One more week till the memorial. I really do not have a lot of plans for afterwards, at least for what is left of this year. Except to continue with my tour guiding course and arrange a visit to the Netherlands. I haven’t been back since the holidays last year. We drove to Harwich on Boxing Day and embarked on the ferry to Hook-of-Holland. We took the ferry back on 2 January. Kamalashila was tired a lot around that time and we stayed an extra night in Harwich so he could rest up. He did the driving and at this time of his life he was not keen on driving without daylight. After we came back I tried to concentrate on my freelance work, starting new initiatives and reconnecting with my network in London, both with friends and professionally. Regarding my work, I had had a difficult few years, with the pandemic throwing a spanner in the works with my then newly-started freelance commissions and activities. Everything went online and then most of it went offline again when galleries starting to open post pandemic and people went back to meeting in groups. Whilst I had been living at a considerable distance from London with a sluggish broadband. So I was going full guns blazing in my new situation: back in London with its many potentials and opportunities for my work.
We know by now that what happened was completely the opposite. Kamalashila fell ill and my attention and care was needed in a different direction. As we are approaching the end of 2024, not my most favourite year, I am hoping to make a fresh start with my working life in the new year. I have a few work things to arrange, prepare and facilitate before then. I will have plenty of time to do the preparation for my course. This takes quite a bit of my bandwidth at the moment, apart from the memorial. At the moment I have ample time to turn towards my experience, to be witnessed by friends, to absorb beauty, and to follow my curiosity about all things Lambeth (the London borough where I live).
But of course I do not know how the creature called Grief is going to manifest and behave in these next months. There is still so much to arrange. So much admin. I keep an eye out for emails on Kamalashila’s phone and have to keep checking the payments going out of his account. Some of them are surprises, some of them by now familiar. Insurance for his devices, keeping his websites in the air, Soundcloud and Vimeo, charity payments, subscriptions. Some I cancel. Some need to continue for now, until they can be transferred to other accounts. It will take quite a while to sort it all out. I hope I will have plenty of time to do this. I hope I will have the headspace. I hope nothing unexpected and dramatic is going to happen that needs to be dealt with, faced, acted upon, that absorbs all of my attention. I hope. And we shall see. But I am confident I will get through it all. In one piece.
