tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43990521453544730182024-03-13T12:32:38.836+00:00Just Carry On BreathingSurviving the Suicide of my Beloved Wife Louise. <br>
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Winner of the Helen Bailey Award for <br>
Best Widowhood Blog 2016
Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.comBlogger70125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-59589204750255151232017-09-10T14:23:00.000+01:002017-09-10T14:25:16.688+01:00Committing an Offence<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">No matter how often
I think about it, the fact that suicide wasn’t decriminalised in England and
Wales until 1961 never loses its power to shock. Barely believably, in a world
of passenger jets, space exploration, television and pop music, one which in
many ways appears not so different to our own, those who failed in an attempt
to take their lives were still, at least theoretically, liable to prosecution
and imprisonment. Even if criminal
proceedings were increasingly rare, hospital staff continued to meet their
obligation to report cases of attempted suicide to the Police – and the
Metropolitan Police’s own guidance of the time was unequivocal; "an attempt to commit
suicide is an attempt to commit a felony, and therefore punishable with hard
labour’.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">We pride
ourselves on now living in a more enlightened age, one which understands and recognises
the dark force of mental illness and accords people driven to take their lives
under its malign influence the same care and respect as those who have died by
any other means. As we mark another World Suicide Prevention Day the media is overflowing
with articles on mental illness. The risks, in particular those posed to young
men, are increasingly well known. Suicide prevention is in the news. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But the
language from that brutal legal framework of post war Britain, rooted in fifth
century notions of the sin of ‘self murder’, is still with us. The phrase
‘committed suicide’ is so pervasive, so commonplace, that it appears in many of
those same well meaning articles and features we read today. And its not just
journalists and sub-editors. Even some medical professionals and others within
the system continue to use the term. I can’t blame them. I used to myself. We
fall back on it instinctively. In a game of word association, the two words would
be inextricably linked. If you are not directly affected by the act of suicide
you would have no reason to reflect upon its usage, much less challenge it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But if you are,
then the term jumps out at you and hits you squarely between the eyes, knocking
you for six with its entirely inappropriate connotations of blame and
criminality, straight from the musty pages of that Metropolitan Police
guidance. Nobody would think that it’s acceptable to say that somebody has
committed death by cancer or heart disease so why should we persist in doing so
with suicide? Why should there be such a contrast in our treatment of a disease
of the mind as opposed to a disease of the body? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It’s not as if
there are no alternatives. ‘Died by suicide’ might sound a clumsy and unnatural
formulation but only because it is so rarely heard. In describing Louise’s
death I often simply say that she hanged herself. It may sound stark. It may
shock but it accurately reflects her experience and mine. Neither Louise nor I
have anything to apologise for, nor am I particularly concerned about
sheltering others from the harsh truth – I have to live with the reality and
the memory of it every day whereas their glimpse into my world is fleeting and distant.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">No doubt some
would argue that none of this matters. They are only words. But language does
not exist in a vacuum. It shapes, articulates and reflects societal attitudes. They
are words which unthinkingly betray a lack of respect and consideration for the
victims of this particular form of disease, and for their relatives. They
suggest that for all the lip service paid to mental illness there remains
remnants of the dismissive and hostile attitudes more openly held towards it
generations ago.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And those
residual prejudices continue to be reflected in choices in healthcare funding
where mental health services persistently find themselves relatively less
well-resourced than other branches of medicine. Somewhere along the line, words
– and the attitudes they consciously or unconsciously represent – form part of
a chain of cultural ignorance which ends in real suffering and real death. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The implication
that those driven by darkness and desperation to such extreme and tragic measures
are somehow guilty of wrongdoing says more about the society which tolerates
such attitudes than it does about those who it persists in misunderstanding and
maligning. Perhaps we haven’t progressed as far during the course of the past
50 years as we would like to think.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-84902516422831638532017-04-15T13:23:00.001+01:002017-04-15T13:25:17.952+01:00With This Ring.....<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HawCwOB1rG0/WMX3eJ3J2JI/AAAAAAAAjLo/jnbpCgGUpNg-Ctkxw4HW_Km_tOhQpQqmgCPcB/s1600/Gary%2B%2526%2BLouise.%2BSt%2BJohns%2BChurch%252C%2BBethnal%2BGreen.%2B24%2BSept%2B2011%2B%2528103%2529%2BCROP%2BFOR%2BBLOG.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HawCwOB1rG0/WMX3eJ3J2JI/AAAAAAAAjLo/jnbpCgGUpNg-Ctkxw4HW_Km_tOhQpQqmgCPcB/s400/Gary%2B%2526%2BLouise.%2BSt%2BJohns%2BChurch%252C%2BBethnal%2BGreen.%2B24%2BSept%2B2011%2B%2528103%2529%2BCROP%2BFOR%2BBLOG.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I was halfway through my lunchtime sandwich when I suddenly felt the disapproving stares from those squeezed in around me at the crowded cafe tables. I had sat there dozens of times before doing the same thing, but it was only now that I suddenly realised how it must look to others; a middle aged man swiping through dating profiles on a phone, his brazen infidelity revealed by the wedding band on his ring finger. