Today I would have travelled back from the Netherlands. What actually happened is I arrived home almost a week ago. I booked an earlier flight and cancelled the one I had planned previously. I had been nervous going away for the first time after Kamalashila’s death. I was not sure whether I was going to be able to cope. My brain had felt frozen so I could not properly think through what I was actually going to do whilst I was there. So a few days after I had arrived I found I just needed space to process and could not find it in the Netherlands. Although it was good to see my mother and some friends, I just wanted to be back home. It was not easy to admit this. I had left Kamalashila’s stuff behind, his accounts, his writings. It seemed a good idea to have a bit of a holiday from all of that. But what I found was a painful series of anniversaries and memories that are connected to this time of the year. We never did much for Christmas. Although for a number of years we led a retreat together at the West London Buddhist Centre. But the last two Christmases we had been in the Netherlands. We had distributed my father’s ashes together in the dunes, early in the morning one Saturday just before Christmas. We had our wedding anniversary on the solstice. The most difficult thing really was: I was in the Netherlands and he was not home in England. Perhaps being at a distance made the loss more acute, more tangible. Perhaps there was more space for the grief to come through away from everything I needed to do and was engaged with here in London. At any rate, I took the plane back and was deliriously happy to be back home, in my own bed, with lots of space around me. And particularly to be reunited with the bath.
I must have picked up a bug at one of the airports or packed trains I had been on. So a day after I got home I was down with a bug. I am now emerging from five days of being on my own, having been forced to rest. The new year has started without celebrations. A year without Kamalashila. This was also difficult. It is still difficult. I had this idea in my mind that after three months I would start picking things up again. I would start returning to a kind of normal life, whatever that may mean. But this is entirely fictional as well. I have a heap of projects to engage with this month, but my heart is lingering, burrowing. I have no idea who I am. No idea what I will do, who I will become. There is just a faint knowing that the heart needs to be on board with whatever happens next. As I was backing up my laptop the other day, it was logging changes. At some point it had reached 700,000 changes. It made me reflect on all the small and big changes in my life after Kamalashila’s death. Catching up will probably happen. But I have no clue what that process will look like, the length of it and in what realms it will take me.
