There is a Welsh word — hiraeth — that has no clean English translation. It is homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or that may never have existed. It is the grief of distance, the ache of something irretrievably gone.
But Welsh has other words too. Chwefror — February, the shortest month that somehow feels the longest. Colli — to lose. Cofio — to remember.
Chronos and Kairos
The ancient Greeks distinguished two kinds of time. Chronos is linear time — the clock, the calendar, the days stacked one after the other. Kairos is the right moment, the appointed time, the qualitative experience of time rather than the quantitative. A moment in kairos is not measured by hours but by significance.
Grief lives in kairos. A song comes on the radio and suddenly it is that afternoon again, and no amount of chronos between then and now can make it distant. The chronological years can accumulate, but a single kairos moment collapses them all.
I have learned to stop expecting grief to follow chronos. It does not get smaller with calendar distance. It reshapes, changes texture, finds new edges. But it does not simply diminish because enough Februaries have passed.
The Risca Cuckoo and the Long Wait
There is a local legend in and around Risca about the cuckoo. The people of the town, it is said, built a wall to keep the cuckoo — and thus spring — from leaving. They wanted to hold onto the warmth, to suspend the season. Of course the cuckoo escaped anyway, and the season turned regardless.
I find myself understanding those wall-builders. The impulse to keep something precious from changing, from moving on, from becoming the past — I know that impulse intimately. I have tried to build walls around memory, to keep it from slipping into the category of history.
But memory is more like the river Ebbw than a wall. It moves. Sometimes it is high and rushes through everything. Sometimes it is low and quiet. But it keeps moving, and what we loved does not disappear — it runs through us.
Dinas Emrys and the Hidden Dragons
Further north, above Beddgelert in Snowdonia, sits Dinas Emrys. In the Mabinogion, this is where Vortigern tried to build a fortress that kept collapsing. His wizards told him to find a fatherless boy and sacrifice him to the foundations. Instead, the boy Myrddin (the young Merlin) revealed the true reason for the collapse: beneath the earth, two dragons were fighting — a red and a white.
I have always read that story as being about what lies buried. Not something malevolent, but something that needs acknowledgement. The ground keeps shifting because there is something real underneath that has not been honoured. The answer is not more stone piled on top. The answer is to uncover what is there.
Grief that is not acknowledged keeps collapsing the structures we try to build over it.
Weaving Folklore into Remembering
I do not mean this in a superficial sense — lighting candles or staging rituals for the sake of it. I mean taking seriously the idea that the stories a culture tells about time, death, and memory contain practical wisdom.
Welsh folklore is saturated with the idea that the dead are not entirely gone. The Tylwyth Teg (the Fair Folk) are sometimes understood as the dead returning. The thin places — mannau tenau — where this world and the other touch most closely. The sense that what we love persists in the land, in the river, in the shape of the hills.
This is not literally true in the sense of scientific fact. But it is true in the sense that our loved ones continue to shape us — our perceptions, our responses, our inner voices. They are not here. They are, in some meaningful sense, present in us.
Some practical ways I have found to weave this into remembering:
- Walk the land they loved. Not as a pilgrimage with a tidy beginning and end, but as a way of moving through a world that still holds their presence.
- Speak their names aloud, in places they knew. There is something in this that is not superstition — it is simply the act of refusing to reduce them to silence.
- Hold the kairos moments when they come. Not with panic or despair, but with recognition: this is the kind of moment that belongs to them.
- Let folklore give you language. When ordinary words fail — and they often do — the old stories offer containers that hold more than direct speech can.
The cuckoo escaped the wall. Spring came and went regardless. But the story of the people who tried to hold on — that story lasted. And in lasting, it holds something of what they loved.
Time moves through us. What we love moves with it.