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In truth the public censure was probably more a product of my own imagination than the reality of our atomised and screen obsessed society - it's highly unlikely that anybody would have been inclined to raise their gaze from their own phone for long enough to catch sight of the content on mine. But the fact that the thought occurred to me at all signifies a growing self consciousness about my wedding ring and confusion at the meaning it now conveys.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It's not the first time that I've felt self conscious about the ring. It took months after the wedding for me to adjust to it on my finger. Never having worn jewellery of any description before I was forever absent mindedly playing with it. But however strange the ring might have felt, I took its symbolism seriously. I was proud to be married and extraordinarily proud to be married to Louise. I belonged to her and wanted the world to know it. Every time that I caught sight of my left hand, or heard the clunk of the ring against another metal I felt a warm glow of satisfaction and contentment. I was finally where I had always wanted to be in life. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Now the symbolism is even more highly charged. In Louise's absence the ring has been the most tangible remaining proof of our commitment to each other. I may come home to an empty house every day, I may not have seen, heard or touched my wife in more than two years, but throughout that time I have only needed to glance at my ring finger to reassure myself that I <i>am </i>still married. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This is not just about trying to convince myself that the link to Louise remains unbroken, that my status is unchanged. It's also a necessary reminder, as memories fade and the loneliness and emptiness of widowhood begins to feel more real than the life that went before, that our short time together actually happened. It was not a figment of my imagination. Hard though it is to believe, I have not <i>always</i> been a widower. There was once something more. Something incredibly special. There was once somebody who loved me. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Unlike some who quickly remove their ring, perhaps to place on a chain, mine has therefore remained firmly in place. So strong has been the attachment that I could not even bring myself to remove it in order to properly clean a wound when I cut my finger. In the circumstances the very act of taking the ring off, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">even just for a few moments, was too redolent with meaning to be able to contemplate.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And nor has the ring been on its own. Louise's wedding ring has sat on my little finger - the only one on which it would fit - from the moment I re-entered the house the day after she died and discovered it carefully put to one side for me to find. I convinced myself that the wearing of two wedding rings, one thinner and obviously designed for smaller, more feminine, fingers told the world the whole story; our love and marriage was still alive but only one of us was now in a position to display the symbols of it. I discounted the option of remodelling the rings and combining them into one, as many do, since it was important to me to retain a sense of the original, the look and feel of the rings that we exchanged on our wedding day.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But the presence of the ring, once such a comfort, is now beginning to feel increasingly incongruous. There is no loss of love for Louise. She will always remain my wife. It is, though, - and there is no contradiction here - becoming harder and harder to think of myself as being married. Louise has already been gone for half as long as we were together. How many nights do you have to go to bed alone before accepting that you are no longer part of a couple? How many months without hearing the words 'I Love You'? How many years without physical intimacy? </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The answer will differ for each individual, but in my case I know that I am reaching my limit. The spiritual and emotional connection with Louise is as strong as ever but in the practical reality of day to day existence there is no real sense in which I can pretend to still live the life of a married man. How can there be when the closest I get to kissing my wife is her dressing gown, still on on the back of our bedroom door?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So someday soon it will be time to do what was previously unthinkable and transfer the ring to the equivalent finger on my right hand. There it will continue to display my love for Louise and confirm to the world, and myself, the fact that our marriage existed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It will not completely remove the ambiguity. To my disappointment, an internet search for the meaning and symbolism of a wedding band on the right ring finger did not confirm a universal understanding of the practice as a sign of widowhood. The idea, in fact, hardly seems even to impinge on the consciousness of those strange people from whom I now often feel so utterly removed - the non widowed. There are, it appears, a vast range of other practical and cultural reasons why I might choose to wear my ring in this way. And while I like the idea of being mistaken for a musician, and am entirely relaxed about being wrongly identified as an Eastern Orthodox Christian, I'm much less keen on the thought that many will assume its code that signifies a willingness to cheat on a partner. Back, perhaps, to square one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But even if the rest of the world doesn't understand, other widow(er)s surely will - we become finely attuned to the significance of the unusual arrangement of wedding rings. There is also always the hope that it might make dating just that little less complicated. After all, i</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">n the event that I was to pluck up the courage to ask a woman out, the presence of a wedding ring on my left hand would hardly be conducive to a positive response if she did not already know some of my story.