Slow, Swift Grief

I seek the company of women through my year of magical thinking.1 Friends who walk, friends who swim, friends who sip coffee outside in any weather. Swift takes her "insurmountable grief" to the Lakes; I take mine to the Peaks and the pool, until suddenly I don't.2

I.

tis the damn season, write this down 3

Magical thinking stretches thin. It begins on my birthday last November and reaches out, under my feet, to some invisible point over the horizon. I turn thirty-eight on the day I'm told my mum will never wake up and her body takes two more days to die.4 We wait. The new year begins with her funeral, and though neither of us know it, this will be the last time I see my dad until, who knows.

Normal routines are suspended. Invented chores draw me through Sheffield streets; I climb gritstone and slip down limestone; I smell of chlorine. I want my legs to feel tired, to hurt, to manifest a pain I can neither point to nor describe.

Returning to work is an interlude between different states of silence and solitariness, from leave into lockdown. I'm one of the fortunate who can turn a spare room into an office. The swimming pools close and we are told to stay at home.

Walking where and when I can, I plot routes that extend and contract to fit restrictions. Still I seek the company of women. I read Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, George Eliot. Earphones in, I walk with imagined interlocutors, representatives, advocates: Kate Bush, Laura Marling, Phoebe Bridgers. I want their words and noise to surround me; they speak to and for me, as one foot in front of the other, I follow wooded trails along rivers, brushing feathery-edged moors I cannot reach. By the time Taylor Swift releases folklore, swimming pools are re-opening, walks are lengthening, and my need for other women's words is as keen as hunger.

II.

my mind turns your life into folklore 5

 folklore suits my summer mood: its euphoric melancholia, its nostalgia, its living "for the hope of it all," bears me along dusty desire lines.6 evermore arrives with the winter dark, the rain and mud; it belongs to short, fragile days of tentative hope — of changing rules, wrecked plans, bent willows.7 I'm drawn to Swift's monologues and storytelling but miss her referents and endless recursions. I listen with a magpie ear, wresting words from contexts and hoarding bright phrases as they rise to the surface, discarding others. Some figures do not serve: I do not want the roots and stems that grow over and into Swift's dreamland; I fear the stillness of wisteria that binds, ivy that covers; I fear this oblique surrender.8 Other figures suit my purpose better.

I counterfeit mourning as I walk, breaking my heart over to beguile my pain. I choose Swift's disappointed lovers in place of a lost mum — more reasonable, speakable, to grieve for the living, to imagine the best colors for your portrait, your bluest skies and darkest gray, daring to dream about you.9 Didion thought herself an imperfect "teller" of her husband's death: she buried details, winding ellipses round this central event.10 I make few attempts to tell my loss, for I'm spared an audience, but I take Swift's words without thinking, without effort — I patch a tapestry of incongruous sentiment: frayed warp, frayed weft.11 This is folklore: the smallest parts, repeated. This is myth: our desire to overcome contradiction, spinning tales "spiral-wise."12

My patchwork covers my pain: it's light and easy to hold, though bearing the weight of grief. I walk with it, stitch and unpick it, discovering a likeness to Didion's dream of digital edition, her longing to "show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines."13 Sitting down to make sense of that first year's grieving, she realized that every word, every choice, was another loss. There's comfort in this failure: it's freeing to know that words will always be inadequate, for if there's no right way to speak of grief, there can be only wrong ways. Do with your words what you will. This knowledge can make the grieving eloquent — like E., who lost her mum six months before me, who speaks to me without fear, with her I lay my patchwork down. But this knowledge can strike others dumb and I meet with silence in odd corners. Little matter as I'm in excellent company through my year of magical thinking, for there will always be women and my patchwork of their words.

III.

there is happiness past the blood and bruise 14

I cannot listen to "marjorie."

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Amber Regis (@AmberRegis) is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield. A writer and editor of various things, this is her first personal essay.

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