#7: Kintsugi – how to mend a broken heart
This isn’t going to be a cheerful post, so… sorry about that. But you might find it useful when the time comes. It’s been on my mind lately as I have friends who are going through a tough time right now.
This is a story of how Japanese pottery can mend the aching inside of you. Or at least, the story of how it did that for me.
Experiencing grief for the first time is a bit like your first kiss. You have no idea what it’s going to feel like until it happens, so nothing can really prepare you for it.
Grief usually comes with bereavement. Loss of a family member, loss of a loved one, or friend.
But it’s wider than that. You can feel grief for any kind of loss.
The loss of something you had before, that you will never have again. The loss of the way things were that can no longer be that way. It’s the futile yearning for the ability to turn back the clock, even when you know that isn’t possible.
The amount of pain you feel depends on how much you cared about the thing that you lost. A brother or a son perhaps.
But also, a limb, an eye, or a kneecap. Your freedom, your security, your innocence, your mind.
Yourself.
I don’t get invited to many weddings these days, but the number of funerals is slowly starting to tick up. Which isn’t great.
The people who stand up and speak offer words of comfort to mourners, to help them make some sense of their loss and reconcile with it. One of the phrases I hear more and more these days is, “grief is the price we pay for love.”
The tears of grief that collect in the corners of our eyes? Unexpressed love.
The love we still have for the thing we have lost, that was meant to be dispensed over a lifetime, that we can no longer give. We are forced to prematurely convert it through cruel alchemy into grief.
We can’t turn back the clock. We can’t change anything.
The trick, though, is finding a way to somehow become a whole person again. You have to find your own way back to yourself.
The concept of death is abstract for kids. But I think I understood what it was even when I was little because when I wasn’t sticking it up my nose, I might sometimes extend my index finder and idly snuff out the existence of some poor bug who was minding its own business until I came along. Then I would examine it with a fascinated curiosity as it waved one of its back legs at me for a few final times while its green innards slowly oozed out.
I understood the mechanics of death. I just didn’t attach any emotion to it.
Later experiments demonstrated that other, larger creepy crawlies worked the same way when I deliberately ran over them with a bike tyre. I soon learned that you reached a line where if the creature was large enough, then it was no longer socially acceptable to kill it. Everything up to that point was OK, like insects and small rodents. Anything bigger, like cats, apparently not.
I transferred these observations to human existence and became aware of my own mortality. What happens if someone squishes me?
I realised that someone could squish my parents, my brothers or my entire family, and I happened to have this lightbulb moment while I was staying at my grandparents’ house.
I was in the bathroom, standing in front of the mirror brushing my teeth, and it just hit me. I could lose everyone I loved and cared about, just like that. It could happen. My eyes filled with tears and I was distraught.
Amazingly, despite all the blubbing and toothpaste dribbling down my chin, it remained a private moment and no-one walked in. I pulled myself together, concluded that although it was a possibility it was also very unlikely, and that because my grandfather was a dentist, I had better finish the job of attending to my oral hygiene.
Come on parents, confess. This is why you get pets for your kids, right? Yeah, OK they make great companions yada yada but they help you teach your children about life and how death is a natural part of it too. It helps them deal with trauma and grief on a relatively small scale early in life, so they can be better prepared for the horror coming further down the track.
Of course, we all hope that when the time comes, it’s later rather than sooner and if you’re lucky, you might be able to avoid it for a good chunk of time. Death is a part of life from the moment you arrive; you can’t have one without the other. The trick is to separate them by the widest margin possible.
I was reassured by my parents that although everyone living on the planet was indeed going to die at some point, it’s OK because that’s way off in the future. We don’t need to worry about it right now – it isn’t going to happen anytime soon. We are all going to live long, happy lives into old age. We’ll die in a comfortable bed, smiles on our faces, surrounded by the people we love, and close our eyes for the final time with the feeling of lingering contentment that we achieved all the things we wanted to in life – with everything neatly ticked off the bucket list.
I bought it and I pretty much went through into early adulthood thinking that I was invincible. Youth gave me automatic immunity from death. I could attempt any crazy stunt or survive any illness, because young people simply bounced back from it. This belief was further reinforced purely through good fortune, as no-one in my family or social circle died until I was 12 years old and very few thereafter.
The first death that shocked me was someone I barely knew. He was a classmate from school, I knew him but we weren’t really friends and we didn’t hang out. He had asthma and I remember him always puffing on an inhaler. He moved on to a different school and one day he had an asthma attack and died later in hospital. I heard about it on the grapevine.
It hit me pretty hard – but mainly because it challenged my understanding of death. It felt like an aberration, like it was against the natural order of things. Young children weren’t supposed to die. They were bulletproof and grew old like everyone else, right? This wasn’t Logan’s Run; people don’t just pop out of existence in the prime of their lives.
It was the first time it dawned on me that we can all have a different destiny and fate can intervene at any time.