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In any case there is a sense in which I still welcome that ambiguity of my status. It seems to accurately reflect the confused reality of widowhood; married but not married, in love but alone. My head begins to spin even faster when I contemplate that at some point in the future I hope to be simultaneously married and in love with one wife and in love with, but for the temporary duration of this life no longer married to, another. And always at the back of my mind the vague hope that one day, in some unknowable subsequent existence, I might have two wives and two marriages at one and the same time. Where would the rings go then?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Stuck in the quagmire of post grief depression, where the landscape is grey and flat, and the challenge of building a new life from scratch seems impossibly daunting, I need to demonstrate, to myself more than anybody, some kind of </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">progress. Moving</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> the ring feels like one way in which I can do so. The </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">only questions that remain, then, are how and when it is to be done. The ring was</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> placed on my finger with such public ceremony that it somehow feels as though some meaningful formalities should be observed to mark its removal. Instead, its much more likely to be done privately, almost furtively, at a random moment when the urge seizes me</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. It may even be repeated several times as, like so many others, I hesitantly experiment with and without the ring.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I expect that there will initially be guilt. Maybe some kind of misplaced sense of betrayal. Even just the writing of this post, the acknowledgement of the reality that time and distance inevitably and naturally bring about a degree of gradual separation, is painful. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Objectively the transfer of the ring is just one more marker in this lengthy and ongoing process. There are countless others. Many have long since been navigated while some, such as the sorting and disposal of Louise's possessions, are still to be braved. But somehow this feels like the crossing of a personal </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Rubicon, a particularly profound statement about the person that I am now, two years after Louise's death, and the life that I lead as a consequence of it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Acceptance is a word too easily bandied about by those who haven't found themselves in this situation. It implies the possibility of a simple point of resolution of the grief and sadness, a 'happy ever after' moment when we are 'cured' of the loss we have suffered. Credits roll, Lights up. No doubt it is comforting for many of those around us to think in these terms. The reality is, of course, much more complex, shifting and nuanced. There are aspects of Louise's death and my subsequent experience which I will never come to terms with, and nor would I want to. The scar of widowhood may heal roughly over but it will always be present and liable to cause pain, often at the most unexpected moment. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And yet my changed thinking about the ring does seem to represent part of an acceptance of sorts; acceptance that Louise isn't coming back and our marriage, in this life at least, is at an end. I repeat that it does not mean that I love Louise any the less, nor do I miss her or honour her memory any less than I did before. There is still barely a waking moment when she is more than a split second from the forefront of my mind. It does, however, mean that the emotional state I occupy and my practical reality have taken a further step towards realignment with each other. It also means that at long last I have begun the process of defining myself as somebody other than solely a widower, as somebody who is able to live in the present and is capable of looking forward as well as back. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It is time, therefore, to attempt to let go of something that I can no longer hold; a marriage that continues to exist only in my heart and my memory. And as I try to deal with the sadness and sense of loss that this entails I will take comfort from the thought that wherever the ring may be, now and in the future, it will </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">always remain as precious and as imbued with the spirit of love as the day when Louise first placed it on my finger.</span><br />
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Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-51122333205306426262017-01-14T12:41:00.000+00:002017-01-14T12:48:19.919+00:00A Heart Big Enough to Love Again<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EdSxeNMzKZg/WHobudQ8-OI/AAAAAAAAi90/vrtz8xE2vbkLUwiy5jwaHbB5zkW8HNedACLcB/s1600/heart%2B3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EdSxeNMzKZg/WHobudQ8-OI/AAAAAAAAi90/vrtz8xE2vbkLUwiy5jwaHbB5zkW8HNedACLcB/s200/heart%2B3.jpg" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I stared into Louise's eyes desperately searching for signs that she was joking, even though, deep down, I knew that there would be none. Just days before she took her life she was telling me that if she was </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">dead I would be free to meet another woman, somebody who could give me more than she was capable of. My mind was in overdrive. Panic at further confirmation of the darkness and hopelessness gripping Louise was mixed with desperate sadness that in her confusion she couldn't see exactly how much she meant to me. But there was also a chilling glimpse into a future where I might once more be alone and forced to start the search for love all over again. