Good Grief

I remember, in the first couple of days after my father died, being very aware that everything felt different - as though I was experiencing consciousness in a new way. I remember thinking, "I should be writing all this down", but of course I was far too busy to record any of my thoughts at the time. And the surreal, unreal, hyper real feeling (the result of adrenaline keeping me going) subsided, and I missed my chance to accurately capture it. 

"Next time," I thought, with certainty, imagining grieving for some future loss, years away, "I'll write it all down." And then, nine months later, my mother died.

It felt different, for lots of reasons, but again reality was altered, and again there was no time to keep a record of it.

I regretted missing my chance to write about my grief; then I realised that I hadn't. I couldn't write about it in real time, but that didn't mean that writing wouldn't be useful. And it's not as though the grieving process was over - it takes years. I'd previously written a blog about sexual violence, and I'd been surprised by how much I benefitted from processing my experiences as I wrote about them. Even more surprisingly, other people got in touch to say that my blog had been helpful for them. So, it was decided: I would write a blog, some posts hidden, others visible, and maybe share it with a few close friends. 

But a blog needs a name. 

I knew that I hadn't handled my grief well, after my father died, which resulted in me falling apart entirely when I tried to "get back to normal" a few months later. I desperately wanted to avoid making the same mistakes again, and after my mother died I thought a lot about grieving well, without negative repercussions. Good grief, if you like.

And those words, "good grief", always make me think of my mother. She was a very religious woman, who swore very rarely, and possibly blasphemed never. So, neutral expressions of frustration, like "good grief", were well used! I occasionally hear myself (a very different, sweary, blasphemous woman) say, "Good grief!" in a voice not quite my own, and it always makes me think of her.

And, of course, of Charlie Brown. 

My parents met at grammar school, after my mother moved out of London, with her family, in her early teens. Because of an eccentric gender-based form system, the two of them only really got to know each other in the sixth form, where a mixed group of friends formed. The group scattered when they went to universities around the country, but the friends all kept in touch via letter. It was then, 200 miles apart, that my parents fell in love. And along with love letters, they sent each other Peanuts paperbacks, inscribed with in-jokes and promises. I grew up with these books, understanding - even as a child - that Charlie Brown had played a small role in the story of my family.

I know it's cheesy, but when I decided to write this blog, there really wasn't any other name it could have. So, Good Grief: a blog about trying to grieve well; a blog about who we were and are; a blog about this new chapter in the story of my family.

Him

(Content warning: rape)


I have lost a lot over the past year. My mother, my father, and him.

Regardless of their own experience, everyone seems to understand the enormity of the death of a parent: it is life changing; it is beyond words. 

But words are what we humans reach for, to comfort each other: "Too young!" people cry - they were in their late fifties - and, "Too close together!" - just nine months apart - and, "Too much for you to have to go through!". And, yes. They were, and it was, and it is. And then (as I smile stiffly, and hold back the tears) people tell me, unbidden, about how much they love their own parents, about how happy they are that their parents are healthy, and quite how incapable they are of imagining losing them. It is understood that this is a loss which I will take time to accept, to grieve for, and to move on from. 

But the end of a relationship? I do not feel that same generous understanding from those around me. Parents are irreplaceable, the logic seems to go, but partners are not. Give it time! And anyway, it's not as though he's dead. 

And no, he isn't. And I'm so glad. So glad that he gets to keep living his life - hopefully more happily and healthily than he has been. So glad that the world gets to keep him.

But that doesn't mean it's not a loss: the person he was to me is gone. Run away with the person I was to him?

He has been my best friend, my lover, and my family. For one quarter of my life, I have slept beside him. When we met, he was the brightest, most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I had no idea the universe had produced something this wonderful. And we fell in love so fast and so hard. 

He used to kiss me on the chickenpox scar on my forehead, so gently but so intensely. And touch me on the nose with such tenderness. We would hold hands, squeezing tightly, fingers intertwined, and he would say, "I love the way we fit together." He would tell me I had perfectly ear-shaped ears, a perfectly nose-shaped nose. His was the truest, most unfailing love I had ever, ever known. 

