enough? I don’t know. Please let me in so that I can do what I need to do. Please.

My head is full. There are too many strands that I have yet to bring together. Sixty-five emails await my attention. I am not yet grounded, though I have cleaned the flat from top to bottom. It all helps, as does a proper night’s sleep. I know that my need for order runs deep and that it is an impossibility. Life is not ordered. It is chaos. I need to accept this and move with it, yielding to its precious flow. All is well. All will be well. I am where I am meant to be, doing what I am meant to be doing. All I have to do is remember to breathe and to pay attention. And love. Just love. Just that.

It was the first thing that hit me. I hadn’t noticed it before when I’d visited, what was it three, four years ago? I sat with it. I accepted it. It stank but it was nobody’s fault. The carers do their best to keep things clean. And the residents are no responsible for what their bodies do or don’t do. It smelt of poignancy. She was lovely. Open and effervescent. I left feeling optimismistic and excited about where this work is going to take me and to whom. It isn’t a home but they all try their hardest to make it so, I believe that. It is certainly kitsch, with all that frou frou and stuff, but it comes from the heart. She buzzed a visitor in. She looked like she knew where she was going. “Now, her husband would be perfect for you,” she said as we walked to the exit. I like her. I like her enthusiasm, her care. I am blessed.

It’s a phrase that Joan Halifax atributes to St John of the Cross. He uses it to describe suffering, seeing it as a fortunate experience and one that takes us to a greater knowing of self. I paraphrase, trying to make these new concepts my own. I understand what he means. I walk into the dark these mornings not wanting to, but, when I get out there there is something like joy. That first smell of the morning air – what was it this morning? a warm, moist smell of beginning to rot leaves – and then there’s the wind on my face. Enlivened I am glad to be out. I move into the blackness, sometimes staying in it or sometimes lighting my way with my torch.

I think about the discomfort of my arthritis. For all its inconvenience and sometime pain, like Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid I feel each step, and I am grateful. I still have my freedom to move. There are others who don’t. So yes, that is certainly my lucky dark. I heard the pipping of oystercatchers this morning andamid the crashing of the waves. I walked over the stragglings of seaweed. I strode through the harbour to the rattling sound of the boat riggings. Yellow squares of light peppered the dark. People were awake, like me. I am comforted by the thought. And then, climbing the hill into the Castle Park I caught the scent of the last dog roses. Gorgeous. Lucky indeed.

I don’t know what to do about it all. I have never really known, even when she was provisionally mine. I say provisionally because they are never ours, they come from us but they are their own selves, autonomous. It was always the case with her. She was detached, separate, an enigma to me. I couldn’t reach her. I still can’t. There is silence. It is an uncomfortable one. She says nothing. I must accept it and do what feels more comfortable. The gift-giving is not. They go nowhere. Does she want them? Does she give them to them? Is she laughing at me? No, that doesn’t matter. Not really. I will send one more, just for her and then I shall cease. Cards perhaps. I need to keep letting her know that I haven’t forgotten. Even if she doesn’t care about the knowing. Who are I doing this for her or me? As I say, I don’t know. Joan Halifax’s book offers a stillness I yearn for. Is it in me already? I need to become more detached, to cut those golden threads. See how tight they are. Just let it be, Ellen. Just let it be.

I get easily thrown. I hold onto life too tightly. I need to be in control. It is an illusion. I know this. All of it. And when I am still I can see it. I can see it all so much better. It wasn’t his fault. And I felt and heard myself being sharp. So sharp that he became defensive. He is a gentle soul, a good man. And I am sorry that I showed some teeth. He emailed me later. He has made it all OK. And now I can breathe. Thank you.

I think about it all the time and I just don’t have any sense of what is the right thing to do. I cannot and do not know her. There is no second guessing, ever. I do my best, I do believe that. I want to be kind, to do what I can to smooth her path. We bought him a coat. We took time in deciding upon the right one. But we are in the dark. I am in the dark. And there is never any response. Does she like it that way? I don’t ask for thanks, just an acknowledgement that she has received whatever it is that I have sent, that I have made a difference, however small. Maybe I will stop sending them things. Maybe it is not an entirely selfless gesture. I want to touch them, to be there, in that room with them when they tear the wrapping. Perhaps she senses my wanting and that makes her crueller. Her lack of response strips me of my skin, just as she did. I need it. I need to hold myself together. I cannot be always opening myself up like this. I will save for them. Won’t that be better?

I’d held it in my mind as a place of serenity, of succour, of even mystical memory. I used to go when I lived there every Sunday morning early, to sit in the ancient, high-backed pews just by the altar and to worship and take communion. I relished those early services. There was no singing, no grandness or pomp just a small congregation, prayers and the preacher reading the lessons. It was often cold and austere but I loved it. It felt true to the puritan in me. And now? We went in and the pews in the main part of the Abbey have all gone, replaced by wooden chairs – very modern and minimal, tasteful even but it still looks like its been laid out for a recital not worship. There are no kneelers and no rests for prayer and hymn books. There was a huge inflated globe hanging in the centre of the building and it was so light. People were everywhere. Tourists mostly, guidebooks in hand, taking pictures and talking and pointing. Even the private chapels were light and bright. There was nowhere to sit in peace and think. We lit two candles for those that we’ve lost and left. I’d cried. I am not sure why. Change, loss, possibly the loss of something that I’d held as a treasure only to find that it was either gone or merely gimcrack, fools’ gold. I am sorry for it.