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">At some point after bereavement, whether it is six months or six years, almost every widow(er) begins to turn their mind to the prospect of trying to date once more. However inconceivable it may seem in the early days of loss, when our love for our dead partner is more intense even than it ever was before, and when the mere thought of any kind of intimacy with somebody else is enough to provoke revulsion, a different perspective emerges with time. Sheer l</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">oneliness, the knowledge that life is vastly more fulfilling with a wonderful partner, the basic human need to give and receive love, even 'widows fire', its flames fanned by </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">the inconvenient fact that sexual desire does not die with our partner, cause us, sooner or later, to realise that we have to open ourselves up to the prospect of a new relationship.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It had taken me more than 20 years to find Louise. I always knew that I had the attributes to make a good husband, but not being blessed with the looks or self confidence to often be considered a candidate for the necessary preliminary role of boyfriend in the first place I always struggled with dating. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> I remain to this day </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">puzzled by the often expressed notion that 'these things happen when you aren't looking'. Not for me they don't. So on and off for two long and lonely decades I forced myself to endure the agony, humiliation and serial rejection of internet dating and its lower tech forerunners in an effort to find what I wanted more than anything else; somebody special to love and be loved by. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I was eventually rewarded a thousand times over for my persistence. I could never quite believe my luck at meeting Louise, a woman who, far from her anxiety induced self doubt at the end, gave me everything that I had ever dreamed of from a relationship - and much more that I had never even dared to hope for besides. She was, without question, the best thing that ever happened to me. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So maybe it was inevitable that from the very earliest days I held on to hope that eventually I would find love again, and be able to experience something just as good as the life that I had so enjoyed, albeit briefly, with Louise. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It was, perhaps, easier for me to think in these terms than many others. Unlike most who have been widowed suddenly I had explicit permission, in Louise's farewell letter, to go on to meet somebody else. I took it, in fact, almost to be an instruction. If in taking her life Louise had </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">believed that she was allowing me to find happiness with another woman, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">failure to do so would somehow make things seem even more senseless and wasteful, her hopes for me disappointed. And whereas many in-law families find the thought of their son or daughter, brother or sister being 'replaced' too difficult to contemplate, it has always been made clear to me that if I were to find love again it would be with the blessing of Louise's family. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I also do not have to consider any potentially similar resistance to a new partner from children.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Nevertheless, it's become apparent that attempting to date after being widowed is even more complicated and emotionally fraught than it is before. Despite that permission from Louise there was initially great guilt at the thought of being with somebody else</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">, as if it would be a betrayal. If I still love Louise, and know that I always will, how could I let somebody else into my life? It took much soul searching to come to the conclusion that love is infinite, that there is no limit to the capacity of the human heart. Just as a parent can love two children equally so I am capable of loving another woman without diminishing my feelings for Louise. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But therein lies an immediate problem. Louise will come with me into any other relationship. For the widowed this is entirely logical. Our situation means that we have no option but to develop a sophisticated appreciation of the complexities and nuances of love and marriage, one which goes beyond the simple 'one heart - one love' formula which the non-widowed have the luxury of being able to hold on to. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">We know that there is no contradiction in honouring and loving a new partner while continuing to honour and love our lost partner, indeed nor in considering ourselves married to both simultaneously (e</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ven if t</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">he problem of how, ultimately, we might have to balance both partners when we are all together in heaven remains a puzzle). </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">We know, too, that the mere fact of meeting somebody else will not of itself end our grief and </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">sadness. It will simply grow the rest of our lives and enhance our happiness around it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">We also </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">believe, with some logic, that our widowed status should stand as something of a recommendation to potential partners; we have proved that we can commit to and sustain loving relationships, we have probably reflected deeply on the meaning and value of those relationships and are likely to be prepared to work harder than most to build another. My next partner will receive not just my love for her but also all my love for Louise which now has nowhere else to go. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But the reality is that m</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ost people who find themselves single in their 30's and 40's are in that situation because of a fundamentally different experience to our own - a loss of love. When you have been widowed your emotional connection with your wife or husband is (usually) intact. How many will be jealous of that love we still hold, that perhaps we still openly display in the wearing of our wedding ring, despite the rather obvious fact that <i>our </i>partner can't possibly try to resume surreptitious email contact or turn up on the doorstep with an axe? How many will be empathetic enough to understand our different starting points and respect our needs? </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">How many on dating sites will simply complain that we haven't 'moved on', write us off as having too much 'baggage' and swipe through to the next dating profile? