Of Girls and Goats and Wars

Some weeks back I made a comment on one of the blogs I read. The blog post was looking at the new monument in Tallinn commemorating the Estonian War of Independence. For those of you who don't know, the monument looks like this:




It's designed to look like the Estonian Cross of Liberty, which is one of the highest military honours in the short history of the country of Estonia. However, it also looks suspiciously like other things involving iron crosses. Most of those things weren't so auspicious.

The discussion in the comments had been playing out the debate over whether or not the monument was actually perceived as representing a good thing. Did it look too much like symbols used by the "bad guys" in various other wars?

As part of my "two bits", I restated my belief that the best monuments look like figures - they're easy to anthropomorphise and more interesting to look at. I included the following paragraph:

Blokes riding horses and wielding weapons are always good value, but they've been over used. One day I'd love to see a freedom monument or a victory statue that involves a young girl riding a goat. Whilst making a daisy chain. If that doesn't symbolise freedom, I don't know what does.

Which tickled the fancy of a couple of other commenters, but raised the semi-serious ire of one, who had this to say:

This a monument for a war. War is not a feminine thing! Young girl riding on goat, playing with flowers?? I think the men who were engaged in battle would turn over in their grave, if that was how we commemorated their fight!

Which, in turn, prompted another player to add:

This a monument for a war. War is not a feminine thing! There should be a young man riding on goat, playing with flowers.

Personally, I found the whole exchange hilarious, but I'd like to put forward the following question:

Sure, war is normally an exercise in men doing violent things... but why do they do it? Forget the politics that usually lies behind the war, why do young men - fathers, farmers and the boy you went to school with - go to war? Especially a "War of Independence?" Is it to dress in a uniform, wave around a weapon and feel masculine?

Well, maybe. They're boys, after all. Still, I can't shake the feeling most grandfathers who fought in a War of Independence did it so they could see their children and grandchildren lolling about in the sun without a care in the world - enjoying a peaceful childhood in a free country. So a little girl riding a goat and playing with flowers seems like a perfectly apt monument to such a war. A celebration of what was worth fighting for.

I doubt any war hero worth his salt would "turn over in his grave" for such a thing. More likely, they would feel glad it was all worth it.

Slipping in Time

I think my sense of linear time is a little off.

Well, okay, it's always been dodgy. Left to my own devices, I can't really tell the difference between an hour and five minutes. Remembering what I did this morning has always been a challenge - along with what I was about to do, or what I ate for dinner two nights ago. I occasionally get yesterday confused with three days ago...

But for the last couple of years I've found I sometimes forget exactly when I am.

This is particularly so when I half wake up in the middle of the night after I've heard a noise or something. It usually takes me a minute to remember which house I'm in so I can work out what's likely to be causing the noises. As I've been living in that house for almost four years now, you'd think it wouldn't be such a challenge.

Strangely, when I'm on holidays and sleeping in a different bed every night, I always seem to know exactly where and when I am. It's only when I'm sleeping in the same place for several nights in a row (or months, as is the case with my house) that I get misplaced.

There's also slippage in my 'half thoughts'. Just today I thought about something I wanted to do towards the end of the month - visit a book fair - and I half thought I might drop by my grandmother's house and show her the books I found. It took me a second to remember that I live in that house, she hasn't lived there for over a year, and she died last week.

Heck, the version of my grandmother I was thinking of visiting hasn't been around for years.

For some reason my internal clock just slipped back about six years, and it all seemed like a perfectly reasonable way to spend a weekend.

It would have been, too.

Normal

And now the hurly-burly's done
And all the guests have been
And gone
And it's time to go back to normal --
But what is normal now?
The extra chairs are put away
The last relatives went home
Today
And it's time to go back to normal --
But what is normal now?
There's a hole in my day
That she used to fill
There's a gap in my prayers
That she used to fill
There's a stop on my way
That she used to fill
And now she's gone
And no one else will fill it
No one else could
No one else should
So, what is normal now?