As some people say, it turns out God has other plans.
Around the same time my grandfather died of lung cancer. It was my first funeral. It was also the first time I wore a jacket and tie, which had been purchased for the occasion. I remember sitting amongst family members in the pews of our Presbyterian church. I also remember the tears on my face but if I’m being completely honest, they were mainly due to seeing my mother looking so distressed. That upset me more.
I hadn’t had any practice with a pet. I didn’t know how to feel or react to these events other than just being surprised by how much or how little I felt each time. I still had a pragmatic attitude towards the mechanics of mortality without any real sentiment attached to it. Sometimes I would merely shrug and conclude that it was simply that person’s time, regardless of how premature it was. I would feel pretty bad thinking that way, and spend time wondering why I felt that way, without ever coming up with any answers.
Ironically, the next time I did shed genuine tears of grief was for a pet. We had a family dog who came into our home when I was about ten years old. She was a Weimaraner and the runt of the litter who we’d picked because we felt sorry for her. Like most dogs she had a good innings but eventually her quality of life rapidly went downhill. As the only teenager in the house with a drivers licence, I was delegated the task to take her to the vet and have her put down. I went on my own.
I comforted her as she sat on the treatment table blissfully unaware of what was about to happen, while the vet injected a healthy slug of blue liquid into a vein. It took about ten seconds to have an effect. She lowered her head into a sleeping position between her front paws, closed her eyes and took a couple of deep breaths.
There was no ceremony. The vet would dispose of her body. I went into reception and wrote a cheque for his services, then went and sat outside in my car blubbing like a toddler for what seemed like a solid hour. I finally had my goldfish moment.
So far I’ve talked about losing someone else. What if you lose yourself? Or pieces of yourself?
(Don’t worry, I’ll get to the pottery thing in a bit.)
At the age of 30 I discovered I had cancer.
…I didn’t discover it myself of course. There were doctors and modern medical gadgets and stuff. I’d been having some weird symptoms, like not being able to walk very far without needing to sit down and rest. I couldn’t do up buttons with my fingers. I was clumsy and kept falling over.
Like a couple of unwanted house guests, I had a tumour growing in the base of my brain and another one firmly lodged in my spine, attached to the spinal cord. Surrounded by bone and with nowhere else to grow, it squeezed the cord and started shutting off the signals from my brain that were supposed to tell my various body parts how to behave.
The treatment was a combination of surgery and radiotherapy. The brain was too risky to operate on, radiation would have to do and then fingers crossed. The tumour in my spine was more accessible and could be cut out, although it meant removing six vertebrae to get to it. Despite being successfully removed, damage was caused to the surrounding nerve tissue during surgery, and it left me permanently paralysed.
I have been a paraplegic ever since.
Twenty years later I can look back at this event with much less emotion than I had then and say that, well, at least I didn’t die – it was a possible outcome at the time. But next time you hear people talking about life changing injuries, it's exactly that. It changed my life.
I haven’t mentioned my disability so far on my blogging journey. I am comfortable talking about it, but it isn’t the purpose of this piece. There’s plenty of time to explore that can of worms later.
This is about the grief I felt at the time. Grief for the things I had lost.
I grieved for the life I once had, that I would never have again.
I would never again be able to walk along a beach and feel the sand between my toes. I’d never be able to climb up a hill and take in the view – not without being carried up there by a team of sherpas. I wouldn’t be able to walk my daughter down the aisle at her wedding or kick a ball around with my son.
I didn’t have a daughter or a son, but back then having a family was part of the plan. I had lost the ability to ever do those things, even though they hadn’t happened yet. I wanted nothing more at that time than to get that potential back.
I still really miss dancing.
I felt cheated. I felt like it probably would have been easier and more convenient for everyone, including me, if I had died from the cancer.
Those left behind could have had their funeral, listened to the speeches, had a few pints at the pub and then go back to their lives. I wouldn’t have had to live with the new nightmare of not being able to feel or move anything below the level of my chest.
Soldiers returning from war suffer a double jeopardy in this respect, I think. They get it at both ends. They could step on a landmine and lose a leg and a couple of buddies in one fell swoop. They have to deal with the dual trauma of losing people they cared about and adjusting to the new reality of living with prosthetic limbs.
They probably also lost their minds.
No wonder those old boys sit in front of the cenotaph each year with their memories still welling up in the corners of their eyes seventy years later, like it happened yesterday.
I was plunged into depression. I was diagnosed with PTSD. Things got pretty bad and on one occasion I was threatened with Section 5 of the Mental Health Act.
I just couldn’t accept it.
I was referred to a psychologist and the only tangible outcome was to raise Kleenex’s share price. I didn’t go back after the very first session when I was told nonsensically to, “just stop thinking negative thoughts.”
That’s the advice? Just stop feeling bad about it? Isn’t that why I’m here, to find a way how? Just don’t. Oh, great fucking advice, thanks.