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Some might say that I'm worrying unnecessarily, that having 'widowed' next to your relationship status is not an obstacle to meeting somebody. My experience so far would suggest otherwise. </span>I'm now back on the same online dating site where Louise and I met and t<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">he contrast with when I was last there is stark. The positive responses have completely dried up. I am older than I was before, its </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">true, but then so are those I am contacting. It seems in order to succeed in attracting interest I must try to hide who I am. Many do, choosing to identify themselves as 'single' rather than 'widowed' but I'm not sure that I </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">could. If somebody isn't prepared to accept me as I am then they aren't the right person for me in any case.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Somehow the whole dating game is more difficult to deal with this time round. I deeply resent having to do it. I was once a much loved husband, but now I'm grubbing around for virtual 'likes' and 'winks' from strangers, desperately hoping for a reply to a message which never comes. It's difficult to raise any interest in the profiles on the screen in front of me. No doubt they are of lovely people but I don't know them and the flat, generic two dimensional descriptions couldn't possibly convey their characters in the way that I knew Louise as a rounded whole person. I can't even fully relate to their outlook on the world any longer. How is it possible for somebody 'not to take life too seriously'? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The confidence sapping rejections, having messages completely ignored or, worse, on the rare occasions when dates are arranged, being stood up, hurt much more now. I almost feel more sad for Louise than myself. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It seems to disrespect her, and her love for me, as much as it disrespects me. I don't deserve, at the age of 48, when almost everybody else around me is settled in relationships, to be spending Sundays sitting in coffee shops waiting in vain for somebody not fit to be spoken of in the same breath as Louise to bother to turn up. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And if they do turn up, and we manage to navigate the inevitable early reference to suicide (rarely a good first date topic of conversation) then we start from scratch. I am no longer a teenager. I worked hard over a long period of time to reach the point with Louise where we felt like a proper couple who knew and understood each other intimately. It's exhausting to think that I would</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> now need to begin all over again. Not just </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">getting to know my new partner but also their family and friends, and to adjust to a whole new way of life lived to different rhythms, probably in a different place and with different people. Nothing better illustrates the fact that I have been pushed from the top of the hill all the way back down to the very bottom once more. What I really want is the impossible</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> - a fully formed relationship from the very start, enabling us to dispense with the dating and the process of getting to know each other.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And who is the person I want to know? Is she different from the one I sought before? </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Perhaps not in the essentials. Ironically Louise herself would undoubtedly have been one of those rare people capable of instinctively understanding how to respect the needs of a widower in a new relationship. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But she will certainly have to be somebody very special indeed. To settle for anything less in my loneliness and vulnerability would be a betrayal not only of myself but also of Louise's hopes for me. It is desperately hard to conceive of anybody matching Louise so I have the toughest of tasks in finding them, but have to maintain hope that somebody equally remarkable is out there somewhere.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I also tend to imagine that she might be a widow </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">- not just somebody who will instinctively understand but also one who can bring a 4th person into the relationship to improve the balance, both dead partners openly acknowledged and celebrated. I visualise one day living in a household with three sets of wedding photos on the walls. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And she is likely to be a little younger than myself. This isn't pure shallowness. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Partly it is borne out of fear that I might one day find myself widowed once more if I was to meet somebody older. Mostly, though, it is because I have lost track of my age and the passage of time. I last shared my bed with a 40 year old woman. We mixed mostly with her friends of a similar age. When she died we were in the middle of a year of 40th birthday celebrations. It was just about possible to still hold on to an idea of relative youthfulness. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I tended to forget that I was six years older than Louise.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I also tend to forget that another two years have gone by since that last night together. The realisation that I might now reasonably be matched with somebody in their fifties is difficult to come to terms with, as if 10 years of my own life have been snatched away from me. