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Mourning in the Garden

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Edited by Anita Pilgrim, Monday, 20 May 2019, 11:34

Square garden full of young vegetables and flowering plants, gardening tools to the left.

This post is for Ven, John, Michael and Gill.

Some of my students, fellow students and colleagues have been recently bereaved, and as they go through that experience which we all have to suffer - but for which none of us can prepare, I wanted to offer my sympathy, or more properly - my empathy. 

I lost my mum about a year ago. It was very sudden, although she had been frail for a while. I did not expect the phone call when it came to say she had had a stroke. I wasn't sure what to do, didn't know how serious that was. People do recover from strokes, right?

It was the busiest time of my working year. I emailed vaguely to my managers, not sure what to do about my hefty workload. Fortunately one of them, realising better than I did how serious the situation was, immediately offered to provide cover for my students. I then also asked this of my other managers. I only took two weeks. I realise now I should have taken much longer and done more to get time away during a period when I needed to be with family and friends, and when I found it difficult and painful to focus on work.

In today's world we are often managing ourselves and may feel great responsibility to those we work for and with. Perhaps for the lost person's sake, we want to continue to be a good colleague, a supportive teacher, a diligent student. 

Camus's novel LÉtranger - The Stranger begins with the protagonist asking for the day off to go to his mother's funeral. His boss looks strangely at him and he assumes this is because he wants time off work, but in fact it's because his boss finds it hard to understand how he can be so factual and unemotional in his request. I feel as if nowadays we have all become strangers to emotion in the workplace, so much so that we have to try to provide special resources to support anxiety, stress and depression rather than look to see if these are created by the way in which our normal emotions are not supported at work and in other areas of our lives.

The psychologist Freud suggested that if grief is not appropriately felt and expressed, then mourning becomes melancholia. We can become stuck, start to behave in odd ways in order not to let go the person we have lost. We need time to experience the overwhelming emotions of loss in bereavement, to come to terms with the sudden huge gap where someone once lived alongside us.

It may be that time at work or in study is a welcome opportunity to engage with people who are supportive of our grief. For myself, although I tried to struggle on for a while, I deferred from my own studies. I couldn't sit still and concentrate on abstract ideas. Once I realised that I had not given myself sufficient space at the time I lost my mum, I began taking sporadic time out of work whenever I could. As it comes up to the anniversary of losing mum, I am mindful to look out for time for her and my own feelings. 

Painful and difficult tasks had to be tackled after mum's death: sorting through books and papers, closing her Facebook page so 'birthday' reminders didn't pop up for her grandchildren (the page can be left as a memorial page), listing with my Dad their belongings to agree how these might be eventually shared with my brother and sister, choosing some jewellery and other items for her grandchildren.

As I went through mum's books, I found a familiar set of gardening books by writers whose gardens we had visited together: Vita Sackville-West, Beth Chatto, Margery Fish. I had a patch of boring lawn in front of my house which I had always intended to dig out for a flower garden. I began to do this, on bad days throwing myself into the task in the mud and rain. I bought flowering plants which I put in, along the philosophy of figuring it out as I went along, as 'all plants look pretty'. They didn't. Some flowers I had bought in an access of grief were in colours that clashed with themselves - quite an achievement for a plant.

On a second trip to sort out more of mum's possessions, I found some books about decorative vegetable gardening by Joy Larkcom, a writer whom mum had become close friends with after translating Japanese seed packets for her books on oriental vegetables. I had always wanted to grow vegetables at the front of my house but felt my neighbours might object to ugly rows of cabbages. (They once complained because I hadn't mowed the lawn! OK, I hadn't mowed the lawn for about four months and it was a bit messy). Decorative vegetable gardening seemed perfect. I knew my mum would have loved the idea and even my neighbours might like it. (They say now: "It's messy - but arty.") 

 Herb and vegetable garden with black cat walking down pathway.Partly dug out flower garden.

On the left, the ugly flower garden. On the right, the 'potager' - mixture of vegetables and edible flowers. 



I post pictures on Instagram of my #PotagerProgress, sharing with friends and the world. I'm often reminded of mum, as I feel my chapped hands (mum's hands at the height of her gardening days were also rough with digging), or put in a plant she would have liked to hear about, or find some disgusting pest she would have sympathised about. Sometimes I still burst into tears as I grub about putting in seeds, and that's OK - nobody even knows (my secret is safe with you, right?). Gardening is a forgiving activity. If you get it wrong and the seedlings shrivel up - they are just plants, you learn from your mistake. If you bought plants that even clash with themselves you can throw them out. (No, of course I didn't! I'm still trying to find places in the garden for the awkward ugly plants. There are lots of plants people will throw away after a year, even though they're perennials, but I'm unable to dig out my own violas and throw them away and have surreptitiously picked up plants other people have thrown out.) There can also be happy accidents - that lovely bank of white flowers in my garden are some salad rocket that bolted; the flowers are edible too - they have a delicious sweet yet peppery taste. 

Plant pot with purple violas in a clump and white violas spilling over the side

Two flourishing pelargonium plants with pink flowers and red buds against a background of white flowers

This white viola is 'leggy'  in its second year - seen as a fault if it's meant to be a clump in a flower bed. On the right are two 'rescue pelargoniums' I found thrown out on a path last autumn. 

Sometimes as I garden, I think 'mum would not have done it like this', and feel anxious that I'm not honouring her memory properly. Actually, mum changed her ways as she went on in life. Remembering her is a process that is part of my changeable life, not something which preserves the things she did and loved as if under glass. 

