Goodbye, and thank you for sharing this journey with me
ONCE a high-flying magazine editor in Dublin, living the classic, harried executive lifestyle, Kate Kerrigan swapped it all to be a fulltime novelist and live in her idyll — the fishing village of Killala, Co. Mayo. But rather than being a sleepy existence, it’s been anything but for the 50-something mother of The Teenager (15), and The Tominator, seven (oh, and there’s the artist husband Niall, too). It’s chaos, as she explains every week in her hilarious and touching column...
SO — it’s goodbye. I started writing this column in 2010 — a year after the worst year of my life. At 46, I fell unexpectedly pregnant. A few weeks later, my brother died, followed by two other family bereavements in quick succession.
Grieving, menopausal and suffering from post-natal depression, I began documenting my life as a wife, mother and writer. Looking back over the writing journey we have taken, one theme has emerged for me: gratitude.
Sharing my experiences with you helped me rebuild my life from its lowest ebb; emotionally, physically and spiritually. In that time I have learned to seek out out gratitude and humour as a weapon against not just the ravages of depression and grief — but the smaller, ‘first-world’ problems that bring us all down.
Life throws bullets at us all the time. How big they are, and how much they hurt, depends on the kind of day you are having. On a good week you might shrug off a dose of headlice as par for the course of having school-age children. But if the critters catch you at the end of a bum week? Well, it can feel like the end of the world.
I was always letting the little things get me down. A chaotic cutlery drawer on a bad day could send me spiralling. I thought that losing my brother and having a baby late in life would give me a better perspective, but actually the rawness I felt only made me more vulnerable to the picking, the gradual erosion of those petty upsets.
What I learned from the aftermath of my grief was that leading a happy life is often down to how well I dealt with those bothersome first-world problems. Bullets hurt. I tried to grow a thick skin — but couldn’t. So I tried to stay positive: to catch the bullets and put them in my pocket for later.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But it helps if you can see them coming. The year everybody died — I thought that was it. That was my annus horribilis. My brother, brotherin-law, my sons’ beloved grandad — all the men in my family bar my husband. Three men dead in less than a year. The worst year of our lives right? Well — kind of.
Over the next few years, we lost our savings, had to sell our beautiful home, my best friend died, my husband’s best friend died, a close girlfriend died — all unexpectedly. I got Crohn’s disease. Our son was diagnosed with Asperger’s. Are we cursed? Unlucky? No, I realised, we are just alive.
Life is random — sometimes fair, sometimes not. What goes around does not always come around. You can’t be ready for everything life throws at you but there are lessons to be learned from the big moves. Not least, that we are strong and that old adage that God, the Universe, whatever it is — won’t give us anything we can’t handle.
Learning to use the heavy artillery of acceptance helped me point those big guns of gratitude in the right direction, get through and move on.
AS humans, we never forget. Our loved ones, the pain of our past — no matter how old we get, how much we move on, how much we ‘heal’ ourselves — if we are emotionally evolved — the past will always come back to hurt us. We remember those we love forever and the pain of their loss will always be there waiting to surface.
The insecurities of our childhoods — can we ever truly get past being the fat one, the stupid one, the one left behind in kiss chase? Perfect kids turn into disappointed adults. Past hurts float about inside us in shards of memories. Sometimes they rise to the surface and hurt. Sometimes they indicate there are greater problems we need to face, and we have to rub the shards and pull them out. Even though they might cut us.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in my fifties. A lifetime of running faster than I needed to; a non-existent academic career; an eldest son who got used to not being picked up from school because his mother was pathologically forgetful. Will I berate the wasted time — or embrace the opportunity to start again? There really is no choice.
How we accommodate our past defines how grateful we can be in the future.
So, this is my last column. I am sad, of course, but it is time to move on. Thank you for your support, your kind words, for reaching out to share with me. For helping me to keep it together and leaving me feeling blessed. #BLESSED, a Christmas collection, is available free at katekerrigan.ie