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">If the process of finding new love is so painful, the challenges so great and my needs so difficult to meet, why put myself through it all? Although the thought of one day finding another relationship was helpful to hold on to in the early days, I am now exposed to the obvious drawback of constructing my hope for a new life around something outside of my control. I might have been less disappointed with my progress, felt less stuck as I approach my third year of widowhood, if I had focused on some other more achievable building blocks such as my career, home or hobbies. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The answer is simple. Nothing in life is more precious or rewarding than a</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> mature, knowing, understanding and committed relationship, genuinely a union of two people. One where the pronoun 'us' carries real meaning, where it signifies a living organism in its own right. I knew this before I met Louise and I </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">know it now even more than ever. If I <i>had</i> been in any doubt then the one occasion since Louise died when there was just a glimmer of an embryonic closeness with another woman would have put me right. To </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">once more</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> feel the first stirrings of tenderness and care for another person provided a distant echo of how good this life once was and a reminder that it can still be good again. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I am scared, it is true, that I might once more have to search for 20 years, that I will be a pensioner by the time I find love again. But I continue to hope that, eventually, another special woman will once more make the wait seem worth every moment. And I know that when I find her nobody will be happier for me than Louise.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-49081755866088434672016-12-15T04:26:00.001+00:002016-12-17T17:10:55.166+00:00It's Beginning to Look a Little Like Christmas<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I opened the box of Christmas decorations as carefully and as nervously as an archaeologist might approach a long lost haul of Anglo-Saxon treasure. This, to me, was much more precious; a collection not of gold but memories, a time capsule of the way things used to be, before. </span><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-adye3ssKtPc/WFVxBRnc1iI/AAAAAAAAirc/9ZZU7MOFfZAmgssMNZ6CRotf4GCc3_WVACLcB/s1600/Our%2BChristmas%2BTree%2Bat%2BIdmiston%2BRoad.%2BDec%2B2013%2B%25282%2529.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-adye3ssKtPc/WFVxBRnc1iI/AAAAAAAAirc/9ZZU7MOFfZAmgssMNZ6CRotf4GCc3_WVACLcB/s320/Our%2BChristmas%2BTree%2Bat%2BIdmiston%2BRoad.%2BDec%2B2013%2B%25282%2529.JPG" width="212" /></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Louise was always gently amused at my child-like excitement around Christmas. Come December each year the cynicism and scepticism of adulthood was temporarily cast to one side as I counted down the days to the 25th. I loved every aspect of the holiday period from the most cheesy of festive pop songs to the traditional turkey - the merest suggestion of anything else for Christmas Dinner was enough to cause disquiet. I might have grumbled along with everybody else at the first signs of tinsel and bumper boxes of Quality Street in the shops as soon as the school summer holidays finished but that was only for appearances sake. I was secretly delighted at the signs of the encroaching season. I would, in fact, have been quite happy to see mince pies appearing in the shops in June.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But last year Christmas was cancelled. My first without Louise. I watched it approach with dread, unable to reconcile the jollity all around me with my own grief filled reality and petrified both of the memories that it would evoke and the inevitable comparisons between the love, light and activity of before and the sadness and emptiness of now. A time for families when your loved one is gone, laughter and celebration when you feel as though you will never be able to celebrate or laugh again, and for remembering times past when memories bring such pain. Nothing can possibly be calculated to emphasise loss more than Christmas. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So I simply avoided it. It was surprisingly easy. No decorations went up, I worked through to Christmas Eve and, by way of distraction, took myself off on a major holiday a couple of days later. I mostly socialised only with those in a similar situation who were equally keen to blot out the festive period and TV couldn't serve as a reminder since I wasn't watching it anyway. By and large things passed me by. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">As this year has progressed, however, I've been much less sure how to deal with my second Christmas. I can't continue to avoid it indefinitely and I'm very conscious that Louise would be heartbroken at the thought that her actions have wrecked for ever something from which I drew so much pleasure. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In any case, I am not in quite the same place that I was 12 months ago. The loneliness is, if anything, even more acute after what is now such a long period on my own, and the hope that I clung on to so tightly, that I might quickly be able to build a new equally good, stimulating and rewarding life, is harder to maintain as it becomes ever clearer with each passing day that the lonely and empty holding pattern of routine is settling into my new normal. But I've become used </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">to Louise's absence, better at handling situations and memories which would have disabled me a year ago, much less vulnerable to surprise attacks of raw grief. Its a flat, monochrome, lifeless world but no longer, generally, a searingly painful one. It's kind of OK - as long as I can avoid comparisons with what I used to have.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It therefore feels like the right time to try to face Christmas again, to engage<br />once more with the holiday season. Which was why I found myself staring into the box of decorations, untouched since Louise had last packed the contents away nearly two years ago, just weeks before she died. I could tell that it was Louise who had packed it because of the efficiency with which it had been done. I would never have managed to squeeze everything in. Taking out the first baubles felt almost like a violation of a sacred space, breaking the vacuum seal on a world where Louise still lived.