Phones, questions and grief

Grief is one of those emotions that may ebb over time but never ever disappears sometimes emerging at times when you least think it will arrive. The first week of March which contains both of my parents birthdays are one such time where my thoughts often turn back to memories and reflections. This year is no different but how those memories reemerge point to the mystery of grief.

Significant dates often open my mind to reflection but really, a small part of me is always carrying grief, ready to spring into something that brings back fully formed memories with all the emotional feels intact. A routine task, a familiar ambience or just a random thought that suddenly attaches itself to a grief memory. While hiking this week, a random image of an old land line phone popped into my mind. I will never know why that image decided to visit me but with it came the realization that the image of that old phone was a symbol of a lifetime of phone calls with my parents. And perhaps most gutting is the crashing realization that all those questions that I have been amassing since their deaths will always remain unanswered.

The Questions

I still have those moments where after an emotional week where just for second I have a thought, I wish I could call them and share that with them. Or, I wonder how you might have managed the situation that I find myself in

As I get older, new questions begin to emerge that I did not even know that I was interested in. Finding out that English was not our first language set in motion a lengthy list of questions that I wished I had asked. In this case my Dad held the answer to the question of when Welsh disappeared as a language in our family. Who spoke it? Did you understand it? How did it make it make you feel?

The Rituals

Behind the questions, lie the ritual of the phone call. Today it seems that even the phone call is old fashioned. Texts and group chats seem to be the norm but there is something still intrinsically satisfying about a phone call with someone close. With only our voices, conversations can ebb and flow where not only the words have meaning but the structure, the pacing, the nuances, and the pause all rely on our imaginations to create connections and understandings. And as our lives changed so did the nature of the ritual of the call.

The rituals of early adulthood after leaving home for the first time are best encapsulated in “the weekly call.”   This call to my parents, always on weekends, as back then calling someone long distance was “cheaper.”  The conversations always followed a similar trajectory and perhaps this is the universal one that parent’s and adult children still follow. This was a time for parents to “check in” to see how I was doing whether it be during university or in the initial stages of my launching as an adult.

I cannot remember who called who, but my working hypothesis is that it depended on how my life was going. In times of struggle, it is remarkable how reaching out to one’s parents takes one back to the place of nurturing and support. Once again, I wonder is that too universal and part of our journey. Other times, as I can now attest to as a parent, it is reaching out when you just need to check in and see how things are going with your child.

Regardless of who initiated the call, it was always Mom who talked first and then following a gendered script my Mom would ask “do you want to speak to your father?”  And the conversation would move from “how” my life is going to “what” am I doing.

As I got older and the pressures of a career and raising children, those calls became less frequent. As a parent today, I now understand how they must have felt as our lives became busier and our conversations became less frequent.

Then something changed, when suddenly I became aware of wondering how my parents are doing. Aging and health concerns enter the discussion but still the focus as I am now learning with my own son, is that you never really stop parenting.

But then gradually, even the act of using the phone started to slip away. Just as phones were at one time connected by wires, it felt that gradually the threads of connection were starting to ebb away. Until finally that number, that I still remember, is no longer in service.

The Continuity

Perhaps grief serves not as a reminder of loss, but to continue to preserve those connections that were once so important but also allow those connections to continue to influence our life today and into the future.

And perhaps the one lesson that I have learned is it is never too late to pick up a phone and to reach out to someone.