And then

And then you keep forgetting.

I got a letter today telling me I've been promoted to the next pay bracket, and one of my first thoughts was: "Hey, that would be a good piece of news to share with Nana when I visit tomorrow."

The thought directly after that was: "Oh, yeah. Dammit."

All things must come to an end

Well, my grandmother finally ran out of space to fall.

She slipped into a coma on Monday night and died Tuesday morning.

We've got a lot of the family coming up today for the funeral tomorrow. I think it's going to be an interesting day.

I cried a bit when she died, and I was a bit at a loss for what to do with myself for the rest of the day, but I seem to be fairly unfazed, generally speaking. I don't know if it's because I'm going to be hit by some serious grief stuff later on, or if it's because I've eked out my grief over the years.

It's more of a shock for the family members who weren't based here, seeing her regularly for the past couple of years. Those of us who lived with her have been watching her die for some time now. In essence, she hasn't "just died", she's just stopped dying.

My mother's in the same boat. She hasn't cried yet and has managed to successfully keep herself busy with looking after everything. You can tell she's not sure what she feels, and she's a bit weirded out by it all.

It's hard to know how to feel about something like this. We've been expecting it, waiting for it, praying for it for years. This is something we wanted to happen, something we're actually relieved about, but we still know, on some level, that it's a sad and unfortunate thing.

Over the past year I have found myself actually angry about her continued existence. I loved my grandmother, and I didn't want her to be in so much pain for so long - and I knew she wouldn't have been if it wasn't part of our culture to keep people alive long after they've stopped living.

She should have died a year ago, when she got that infection. Instead, some doctor swooped in at the last minute, "saved her life" and probably felt good about it. Never mind the fact that it was too little, too late, and what they had left her with could hardly be called a life. It was an existence, and it was cruel and pointless.

So, yeah, my grandmother's death two days ago was a blessing. Something longed for and looked forward to. And I'm still not sure what I feel about it all.

I probably won't be for a while yet.

"She should have died hereafter; There would have been time for such a word."

Catcher

Catcher catcher Mason
Catch me if you can
I'm a fan of any man
Who knows just where he stands

Wind and sea and starshine
Are ever just the same
Catcher catcher Mason
Did you catch my name?

Catcher catcher Mason
Ever and again
There's a long and winding road
Which never feels the rain

All the world's a lost boat
The stars can never find
Catcher catcher Mason
I can catch in kind

Falling Slowly

My grandmother didn't die last weekend.

We were kind of expecting her to - she looked worse than she had for a while. There was trouble breathing, trouble swallowing and a throat infection of some sort (don't ask me which was caused by what), and it looked like something that might finally get the better of what's left of her.

But... she didn't die. She's slightly better now. I suppose I should be happy about that, and on one level I am. Mostly, I'm just resigned.

It reminded me, though, how we're still expecting her to die on poetic grounds. It's like we've read and heard too many stories about people dying once they've done this, that or the other, and we keep looking for the poetic moment of closure, after which she can "rest".

Time after time there's a moment, a milestone, a visit, an illness... and we think she's surely had enough now. Now she's had the chance to say or do x, y or z - so she should just go to sleep and let go... right?

Somehow we've all got this strange idea that life is some big switch that we can choose to keep on or turn off depending on whether or not we have the will to keep living. It's this concept that just seems to haunt the collective consciousness of our culture.

Watching my grandmother sink into death over the last few years, though, and looking at her neighbours in the nursing home doing the same thing, I don't think life is that co-operative.

I think it doesn't matter how much you might want to stop living, you just keep falling slowly until you've run out of space to fall.

The more we treat ourselves and our loved ones with medicines and care designed to "help" them, the more falling space we give them. Living longer is not necessarily living better - it's just living longer. We don't get to "drift away" just because we've had that final, poetic moment and "now we can rest". We just keep falling slowly...

At some point, life stops being a gift and becomes a sentence. No poetry in the world can change that.