Australia, insurance, car, home, live, holidays

She calls her father,then an ambulance and the world of trauma,of grief begins.

“I lay down beside him on the floor,closed my eyes. I was conscious of the sound of him not breathing. I held his hand. His body was hard and cold. My body became hard and cold. The feeling leached from me. It disappeared from my fingertips. ‘He’s not here,’ I wanted to say again. I disappeared into the carpet like liquid. A stain. My senses diluted. I waited. For a sign. A feeling. For a message. For anything. His absence had a physical weight to it. It filled up the room.”

Sholl is writing this 16 years later. Bits ofFound,Wanting began as part of a creative-writing class,but it painstakingly forged itself into a book. Twenty-two is so young,too young to have been dealt that slap when you are just testing maturity. And although Sholl trod carefully around Rob’s family,his parents and his two sisters,it seems clear that because she and Rob were not married she was unable to express the full extent of her loss.

She cannot remember what the weather was like the day of the funeral but she can remember the eulogy,acknowledging their love but also remembering getting angry that it wasn’t quite right. This wasn’t describing the Rob she knew. Lover,partner,friend is different from child,brother.

She sees therapists and is diagnosed with post-traumatic-stress disorder. Like soldiers,she says. She binges and starves,she obsesses about everything,she “schemed against her body” in her anguish and her psychic pain manifested as tiredness and boredom,trying to find the way out of disbelief.

She tries to imagine she is pregnant. She doesn’t have the energy to have a proper breakdown,to rush through the streets screaming and flailing. But she does begin to stir. She goes to a self-help group in a small church by a suburban park and enacts her inner madness. Comedy again? It is a start.

I like the way Sholl moves from the madness of the early chapters into the flow of another life,in reality a second chance at staying here on earth.

Despite her desire for oblivion Natasha Sholl stayed on and has re-partnered with Dean,a sane and solid man,and they have four children. Dean knew Rob,knew her history and has been able to include it in their history. Writing this book is part of that and Sholl writes with dignity and thoughtfulness.

This book is testimony to her brief years with Rob but a stronger,sweeter testimony to the living,written – unusually for a grief work – with more generosity than ego. Grief is as unique as the person it settles into and so deep it has no language. Sometimes silence coupled with endurance is the only way to do justice to grief.

The Egyptians used to seat a polished skeleton at the table towards the end of a feast or celebration. A stark visual of Death’s immaculate success rate. We don’t really want to believe this. Not me! Not me! We blink resorting to Freud’s magical thinking. Perhaps the seismic sea wave of grief books is our version of the Egyptian skeleton.

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