Yesterday, I finished Sólrún Michelsen's On the Other Side is March. It is about a Faroese woman in her sixties who is caring for her ailing mother. It is a book about a daughter watching the most important person in her life slip away. Having lost my mother over a year ago, the story resonated with me. Many passages made me cry, and they also made me feel less alone. I was reminded why we read books—so that we can know that someone somewhere has felt our sorrow and found the words for it.
Here are some of my favorite quotes:
As the years go by only moments remain in memory. Like stars on a frost-bright night. The darkness between them is the rest. A primeval pool of oblivion. Everything you struggled to squeeze into life, all those things that seemed so important, didn’t matter after all. Just faded to a dark backdrop of the forgotten. Space waste. But the moments. Some but a few seconds long. Something somebody said. Or did. Something that happened. They twinkle away. Nobody, nothing can put them out.
Back in the day men would send us to the Blocksberg, the witches’ mountain. It was there we found a place they can’t go, the one they have envied us for ever since. The place where we meet and talk woman to woman. Where corsets are loosened and burkas cast off. Where we now pirouette around the pyre instead of burning on it, and the scorching cloud of sparks twirls along beckoning the cold stars that cling to the darkness to come join in. The place where secrets are told and remedies and recipes for life’s many whims are passed along. The place where you can harbor the thought: What would it be like if nothing I did could fail?
A mother is someone who nobody can live without and be whole.
When do you stop marveling? Or enjoying? Growing up isn’t necessarily better. Perhaps we were children in Eden. We only started to reproduce when we were banished. The more baggage the greater the force of gravity. Weighing down every move. Too heavy to take flight. But somewhere out there children are still lying in fields gazing at the stars and infinity dreaming impossible dreams. Or they are lying under a lamppost feeling this tangled yearning to fly with the snowflakes, while they make fallen angels in the snow.
There is something divine about gardens, just like there is something divine about words and music. This trinity, which enables us to survive in spite of everything.
I rock and I sing. All these thoughts that nothing comes of. That nobody else has ever understood or cared to understand. Some hapless, like toppled insects flailing on their backs. Others glide quietly past and vanish unhurried on a residual current defying the tide, for a time. At the end of the day, after all the distracting clutter has been swept away and peace has been strewn on the floor, all I need is for someone to need me. For little arms to wrap themselves around my neck. To be able to embrace someone without words. Or to stroke a wrinkled cheek and see the little smile of gratitude in return. I could live off that.
I feel drawn to the unknown. The unending. To what is wanting.