Comfort
I dreamt of cooking last night. Cooking a meal in my kitchen for an old friend. A friend who nowadays cooks for himself and has never eaten my food. It was a simple meal, still I remember thinking that he would not be able to stop himself from comparing and criticising my cooking. Even though it was my dream, I was powerless to stop the hurt. In my dream, I offered the only comfort I could give, and this friend rejected it as he rejects any attempt at empathy or solace. He is a desert island, and needs no one to offer some shade or a cool drink. Well, at least, that person is not me. It hurts, this repeated rejection of comfort. I wish I could offer it to someone else but these choices – whom to love, whom to hate, comfort, rejection – lie beyond my control.
Comfort is a strange thing. It is often only in hindsight that we acknowledge its gift. In the fraught moment, the ongoing tragedy or the upheaval, it is easy to take comfort for granted. A cup of tea carefully placed in a trembling hand. A squeeze of the shoulder, a quick hug, the loving command to be brave, the brain stores these gestures away to be taken out, to be savoured and given thanks for, when trapped in the eye of the storm.
Often, it is not the overt gesture but the reassurance that brings comfort. The sagging of the mattress as a familiar weight settles next to you. The sigh, the murmur and the knowledge that nightmares may come, only to be chased away by the calm companion breathing next to you.
Or sometimes it is the absence of that weight, after years of bated breath and feigned sleep. That too, brings comfort, of a sacred solitude. To own your night, to owe no one your peace of mind, the sanctuary of that empty bed.
Comfort lies sometimes in circumstances beyond your control. A beloved man lies fighting death as all around him, the world fights its own battle with this strange new normal. We who cannot be there with him, feel an overwhelming helplessness. Yet we are comforted because he has never been alone. He lies surrounded by a network of gratitude and love, streaming from around the world to his bedside. His own family is there too, having left behind creature comforts, having abandoned dreams of a new year and fresh beginnings. When he leaves, he emerges from a cocoon of such deep love and caring that he must have spread his wings with a smile on that dear face.
I spent a lifetime being needy, eager to suck up any proffered gesture or word of empathy. And yet I avoided funerals and condolences, prayer meetings and deathbed visits. I side-stepped heartbreak and heartache, pushing back when the grief of others threatened to distract me from my own. I concentrated instead on survival, feeding my need with the oxygen of comfort, ironically the very thing I refused to offer to others.
It was hard, learning to feel for the pain of others, to comfort without expecting gratitude or worse, expecting to be comforted in return. Though empathy came later than to others, I am grateful that it came at all, so caught up was I in the drama of my own grief.
Music. Food. Eating it and cooking it. Books. Reading and increasingly, writing. Friends. Old, long lost and ever present. Animals. Dogs and cats of my heart. Trees and plants. My balcony. Solitude. The stillness that is solace to stretched nerves. The ocean, in particular along a stretch of beach that no longer exists outside of my memory. The top of my children’s heads. Now that they tower over me, when they lean forward into my hug. The man whose weight next to mine in bed brings dreamless sleep. Very blue skies and very grey ones. The clear light between stormy weather. The breeze that brings with it the rustle of peepal leaves. The rhythm that sets in after a few minutes of stitching. The colours that steal over the empty canvas.
The comfort of old friends doing what they always do. To anticipate their thoughts and words and actions. Yes, there is comfort even in the familiar rejection. And comforting to know that I will dream this dream again.