The story resurfaces and I let it flow through me

The impossibility of escaping trauma

All morning I’ve been telling my mum that her procedure will ‘all be over and done with in an hour’ and that afterwards we can go home to her cosy kitchen and I’ll make her some dinner and a pot of tea. The blue of the waiting room is the blue of the sea just before a storm. My mum’s hands are so frail every vein stands up. She is mapped.

We are careful with what we do and don’t tell each other in this quiet place where four other people are waiting their turn to go down the corridor. We don’t talk about the creeping fear that is on her, since my dad died and all hospital rooms are the rooms that he died in, or my own creeping trauma, from this hospital, from this hospital where my daughter’s life was compromised so many years ago, and also somehow right now in this space. This is a trauma that leaves me alert to myself, aware of myself like the owner of an unpredictable dog who might start barking or cowering for fear of the unknown. This is an internal animal. Today is a day for a calm exterior, a cushioning of self, a making myself uncomfortable in order to give comfort.

We don’t speak these things. Instead I hold her hand briefly, and we talk about what what information she should tell the nurses and doctors about her plethora of autoimmune conditions. Then away she goes, smiling at the nurses who take her arm as if she was an old friend and they are pleased to see her.

A routine procedure, but not routine, as nothing is really, when you are in your seventies and compromised by chronic health conditions. Still, the waiting room is clean and comfortable, the radio station hums in the background, nothing blaring. The seats are padded. It is quiet enough for me to take out my book,

Ruth Allen

‘s Weathering, and begin to read.

My eyes flick to the clock, watching the counting up of quarter hours. Now it is an hour and  ahalf. I imagine all the paper work and consent forms that need signing, not unusual that it should take a while. But now it is two hours and I begin to feel slightly uneasy. I imagine a ward full of people needing the same procedure, all with consent forms. This is why it is taking so long.

On the TV, images of British wildlife appear and disappear: blackbird, goldfinch, roe deer, hedgehog. I’m glad of it. I’d rather have random images of animals and birds than some awful gossipy morning television show. On the walls, two long distorted images of the Yorkshire moors add a sense of peace and expanse to what is in fact, I notice, a windowless, hot room.

Two and a half hours. I’m quashing my panic. I tell myself if there was something wrong they’d let me know. But all the time my mind jumps back to the time around my daughter’s death, when we made assumptions it can’t be an emergency if they are still treating us as a non emergency. It can’t be that bad if no one is calling for an ambulance. I pick up the book again and highlight a quote with my highlighter:

We do not have to choose one story and run with it.

My stories are converging here in the blue-sea-storm room, the too hot room. The past story that I keep retelling, keep putting to bed, only for it to rise again and keep circling me is running into the story of today, the story of a capable, intelligent woman taking her mother to a routine hospital appointment. I am trying too hard not to feel the stories of myself. I remind myself that all stories change the landscape of self, that I am a a landscape that has been changed, but that I am still here, still working, still habitable.

I am looking around at the faces of the people passing through the too hot storm-blue room and feel a sense of kinship with them, for all the people who are navigating the internal landscapes of their past and present. The protective armour of their external selves, the way they move their own pain aside to offer respite, places of safety to other people. It almost makes me cry to think that we are all just drifting over our own pasts, that we are all so lucky to have reached this place of living when there are so many branches of our lives where we may not have survived. I am glad to be here in the blue waiting room, survived.

What a salve Weathering has been. I have read it slowly, little pieces spread out over a couple of months, allowing it to sink through me like water through porous rock. So much of what is in it mirrors my own experiences. Ruth’s style is to move around the themes carefully, in her open, genuine, thoughtful way.

Three hours. I pack my book away, look around for someone to ask. I am now the only person left in the waiting room. My daughter’s death fourteen years ago is taking up the air in the room. It’s happened again. I have assumed. I have trusted.

Then the doors shush open and there is the little old lady that is my mum, carrying her own bag, dressed and chatty, ready for home. My experiences recede like a child back into the shadows of unlucky and very unusual rather than inevitable rather than cursed. I right myself, pack all the trauma back into my bag, lead my mum gently back to the car. When we get back to her house I try to tuck her up with a blanket, but she’ll have non of it, she is already reasserting her independence, proving she’s not weak and doesn’t need looking after and I allow her to do that while I make a pot of tea and find some biscuits and put something she’ll enjoy on the tele and tempt her to rest again.

On my way back home I drive out to the centre of the ghost lake, pull over in the dim afternoon light. I pull my ever ready binoculars out and stand on the bridge to look for the buzzards. There they are, being harassed by crows, physically knocked about, but then lifting, unbothered, up and across where the sky is low with rain. Deep breaths. The landscape is like a mirror letting me see myself, pain, life, joy, grief, all there, all the stories rolled open, my story too, and open too to the future, all the things to come.

Shameless Self Promotion

You can buy my nature/landscape memoir The Ghost Lake from bookshops, online, as an ebook, an audio book and of course you can lend it from your local library.

For paid subscribers -

Links and information for today’s write-along can be found here: