A Labyrinth Walk with Grief

It was a quiet morning of beautiful Scottish weather when I decided to walk the classical labyrinth set in the shadow of the ruins of Dunure Castle. And when I say, “beautiful Scottish weather,” I mean it was cold, grey, and wet.

For me, it was the perfect morning. I associate weather like that with both Newfoundland, the home I grew up in, and Scotland, the home where I now live and longed for most of my life. Plenty of people think me mad for this, but I find this weather comforting and inviting. And I was looking for comfort on this particular morning. It was the morning after the anniversary of my grandmother’s death.

The body remembers

Anniversaries of grief are odd. Sometimes it’s all you can think about. Sometimes you don’t consciously realize it’s coming until it’s over and the funk you couldn’t quite put your finger on has lifted. For many of us, our bodies and our moods mark the occasion, even when our conscious mind forgets.

I’m always aware of the coming of Valentine’s Day, because that was the day we buried my grandmother. That date stands out even in my conscious mind because it always seemed fitting to me that we turned the very last page of the greatest love story I’ve ever known on a day marked to celebrate romantic love.

I don’t typically think about the anniversary of her actual death, but my heart knows, every year. On the actual anniversary, I just feel a bit moody, but I can’t put my finger on why. Until my mother inevitably asks me “you know what today is?”

When she asked me that question the day before I walked that labyrinth, I didn’t know. Not immediately. It took a minute for the gears to click into place. In the moment of recognition, though, I was viscerally transported right back to my grandmother’s bedside, where I sat with my mother, as the strongest woman I’ve ever known drew her last breath. The afternoon light in my kitchen window in Scotland was an eerie match to the morning light in that Newfoundland hospital room.

Not “just” a grandparent

When I lost my grandparents, it was not like losing a grandparent for most people. My mother was a single parent and I spent as much or more time at my grandparents’ house as my own growing up. They were more like parents to me than grandparents.

My grandfather was essentially the only father I knew growing up. When he died with only about 8 weeks’ warning when I was 16, it ripped my entire world apart, and that grief shaped much of my adult life.

By the time my grandmother died, I was in my 30’s and had already lived with that hole in my heart for 15 years. My grandmother’s grief at her husband’s passing had also made my relationship with her during those last years a bit of a mixed bag a times.

I still miss my grandmother, and there’s hardly a day goes by that I don’t think about her and wish I could call her, but the grief was never as all-consuming as when my grandfather died. So it does tend to take me a bit by surprise when it creeps up on me, like it does around the anniversaries.

Of course, it has also occurred to me, particularly since moving to Scotland, that my grief for each of my grandparents separately has become quite entangled in the 10 years since my grandmother died.

The greatest love story I’ve ever known

I didn’t need Disney to fuel my imagination with fairy-tale romance – I was a living descendent of one.

My grandmother trained in England and Scotland as a nurse and midwife just after the Second World War. While working as a midwife in Edinburgh, she saw an advertisement looking for nurses in Newfoundland and put in her application, as she had always wanted to use her profession to travel. She set sail from England with “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel playing on the radio. She landed in St. John’s then travelled by train to the west coast of the island to work in the cottage hospitals in the outports. She loved Newfoundland so much that she took a second contract when the initial one was up. Which is why she was still there when my grandfather arrived.

My grandfather was born in Kisumu, Kenya. His father was a doctor from Brora in the north of Scotland. His mother was a missionary – born in England, she moved to Australia as a child, and from there to Kenya in her 20’s. His parents met and married in Africa. After boarding school in Australia, my grandfather completed his medical training in Aberdeen. He did his two years of mandatory military service in Jordan, then returned home to Scotland where he practiced medicine until he applied to go to Newfoundland to work in the cottage hospital system. He always said he moved to Newfoundland for the salmon fishing because it was becoming too restricted in Scotland.

When my grandfather arrived in Newfoundland as the junior doctor in Channel/Port-aux-Basques, my grandmother was the nurse-in-charge. As he used to tell the story, she was the boss of him then, and she’d been in charge ever since.

He pretty instantly fell in love with her. She was less impressed. (Though, I believe that had more to do with the institution of marriage than my grandfather specifically.) When he proposed to her, she said “Oh John, don’t be so silly” and went back to England with the intent to take a contract in India.

He followed her back to England – back in the days when that meant taking a multiple-day trip by boat – and proposed again. This time she accepted him and they embarked on a life together that was, in many ways, ahead of their time.

They married quite late for their generation, both pushing 30. And while my grandmother formally stopped working when they got married, as was expected of her, my grandfather’s career (and his professional respect for her) allowed her to continue using her training to play a supporting role to his career, largely through volunteer work in the hospitals, in the community, and later in organizations that supported the work he did through the university.

While they most definitely maintained traditional roles in their marriage overall, the work at home was also more evenly distributed than in many a contemporary marriage. By the time I was practically living with them as a child, my grandfather had semi-retired and had taken over most of the housework. He was also the more overtly nurturing personality and took a very active role in raising first his own children, then his grandchildren.

The way they loved each other and worked as a team gave me the best example I could have had of what an equal marriage looks like. I have certainly strived to emulate their dynamic in my own romantic relationships my entire life.

Every love story ends in tragedy

My grandfather used to say that even the most successful marriages end in tragedy, alluding to the fact that one spouse survives the other, if some other tragedy does not befall them first.

