THE teddy bear was lying on the pavement, bedraggled and wet.
What had happened in the lead up to its presumed parting from a child? Why had it ended up on the streets?
There was no-one around who may have accidentally dropped it, so I walked on and, as usual, it turned out to be a minor incident that stayed with me for way too long.
I remembered finding my first teddy bear in the bin after my mum had thrown it away due to its insides spilling out from its broken seams. I retrieved “Little Ted” (this wasn’t recently, by the way) and hid him in a drawer – I didn’t want him to die – but it wasn’t long before he was discovered and gone for good.
It wasn’t something I had thought about for decades, but as it came flooding back it occurred to me that such a loss, alongside that of a pet, is many people’s first experience of “death”. That bear had been with me for as long as I could remember and his departure was a signal that nothing lasts forever and changes, welcome or not, happen throughout life and alter the course of your existence.
As our time progresses, the losses become more significant and the quantity higher.
There may be a goldfish or a hamster. My brother had a stick insect! For me it was our cat. It could be a car that has been in your family since childhood, or you move house, away from the only place you have ever known.
Then it becomes people. That uncle or auntie who you rarely saw but who always bought you Christmas presents, the man across the road who said “hello”, your grandparents. The hammer hits the nail harder each time. There’s silence in the school assembly as the passing of a pupil is announced and you consider your own mortality.
You move to a different part of the country and drift away from the connections you have spent your life making. You gain new ones, but they don’t sustain like the ones you had made previously – people, places, certain pubs, streets, buildings – would have done if you had stayed.
Then you lose a parent – and you will remember those who died when you were at school whose parents lost them. This will change the course of your life once more. Everything. The way you react to a situation, your behaviour and thinking, your level of responsibility. Or maybe it won’t.
All this came flooding back as one of my mum’s best friends died recently. Mum was devastated. Some seemed more keen to sort out “the estate”, such as it was/is. “You just wouldn’t...” I said. But some would. It’s possible they’re not even wrong to be like that. It’s just their way of dealing with it. Or am I being too kind?
I remembered the teddy bear and wondered how the child who had lost it felt. Bereaved? Demanding a replacement? Maybe they hadn’t lost it all, but had fallen out with it and hurled it to the ground. The death of a relationship, rather than of a possession or person.
I pictured him/her 50 years later typing out their recollections of the parting of ways with their first teddy bear. Or more likely they just walked on and quickly forget it ever existed. We all react in different ways to each individual loss when the coping mechanism kicks in.
Some appear to continue as if nothing ever happened, others, like myself, don’t travel light and the burden becomes heavier with age, only relenting when the big one happens.