In the spinal unit I was surrounded by other patients in wheelchairs also trying to adjust to a new way of life and I couldn’t comprehend how cheerful some of them were. It was like they were totally OK with it.
I felt like my life was over.
So, regardless of whether it happens to you or to someone else, how do you live with that kind of anguish? How do you bear it? How do you get to a place where you can finally say, “I’m OK now, I can get up today and face the world?” How do you get on with your life?
I’m not sure I’ve fully figured this out yet.
But so far, it’s a formula containing three elements: time, energy, and kintsugi.
You’re probably wishing that I’d just put this up front as the TL;DR so you didn’t need to wade through my self-indulgent despair tourism up until this point. I did apologise at the beginning, but yeah. Sorry.
But if you’ve stuck with me so far, here’s my recipe:
Time + Energy + Kintsugi
Time
Time is a cliché but it really is true. Time does heal. That’s all that needs to be said for time, except that it comes as little comfort when someone says it to you – especially at the beginning when everything is still raw. You want to tell them to fuck off.
Just know that things will get better, no matter how much it hurts right now.
Energy
I discovered, simply through being miserable for long enough, that this requires far more energy than not being miserable. We’re talking a good two to three years here.
Even though I was just sitting around feeling sorry for myself for days on end, it seemed to sap more strength than a marathon. It robbed me of any ambition. It was exhausting. I didn’t get anything in return for the energy cost.
I finally concluded that that I could wallow in self-despair forever, or simply get off my arse (metaphorically of course) and get on with it. Instead of obsessing with the things I could no longer do, I needed to focus on the things that I could do.
It was a light bulb moment, and I felt a circuit connect in my head. But I had to arrive at that moment by myself, in my own time. I’d already heard these words from others, but I had to arrive at that realisation myself for it to mean anything.
Maybe that’s why some of the other paraplegics were in a better mood already – perhaps they’d arrived there earlier than me. Or maybe it was because they were on Tramadol.
Regardless, thus far, the formula is a function of time and energy expenditure. Now let’s throw in kintsugi.
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the pieces back together with a lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold. “Kintsugi” translates directly as “golden joinery.”
As well as being a practical way to repair broken tea pots and crockery, it is considered an artform. It is also held up by the Japanese as a philosophy, one that treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to be hidden or disguised.
In turn, kintsugi is closely aligned with wabi-sabi, a view of aesthetics that is centred on transience and imperfection. Wabi-sabi derives from Bhuddism and embraces flaws and imperfections, an approach found throughout Japanese art. Kintsugi values the marks of wear from the use of an object, highlighting cracks and repairs as events in the object’s life.
Crucially, it finds a way to restore the function of the object, rather than allowing its use to end at the time of its damage.
I can’t remember how or where I first became aware of kintsugi, but it’s been rolling around in my head for the better part of ten years now. I saw it referred to in The Man in the High Castle, but I already knew about it then because it jumped out at me as soon as Robert Childan mentioned it to a customer in his antique shop.
Maybe it was on an episode of The Great Pottery Throwdown.
But given how much time I spend at London’s V&A Museum, one of my favourite places in the world, I’m pretty sure I discovered it there in the Japan collection. You can even buy a kintsugi gold repair kit in the gift shop (made in the Netherlands).
Kintsugi helped me realise that it’s OK to not be OK.
To realise that things are never going to go back to the way they were before, but you can put your broken pieces back together and continue to function.
There is no attempt to hide the scars, they are literally illuminated. Time helps them to heal over, but they stay behind as an important record of the events in your life. You may wear them with a heavy heart, but it can also be a proud one – proud of what you’ve accomplished and how far you've come, despite the fractures and failures.
We all have flaws, that makes us who we are. The flaws can be strengths if you let them. Each scar has its own unique pattern and a story to tell.
Grief is a personal journey, it’s different for everyone. Maybe my recipe works for you, maybe it doesn’t.
It helped me to stop wasting my time railing against the futility of the hand dealt to me, and instead want to make each day count for something.
Don’t try to bury your grief, don’t try to forget about it. You don’t have to always maintain a hard exterior. Let the fractures heal and stop occasionally to look at them, to see the gold light within them. That’s where your loved ones and cherished things live.
If you’re newly grieving right now, then the pieces of pottery are still broken and lie scattered. You can’t even begin to put them back together yet. That’s OK, put them in a cupboard and come back when you’re ready, perhaps with your £28 Dutch kintsugi repair kit.
You will, because that’s how life is – there is no other choice. You have to repair the cracks and cherish the scars.
The alternative is too terrible to face – you could lose your mind, and yourself.
Dedicated to the memory of Aidan David Robert Nicholson, 2005-2022
Korean tea bowl, Joseon dynasty, Mishima-hakeme type, buncheong ware, stoneware with white engobe and translucent greenish-gray glaze, gold lacquer (16th century), Ethnological Museum, Berlin, Germany
