When grief brings you home to Cyprus

Born on the island in a military family, one now local writer returns to track down the vision of Cyprus described by his now dead motherI started reading Matthew Philip Long’s debut novella a couple of months after my mother passed away. And I had to stop. Set in Cyprus, Life Goes on Without You and Me follows a man returning to the island of his birth after his mother’s death, searching for traces of her in the land she once loved. Grief, memory, belonging – he writes about all of it with a rare eloquence that left me breathless, capturing what none of us can escape: loss. “There was never any intention for anyone else to read it,” says Long sitting in the heart of Nicosia, a town he now calls home. “It started off as diary entries when I started traveling back and forth to Cyprus a couple years after my mum died. I decided to try and find something of her to kind of cling on to; I brought a camera with me and some notebooks, and started making journal entries about feelings”. There’s no doubt that Long’s words are written from experience. And a need to understand. That’s what makes it so poignant. The rhythm, the word choice, the humility toward such a difficult and multilayered subject, the respect for the emotions it stirs, a love for the island – it comes together into something truly all-encompassing. “I finished writing the book about 18 months ago. Now I’m just trying to get back into the mindset of it again,” admits Long. The book will be launched on June 26. As we swap notes I understand what he means by getting back into the mindset. There seems to have been so much growth, so much reflection, so much change that took place as he wrote these pages. Having to talk about this as he launches his novel is not easy. “This book was about trying to understand my own grief, and also to create a language for it. I don’t think I had the tools to speak about grief openly and that’s what the diary entries were for, and that’s what this became. It became creating my own language to understand grief and the loss of what my mother meant to me, what Cyprus and the role it played in her life meant to both of us,” he adds. Long was born in Ayios Nikolaos, Dhekelia, one of the island’s British military bases. “My dad was a British soldier here, and my mom moved here with him from the UK. I was a child of a military family,” he explains. Although the family only spent a couple of years on the island, his mother’s experience here and adoration for the island was evident throughout his childhood. “I have no (personal) memories of Cyprus. But what I do have, and I guess where the desire to find a connection with the island came from, is its memories lived through another; my mom used to talk to me about Cyprus all the time and in such a loving way. It was a happy time in her life, which was an anomaly in a lot of my mom’s life, so it really stuck with me. I remember so many times when I was younger, rather than reading a bedtime story, she would bring out photo albums and show me photos of me growing up here, or you know, me, her and dad in Cyprus, and the first years we spent together.” Matthew Philip Long Thirty years later, her death urged him to come back. “It started off as more of a photo project, I came with a bunch of the photos from the albums, and I was using a camera to try and recreate those images, those memories, desperately trying to make those memories mine; something tangible rather than something that was I was losing, but the writing just took over. The more I wrote, the more I found some healing in that form of expression, and started thinking that this is something that other people might connect with, or might resonate with.” Long has managed to create a beautiful language of grief. “We found out that she was terminally ill, and she died three weeks later. It all happened very quickly… there wasn’t enough time, not that there’s ever enough time with these things, my life transformed overnight, and I think that’s another part of the book; it’s also about that thing that people don’t really talk about. When someone dies, you’re also mourning for a part of you that you’ve lost; mourning for when before my mom got sick, that version of me no longer exists, he’s gone. Different things can never be the same again, so it’s also about trying to grieve that part of myself, and to say goodbye, and acknowledge that I’m now moving on to a completely different stage in my life, when you’re confronted with the death of a parent, a loved one, things can never go back to how they were.” And that’s perhaps the crunch of the story. Long didn’t really find what he was looking for in Cyprus. But what he did find is himself. “The end of the book is the realisation that I was desperately clinging to something that doesn’t belong to me, and I needed to let that go. I would say that the connection to Cyprus is essential to the book, but it could have been anywhere. A huge part of the process was research and just reading as much as I could about Cypriot history and particularly British colonial history here,” says Long. The book also explores how the landscapes we inherit shape the lives we continue after loss. “(British colonial history) became tied to my journey, not only reclaiming memories, trying to find connection, understanding home, and belonging in a country, but a place that has been so scarred by colonial history, and I was born here because of colonialism and colonial legacy. You can read everything you want about colonial history, but to see a physical embodiment of what that means is still quite a challenge for me,” he adds. “But the longer the journey went on, the more I looked, opened my eyes, and discovered and talked to people here, the more it helped with an understanding and acceptance of what it means to be British here. Part of it was also trying to understand, or trying to come to terms with the fact that again, I was searching, and how I was using grief to find a home, belonging, and a connection that can never happen. I’m not Cypriot, I have no ties or connection to this island.” Yet today, Long calls Nicosia home; it’s now where he lives. “Before you can make something home, there has to be an internal truth and reconciliation process: this is what we (British) did here, this is the legacy that is still ongoing, especially in the last five-six months with the role of the British bases here, and how active that has been in the region. It’s about allowing myself to embrace all parts of it, but also to acknowledge that even the idea of trying to find belonging in a land that doesn’t belong to me is also a colonial attitude.” But Cyprus feels like home. “I’m still an outsider, and always will be an outsider here, but I love Cyprus. I love the feelings it’s given me. I had such an incredible experience here, and one that belongs to me, and it felt right to actually just make this place my home. Cyprus is very much a part of who I am now.” As we part, we touch upon the art of writing, how it is a means to understand the world we live in and ourselves. “Writing is, or should be, when done honestly, about being a witness, taking a step back rather than trying to solve problems, I didn’t want to write some kind of definitive book or manual on grief. I wanted it to represent a process. The intention was for it to be meditations, reflections on grief, but also a love letter to Cyprus and to the country, while being as respectful as possible.” Although the novella follows a man returning to the island of his birth after his mother’s death, the place he finds is not the one she once described. Divided by history and silence, the landscape becomes a mirror of his grief in this moving work on the search for belonging. Life Goes on Without You and Me, published by Armida Books, will be available from June 26 on Amazon, online, and local bookstores in paperback and ebook formats. Book presentations by the author are due to follow in October