Writing about change in my journal yesterday: everything can change in an instant, it might already have done so. If the light of the sun were to suddenly extinguish it would be eight minutes before we knew, and in those eight minutes we would continue to live as normal. Later in the day I opened the email that told me I had lived a month without knowing that one of the lights in my life had been
extinguished.
Hello! sorry Les just. Useing. Sam’s. Pad not good at it sorry to tell you sam died day be for her birthday. 20 Feb I’m just getting round to doing this.
There is a shock when we lose someone suddenly. There is the disbelief, the whole agony of how could this happen? It is different when we lose them slowly, when we know there is an ending sooner rather than later. It is different again, when we find out only later that we missed the ending. When a husband has to respond to a flippant email about fairies and flowers and memories, to tell you that the smiles you hoped she still had no longer light up the rooms you sat in together.
I was already missing Sam, cliché as that is, because we’d already agreed that my staying in the Garden Room was no longer possible for logistical and financial reasons…and because I hadn’t spent much time recently in town. I was there yesterday, between a train and a bus, killing time wandering, window shopping, thinking I’d go for a coffee and deciding not to. Remembering other days, I thought about whether I should go knock on the door, see if anyone was home, if she was well enough for five minutes…I did not do so.
Maybe Mal saw me; maybe that prompted the message. Or maybe he had literally, purely coincidentally, just gotten around to it.
He’s one of the few people I’ve never corrected from shortening my name. I don’t like it, but the family have always done it and these people were almost instantly family.
Come in, sit down, don’t worry about your boots… I took them off anyway. It was Winter, they were wet if not actually muddy. It was 2020, in those months before the rumours of a virus became real and turned all our worlds upside down. Mine had already been torn apart and I was working on reassembling the pieces into a new reality. I had thought it would be a Kintsugi thing – holding the same shape even if the cracks were visible, highlighted even. It turned out to be more a Kaleidoscope shifting, the same pieces but a whole new picture. Sam would have a bigger hand in that than either of us realised at the time.
As the weeks became months, years, we connected. She was a delight, a nurturing, an inspiration. She said I was special because I was the first person to book the Garden Room – not the first to actually stay, but the first booking – and from the outset I said it could be a regular thing. I explained my desire to write in two separate groups, both of which met on Tuesday mornings, and the only way I could manage both (given my lack of a driving licence) was to be already up at the coast by 7a.m.
So it worked...I'm sure I got privileges other guests didn't, because although I continued to reinforce my acceptance that she had a business to run, we both knew it went deeper than that, that we had become a "we". With the interruption of lockdown, and going back as soon as a carefully managed return could be managed, for the next five years, I would spend many Monday nights – and occasional others – in a room that enabled me to wake in the middle of the night and see the stars, or the moon, a room that opened into a courtyard garden that thought it would grow up to be a jungle.
On most of those evenings, before I retreated into that room and garden, we would sit and talk – in her front room, in her kitchen, space between us as dictated by rules and her vulnerability. We talked frivolous and laughed, but we also talked serious…and took deep breaths…because we were alive and life was full of beauty, even now.
She & Mal shared their life story with me – the amazing places they’d lived, the jobs they’d done, people they’d met, the disasters encountered that with the distance of time had become a lot funnier than they were in the living of them. I returned the favour.
Somewhere along the line, Sam adopted me. She called me Leskey – a mistype that she then adopted. Although the deal was room and D.I.Y. breakfast, she always made sure I had picnic dinners available: bread and meat and salad and snacks and fruit – and she’d worry if it seemed that I hadn’t eaten enough of them, so at times they also became the next day’s lunch. Often there would be cake or chocolates…and she gave me so many cards and gifts.
I have a pair of slender elephants among my pride. A card with the simple word Welcome is Blu-tac’d to my kitchen wall. A fairy oversees my writing space and travels with me to journalling retreats. She has been introduced to my scribbling friends. The message that she held the day I found her in the treasure chest by the tiny Christmas tree, is in my desk drawer. The day I brought her home, I thought I’d stolen her – but No…you were meant to have her!