When my grandfather died, my grandmother remained as a tangible reminder of their love story, which had formed the foundation of any stability I had in my life as a child. In my grandfather’s absence, I learned to see my grandmother through his eyes, which deepened my own relationship with her and brought me some solace from my own grief.

In turn, my grandmother kept my grandfather present in our lives, remembering him with stories that we’d all grown up on – the basis of our family history. For every milestone, she lent me a thistle brooch he bought for her in Scotland, so that I could have him with me at occasions where he should have been, from graduations to weddings. And when she knew she was dying, she gave it to me and I wore it at her funeral. On Valentine’s Day.

No grief is ever the same as any other

Sometimes I feel guilty for the discrepancy in how I grieve my grandparents. There is a gnawing fear that somehow being less intensely emotional about my grandmother’s passing is a reflection on her importance to me.

Logically, I know it’s not.

For a start, I was at very different stages of emotional development when each of my grandparents died. When my grandfather died, I was a child with undiagnosed ADHD, and all the emotional dysregulation that goes along with that. When my grandmother died, I’d spent my entire adult life learning to regulate my emotions.

The loss of my grandfather was fairly sudden and the impact it had on my life was traumatic. While the illness that took my grandmother in the end was short, I’d been mentally and emotionally preparing for the eventuality for years.

Grief changes over time

One of the best theories I’ve heard about grief came from my nursing education, so I’m not sure now who originated the idea, but it certainly tracks with my experience. Grief does not get smaller over time. Rather, our lives get bigger. Eventually, your life can grow big enough that the grief takes up a smaller proportion of your life. But the grief itself isn’t getting smaller.

Over time, as my life has gotten bigger than my childhood and my origins, the lines between my grief for each of my grandparents have become blurred. As the intensity of the emotion fades, it is replaced with a kind of sadness that their generation is now disappearing.

This past December marked 25 years since my grandfather died. This February marks 10 years without my grandmother. These milestones have had me thinking more than usual about the ways in which the world has changed without them and how to hold on to their legacy without hindering my own growth.

These are the giants on whose shoulders I stand. Their stories and expertise have shaped my worldview and my values, even if neither of mine align perfectly with theirs. And I want my daughter to know them as more than a passing mention in history books written about a place she’s never lived.

But I don’t want their memory to haunt me so long that I fail to notice that all that is left of them in the living culture of the land that shaped them are the other ghosts of their generation.

Legacies

As I walked the labyrinth in Dunure the morning after that anniversary, I was struck by bright red flower petals that had been left on the path overnight. I wondered if this might be some kind of memorial tribute, or some other kind of offering. Not for the first time, I found my thoughts straying to the legend of the man who had spearheaded the creation of the labyrinth I was walking on. I missed the opportunity to meet him by two years.

The grief of the community around his passing is palpable and, by all accounts, he was a font of knowledge about the kinds of stories I would have dearly loved to hear. The community here speak of him in much the same way as the communities my grandfather touched spoke of him after his passing. His passing also marks the tragic end of another great love story.

The grief for Andy Guthrie is a grief that is familiar to me. Even though I am an outside observer, it reminds me of my own experience of grief. Which ironically intensifies my longing for conversations with my grandfather, since he was also a great observer of human nature and empathizer of human experience.

While my family have no ties to this part of Scotland, it was my grandparents’ influence on me that initially brought me across the Atlantic Ocean. Chance – or fate – brought me specifically to the village of Dunure.

Being in the country that shaped my grandfather has inevitably led me to a lot of reflections on him, his influence on me, my ancestry, and what it means to belong somewhere.

What I was less prepared for was the echoes of my grandmother this land holds. She was the epitome of being English and my grandparents did not know each other yet when they lived in Scotland.

When the Queen died, we made the trip to Edinburgh to pay our respects, partly on my grandmother’s behalf. It was another milestone that marked the passing of that generation and my grief was real, which has been difficult to explain to many of my peers, who did not see the personal characteristics of a parental figure embodied so closely by a public figure.

It was very poignant for me (and my mother) that we walked the same street to mark the end of the late monarch’s reign as my grandmother stood on to watch the Queen’s progression on her first visit to Edinburgh as monarch to mark the beginning. My grandmother was a young, unmarried nurse doing her midwifery training at Simpson’s Hospital at the time. On the Queen’s last progression through Edinburgh, 3 generations of my grandmother’s descendants were there in her stead. Good completions and new beginnings, as they say in my Lakota ceremony circles.

The Labyrinth as a container for grief

As I walked with these griefs that morning, I was struck that it was not coincidental that they were arising in connection with the labyrinth. The labyrinth is a wonderful container for grief. It is a physical metaphor for the chalice or well of myth and legend. The receptive space where emotions can be poured out and held sacred.

• The walking helps loosen our emotions.
• The perimeter provides a delineation of sacred space that makes it safe for us to allow ourselves to feel those emotions.
• The centre provides a container where we can lay down the burden of those emotions.
• The walk back allows us to distance ourselves from the burden so we can reintegrate with the rest of the world less encumbered.

I will never stop missing my grandparents. The grief will never go away completely. But at times like this when the grief is less bearable, the labyrinth provides me with a space to honour them, and my own feelings, in a productive way. It allows me to unencumber myself of the burden of those heavy emotions without repressing them. Ultimately, the labyrinth allows me to transform the oppressive grief into a beautiful poignancy that honours their legacy. I left the labyrinth that morning feeling lighter, and somehow closer to those I’ve lost.

In true labyrinth fashion, however, I also brought with me more big questions to ponder as I still continue to integrate the lessons of my walk, two years later.