But now it is gone, and we are caught up in the cruellest limbo. Living apart together. Waiting for the practicalities to catch up with reality, every day hoping I can bear more than I think.

But... when my phone beeps, my heart says his name. When I'm sad, I want to bury my face in him. When something is funny, I want him to laugh, too. I want to travel back in time to all those mundane little moments of quietly loving and being loved, to live through them again, to soak them up and keep them forever. 

Being in the same place as him is agony. Hearing his voice not saying "I love you". Watching his hands not holding mine. Wanting to press my face into his chest, and breathe him in, feeling safer than anywhere else in the world. But I can't, because the space he inhabits is no longer my home. 

On Tuesday, it would have been eight years. On Wednesday he moves out. 

And then I can fall apart entirely. And then start putting myself back together again. Without him. 

...

EDIT (21/07/2017)

It is now 13 and a half months since I wrote this post, and it is like reading someone else's words. The day after I wrote this, he and I were arguing. (I so desperately needed him to leave, as soon as possible, as his continued presence, and flaunting of his new relationship was unbearably painful, and making me lash out, criticising both him and the woman he was leaving me for - which he denied, but was proven almost immediately.) He was telling me, with vitriol in his voice, what a "nasty" person I was. Winded by this, and incredulous at his double standards, I said: "you raped me". Because he had. Years before. And then (as I lay, head turned away, sobbing silently) apologised, apologised, apologised. And I, in the middle of a spell of treacly, black depression, self worth already bruised and broken from the sexual violence in my chidlhood, silently accepted his apology, absorbed all my feelings about it into numbness, and never spoke of it. I literally never mentioned it. But I did not expect that he would forget it. But he did: raping me did not matter to him, because I did not matter to him. I can reach no other conclusion. 

So, as horrible as it felt that evening, to have his brutality laid bare, it helped. And from there I was able to look more closely at the ways in which he had controlled me, gaslit me, made me quieter and smaller and less. Realising precisely *what* I was losing (and what I stood to gain. Myself, for one) changed the grieving process, fundamentally. 

Today I am in love with someone who actually likes me. Who does not wish to change me. And whom I feel able to trust with my entire self. It is fucking glorious. 

Unlived Life

My mother died, of suicide, on the 18th March 2016. This post was written during the days before her funeral.

_____________

A week after my mother died, I read an article by the single, career-focused, forty-something daughter of a regretful housewife, exploring the generational ebb and flow of female priorities and choices. For these two women, the dichotomy was clear: family versus career - cultural expectations as they entered adulthood leading each woman down a different path. 

This is far from my own experience, but I am keenly aware that my life has not paralleled my mother's. She was the first in her family to go to university; I am studying for my BSc in my thirties. I was born - the first of four - to a pair of married, mortgaged 27 year olds; I gave birth to my only child in my chaotic teens. So, while I certainly found the article enjoyable and thought-provoking, it did not resonate with me in the same way it surely would have with many of my generation. 

What has stayed with me though, looping through my mind in the days since, are the words of Gloria Steinem (from this recording of Desert Island Discs), quoted by the author: “I suspect, like many women, I'm living the unlived life of my mother”. 

The unlived life of my mother. My mother's unlived life, left behind, unwanted. Not figuratively, but literally. The life that my mother elected, irreversibly, to cease to live. 

I find myself, now, drowning in my mother's unlived life. It hangs in the air of her home, syrup-thick, filling the space where she is not. I open the wardrobe of clothes she will never wear again, and more spills out, drenching me in spent possibilities and tears. I am cooking in her kitchen, sleeping in her bed. I am running her errands, fulfilling her responsibilities. Hers, not mine. Although inheritance and circumstance dictates that they now are. I open my eyes in the morning to her favourite photograph of my recently dead father. Am I crying her tears for him, or are they mine? 

The boundaries are blurring.

But can I live her life, and at the same time my own?