You never get over losing someone so close. However Freud suggested that if we move through mourning appropriately, it's as if the person we lost becomes a part of us. We get that great gift of recognising them in ourselves, and can move on in life celebrating their memory rather than clinging to something material which has gone. Rather than get over it, we recover - lay sympathy, love and acceptance over grief so that it softens and the pain is no longer unbearably sharp. 

For this, though, we need to allow ourselves time and space in which to mourn, to remember, to regret. We mustn't be a Stranger to the intense emotions of rage and sadness which do seem as if they may overwhelm us at times. These too will pass, but not if we try to block them and push them back. Only if we allow them free passage, and ourselves what time we need for recovery. 

(My Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/rhiwbinapotager/?hl=en

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light skinned mixed heritage woman writing letters.

Why I will vote Yes to suspend industrial action

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After intensive strike action, Universities UK have now come forward with a proposal to staff in universities on the Universities Superannuation Scheme which the union has put to members to be voted on.

There has been intense argument on social media about which way to vote. It is clearly very important that all UCU members vote in order to come to a sound democratic decision on whether the offer about pensions is good enough, and we can suspend (not end) strike action and go back to teaching as normal, or should we reject the offer and continue to strike.

I have been on holiday and will have to come back onto email in order to vote. I have done my best to look at material about the offer while also taking time off with my young daughter. I am going to vote in favour of accepting the offer.

The offer is a substantial move from the employers' original position, which was that they would not negotiate - they have gone with the union to ACAS to do so, and that they were determined to move from a defined benefits scheme because of a massive deficit in the pension budget. They have now agreed to a joint board chosen equally by the employers and the union which will re-valuate the deficit, and they have recognised that the vast majority of those of us who have invested in the pension fund want a secure defined benefits scheme rather than what one speaker at a rally described as the 'chocolate teapot' of a pension which they tried to make us accept.

Why would we not accept this offer? So far as I can see, people against it have no trust in UUK and expect them to renege on their offer. There has been a lot of detailed unpicking of the wording of the offer, suggesting it is full of little loopholes.

I do not trust UUK either, but I trust the process. I trust that ACAS and the union, who have brought us this far, will watch over my interests. Sally Hunt raised her serious concerns about the pension proposals from very early on and the union worked extremely hard to get us to come out on strike at all. I believe they have a good understanding of what is going on.

People also complain that the proposal should not have been put to members, as it is merely a suggested process not a complete cave-in by the employers. I say: Let's be magnanimous. We, the employers and the British media (see articles not only in The Guardian and Times Higher Education Supplement, but even in the Financial Times) know that the employers were caught with their pants down. They were stupid to assume they could put such a poor valuation assessment of our pension fund in front of university staff, who include Emeritus Professors of Economics, Business Studies, Pension experts, Statisticians and many others who took their chocolate teapot apart in blogposts and explained exactly where the beans had come from. Let's allow them to pull their pants back up in private in the joint re-valuation committee.

We had to be allowed to vote on this proposal now, because if we left the vote any longer, we would not have time to vote before having to take strike action during assessment. We must have a democratic mandate if we are to do that.

Those who say Reject the offer, argue that we should not lose momentum. They believe the employers only want to get us through the crucial exam period and then will renege on their words.

I believe that the process will not allow them to do this, and that they are under scrutiny not just from our union and ACAS, also from interested media and therefore the public (including supportive students and their families). Exams are like spring. They come round every year (eventually). We are suspending our action, not ending it. If as the months go forward, UUK do renege on their recognition of the kind of pension we want to invest in, we will be able to strike during exam period next year.

We would be able to do that with continued popular support. I believe that if we drag the strike on this year in the face of an offer from the employers, we will lose the vital support we have had from students and their families, the media and many key politicians. (Perhaps that is what the employers hope will happen.)

But yes - we need to keep up pressure.

We need to do this by moving on from the battle over pensions. Perhaps it is not won yet. However, we need to leave picked personnel to take care of that for us (like union officers and our chosen members of the committee to re-consider the valuation of the pension fund, and lawyers who could oversee the process for us).

We should move on to other aspects of the neoliberalisation of universities. This is where the real deal is. Issues over our pensions arose because of the general trend of universities towards marketisation. There are several other fronts where we need to focus attention in order to win the war.

  1. We at the Open University are dealing with a vote of No Confidence, not just in our Vice Chancellor in person but in the whole Executive who have sought to introduce neoliberal principles to the detriment of our social justice mission. I regard this as a test case in education values: should education be market-driven, or driven by humanism.
  2. Coventry University have had an organisation imposed on them which means they can't stand collectively with the rest of us in the University and Colleges Union. We must defend our collective bargaining position.
  3. Casualisation blights our teaching and research provision.
  4. Our workloads have gone through the roof. Tiredness and stress are leading to health issues which affect most academics - while universities trumpet their support for student mental health initiatives.

I want to shift my efforts now to raising awareness of those problems, with my voice and my political will. (After I have had what's left of my holiday! wide eyes So far I've only had to sort out one poor student in difficulties so it's been a good break smile Oh, and I recruited another student for the Open University in Scotland who was unable to access traditional university and thrilled when she realised that she could study with us - for free, and without having to do a lot of GCSEs first. You owe me one @OUScotland.)

From a short walk in Roslin Glen.

Misty trees on a hillside Green bluebell leaves under the trees

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