Sometimes when I would show up, excited about attending a concert (before or after) she’d have Springsteen playing to welcome me home. Home.
The number of times in my journal on Tuesday mornings I’d have to cross out the word Home and write Sheringham.
She came into my life at a time when I was only beginning to heal, beginning to find my new equilibrium. She may not have known how big a role she played in that, simply by the way she faced her own challenges – not always with grace, sometimes with rage – but always with a dolloping great chunk of positivity…and the way she talked about the dew on the grass, shared the stories of Grumpy Gull, could always find something to smile about, laugh about, without ever denying the reality of the turn life had taken. Maybe I was her safe space as much as she was one of mine. She did say, once, that I got some of what she wouldn't say to anyone else. If ever there is a mark of friendship, of love, then surely the placing of a confidence is it.
She may not have known how much was her doing, but she noticed the change as I healed over those years. It is so good, she said one day, I remember when you first came and now to see you thriving…
As time went on and her condition took a greater toll, we evolved a code that told me when to come and talk, and when to stay quietly out of the way. She was always a respecter of personal space and always sensitive to what people needed. I hope I repaid that.
Everyone who walks through your life leaves a trace, beyond things that they actually gift to you…I think of the people who changed my eating habits, how I cook, influenced my music, my taste in clothes, guided my spirt and my exercise routines. Sam is echoed, of all places, in my bedroom – her décor delighted me and eventually I thought: well, why not. Why not black sheets and flamboyant duvet covers? Why not use a duvet cover as a lower divan cover? Why not soften the edges with green things or pictures.
Meanwhile, in my hallway is a mirror, wooden framed, in the shape of a Norman arch. Full length, which is to say it is about four feet at its height and two and a bit feet across its width. It gives a full view of the body if you stand far enough away.
It was, probably, 2023 and for over a year Jay had been promising me a mirror of similar proportions to aid in my learning of how I was using my body, to improve my practice of both Softening and Form. That mirror currently resided, still resides, on someone else’s landing. It had only ever been a loan, he insists, and he had now asked for it back. The loan was to the parents of a friend. Unfortunately there was been some family falling-out during the pandemic, its aftermath, and the growth of what he calls ‘project fear’ such that access to the parental home became prohibited. If I ever knew the details of those arguments, I have long discarded them. The result was simple. The holders of the mirror were not strong enough to lift it down the stairs and neither he nor their son was permitted to enter the premises.
Every now and then the question would resurface. He wanted to recover the mirror. He wanted me to have it. We agreed where the mirror would go when I finally got it. So far as I know it is still on someone else’s landing. I have never seen it, so I don’t know whether I would have preferred it to the one I have. The one that I have that was an unexpected gift from Sam.
One Monday afternoon, I arrived, probably from the beach because it was Summer. I would have been in cropped leggings, my skin salted and sand-stuck, my hair an unbrushed, sea-soaked mess. I would have been smiling. One of her biggest compliments to me was when she said the beach-bum look suited me.
“Go upstairs,” she said, “Take a look at the mirror on the first landing, do you fancy it?”
I went up. “What? Seriously? How much do you want for it?”
“We’re just getting rid, yours if you want it.”
I wanted it. I adore the shape of the thing and I knew exactly where it was going to go. Precisely where it is. Jay drove me up one day to pick it up & we hung it in the hall as soon as we got back.
I don’t like the colour of the wood. I had always had in mind (still have in mind) to paint it black. I will, eventually. Meanwhile, I do occasionally practice Softening or Form in front of it. I talk to myself in it, which is just a thing you do when you live alone. I walk past it dozens of times a day. It reminds me of my progress and/or lack of it in honouring my self-commitment to respect my physical body, to honour the teachings and do my practice.
And I think of my first meetings with Sam and all the confidences we have shared over the five or six years we’ve known each other, and all the things she has taught me just by being who she is. We should all have such people in our lives.
A glittery fabric butterfly has alighted at the point of the arch. That is Sam as well.
She is listed often in my journals as one of my everyday angels…and she will remain so. No-one we truly connect with ever really leaves.
~ /~
Thank you for everything, Sam. Go gently. 💙♾️💙