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Erecting the tree was an even bigger emotional challenge. Like most of the contents of our joint household, it was originally Louise's. I still vividly remember the pleasure and excitement of putting it up for her at our first Christmas together, just days after we had got engaged. It felt symbolic of the intertwining of our lives. We rarely took selfies but one of us the following year sitting in front of the same tree surrounded by presents, about to celebrate our first Christmas as a married couple, perfectly encapsulates the sense of domestic contentment and fulfilment. I was wearing a badge. Zooming into the picture I can see it says 'Loved Like Crazy'. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I still won't be able to bring myself to observe many of the Christmas traditions we were beginning to establish together - that would be a stretch too far. There will be no special meal on Christmas Eve, no visit to midnight mass, no real </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Christmas tree in the conservatory. There are other things which are beyond me too. An attempt to obliterate the darkest of memories with love, placing a heart </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">shaped decoration where I found Louise's body, failed when I quickly discovered </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">that I couldn't bear the sight of any kind of object hanging there.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I am not sure that I will ever get used to waking up on Christmas morning, turning to an empty side of the bed and wishing a void</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> a Merry Christmas</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. Nor should I. Louise's death isn't something that is meant to be easy. If I ever lost sight of its significance I would have also lost sight of the significance of our love and our relationship. Neither would I ever want a Christmas to go by without reflection on the memories of those few we shared together, despite the shadow cast over them by the knowledge of what was to come and the pain of Louise's absence. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br />But </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">inside me that little child is bursting to emerge once more, ready, at least tentatively, to try to take some pleasure in my favourite time of year. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This Christmas I won't run and hide from the </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">first sounds of carols. I won't avoid the shops, decked out in their festive finery. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I won't tell everybody not to bother buying presents for me. I might even watch some TV. I've already found myself checking through the schedules.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br />And I will write cards to Louise's friends, some of whom I barely know, in an effort to maintain her networks as best as I can, to hold on to something of her life. Cards which, incidentally, Louise herself bought, her thrifty habit of bulk purchases still of practical help to me at this distance. There will be Christmas Dinner with my family even though, as was the case for years before I met Louise, I will again be the odd one out, the unmarried one, acutely conscious of feeling not quite a full adult and charged, by default, with looking after my Mother. And there will be the new Christmas tradition of taking flowers to the spot where Louise's ashes were scattered.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I can even silence the occasional nagging doubt that I shouldn't be allowing myself the prospect of any enjoyment, that it is disrespectful to </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Louise if I smile, laugh or experience contentment. I know that I have honoured her properly and continue to do so, that I am entitled to seek to live again, without guilt. I'm glad </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">that I made the effort with the decorations. The house looks more cosy and </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">inviting than at any time since Louise died. She would certainly approve. Somehow the lights on the tree echo the flames of hope and remembrance </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">that have flickered from the many candles I have burnt in her memory over the last 23 months. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The decision to open myself up to Christmas feels as though it's released something of a blockage. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">For the first time in many months there is a sense of achievement and progress.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The wishes expressed in so many cards, exhorting me to enjoy 'the happiest Christmas ever' are a long way wide of the mark. It can hardly be that, nor even remotely close. Much of it will still be difficult to bear. There will be moments of real pain and emptiness. But I'm hopeful that this time it won't be quite the unhappiest either. For the moment that is good enough. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-11693802257614390842016-09-10T11:33:00.000+01:002016-09-10T11:42:24.132+01:00A Candle of Hope<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iZYNMcJa6_Y/V9NNIMR4IJI/AAAAAAAAgxo/RIELvjVUHIsARCP8yNrsb-OQGVBgwGewwCLcB/s1600/candle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iZYNMcJa6_Y/V9NNIMR4IJI/AAAAAAAAgxo/RIELvjVUHIsARCP8yNrsb-OQGVBgwGewwCLcB/s200/candle.jpg" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Every year the Samaritans publish a grim document; an annual review of suicide statistics in the UK. The <a href="http://www.samaritans.org/sites/default/files/kcfinder/files/Samaritans%20suicide%20statistics%20report%202016.pdf" target="_blank">latest edition</a> reveals that there were 6,122 recorded suicides across the four home nations in 2014. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Globally, the World Health Organisation estimates that <a href="http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicideprevent/en/" target="_blank">around 800,000 people die by suicide each year.