Making sense of pain and chaos

My children were returned to me when schools closed last year. At five and seven, their lives had just been uprooted in the wake of family separation, shunting them from a big block in the country with a trampoline and a treehouse, to two tiny apartments in Melbourne’s inner north. It’s fair to say that things felt uncertain, precarious and hard. At that point, I read Deborah Levy’s memoir again. The Cost of Living reflects on remaking a life in the wake of divorce. ‘The writing you are reading now is made from the cost of living’, I recited to myself in my unfamiliar apartment, a mantra of survival and acceptance. I thought of Zadie Smith’s assertion, printed in Elle: ‘It’s all life. It’s all unavoidable. It’s all better than its opposite. Enjoy it while you can.’ I suddenly understood that I had never before experienced proper grief, never perceived that all the yearning and disappointment and sorrow in love songs was anything other than poetic licence. Levy’s ideas, and Smith’s, worked to suspend me above the void I felt I was falling into as the separation and pandemic converged, loneliness upon loneliness. Still, when pitted against the possibility of life’s opposite, the cost of living seemed a worthwhile price to pay for access to the human condition, of which loneliness might be a fundamental component. Writing this at the dawn of a new year, the other side of lockdown, I know that I am (on the whole) prepared to pay up.