I love the precision of language, the way that, as a writer, if I choose the right words I can convey the exact sensation of feathers on skin, or sunlight over the ocean. Less is more, we say. Why use ten words when one will do?
The English language is vast and intricate and yet still, sometimes, we say 'there are no words'. In grief, I've learned that sometimes this is the best thing to say. Less is more. There are no words of comfort adequate for something as big as the disappearance of a parent or a lover or a child. 'Grief' is not big enough. 'Loss' is not strong enough. 'Sadness' only goes so far.
And sometimes we have to look to another language for the word we need. The Eskimos, some say, have fifty words for snow. The Americans, allegedly, have fifteen words for sandwich. The Greeks, we're told, had six words for love. And the Welsh? The Welsh have one word which, for me, sums up the pervasive, eternal experience of profound loss. Hiraeth. A word which has no precise translation but a word which means a longing for a place to which we cannot return, a yearning for home.
And yet I am home. I am sitting here in my favourite chair by the fire in the house that I share with my two children, my family. I live in Sheffield. I've pretty much always lived in Sheffield. If you ask me where my home is, I don't have to falter. It is here, nestled amongst the green parks and trees, at the confluence of rivers that fed the steel industry, between the seven hills. It is here that I belong. In truth, I'm not sure that I'd live anywhere else. Maybe for love. Only for love. And yet, for the last three years, I've been homesick, filled every day with longing, desperate to return to something, somewhere, to a place that had no name. Hiraeth.
For me, that place is the place where parents and grandparents congregated around Christmas trees and days when my mother's voice was just at the end of the phone. It is the time when I had someone to love who really loved me. Before he died. Before she died. Before anyone died. The place that I long to return to is a place of innocence. It is a place where, sometimes, it could feel that everything was ok. It is a place of completeness, wholeness. It was a time when nothing really awful had yet happened and when I couldn't imagine how awful things could get.
These days I try to live in the moment. I work hard to count my blessings. I focus on the sensation of feathers on skin, of sunlight on the ocean. I strive to find the beauty in the little things, to cherish what remains. But the longing will never leave me. And every time I love someone, it is tinged with the knowledge of the loss that will come. And every time I lose someone, I fall deep down into a well of pre-existing sadness. And I know that it will always be here. This sadness. This longing. This yearning for a place to which I cannot return. At least I have a word for it. And I love words, sometimes more than people. Hiraeth.