</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Numbers of this magnitude are hard to relate to without being broken down into a more meaningful scale. Put another way, we can say that Louise's tragedy is repeated </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">across the country approximately</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> 16-17 times </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">every single day </i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">and</span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">around the world </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>every 40 seconds. </i>In the time it takes you to read this blog post another four or five people will have killed themselves.<i> </i>But<i> </i>even these statistical devices do not begin to convey the real impact of suicide. The raw numbers represent thousands of individual stories of despair, thousands of lost hopes and dreams. Thousands of people who did not want to die but felt that they were unable to live any longer.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And of course none of these tragedies happen in isolation. For every person who takes their life countless others lose a </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">husband, wife, son, daughter, father, mother, brother or sister. Each of these people, too, have their own story to tell, of the shock, pain, guilt and anger. The life not, in their case, ended, but still devastated beyond all recognition. Thousands upon thousands of <i>Just Carry on Breathings'</i>.....</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It could even be worse. Much worse. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Its estimated that for every one person that succeeds in taking their life <a href="http://lostallhope.com/suicide-statistics" target="_blank">between 20-33</a>, in the clipped, clinical jargon, 'fail to complete'. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There are no easy solutions. Suicide, it seems, is always with us. During the 1960's, the decade in which the act of attempting to take ones own life was absurdly belatedly decriminalised in England and Wales (it was never a criminal offence in Scotland) </span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Admin/Downloads/suicide195082pt35_tcm77-344571.pdf" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">around 4-5,000 people died by suicide each year</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> in the UK, a figure which, taking into account population growth, is broadly comparable to today. During the same period nearly twice as many - </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reported_Road_Casualties_Great_Britain" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">7-8,000 </a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">- were killed on the roads annually.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> But by 2014, the same year covered in that latest Samaritans report, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">the number of fatalities on British roads had been reduced to less than a third of the number of suicides; barely 1,700. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">If improved design and manufacturing techniques, smarter traffic engineering solutions and improved public awareness and behaviours have helped make our roads safer then ever before, are there equivalent transformative measures for suicide prevention? And if there are, does the will exist to implement them? Everybody understands the risks of accidents on the road and, to an extent, shares some of that risk. 'It could happen to me'. In these circumstances we are motivated to invest - emotionally, politically and financially - in solutions. But despite the reality borne out by the statistics, for the most part mental illness and suicide remain hidden on the fringes of society and public discourse, something shameful and frighteningly 'other' nobody ever expects to experience. Suicide is something that happens to somebody else. Somebody</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">weaker and more vulnerable than ourselves and our family and friends. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This ignorance and complacency kills. It certainly helped to kill Louise. Despite very recent experience of suicide within the family, knowledge of Louise's past suicide attempt and genuine insight into her mental state, I still underestimated the level of risk. It is, after all, extraordinarily difficult to truly grasp the fact that the person closest to you, the person that is your world, could possibly take their own life. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The lack of understanding is compounded by the stigma still associated with mental illness and suicide. I see this frequently in the reaction of people who learn how I was widowed. Sympathy at hearing of my loss turns into wide eyed shock when they discover the cause. It is unlikely that neighbours would have gossiped behind my back about the reasons for Louise's death had she died of cancer or heart disease. Nor would I have received hate mail accusing me of responsibility, or feel the need to defend her character from the hasty judgement of others, to emphasise over and over that she was not weak or deficient in any way. She was simply ill. No wonder many of those bereaved by suicide find it difficult to publicly reveal the fact. And, crucially, no wonder so many of those embroiled in an internal struggle for their survival, desperately trying to fight off the hopelessness that can bring with it the darkest of thoughts, find it impossible to acknowledge what is happening to them and reach out for help.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This evening I shall be marking World Suicide Prevention Day in the company of more than a dozen brave and resilient people who have also lost their partners to suicide. At 8pm we shall join thousands around the world in lighting a candle in memory not just of our loved ones but everybody who decided they could bear the pain of living no longer, and in recognition of those who have survived suicide, whether as a bereaved relative or one of the fortunate majority who 'failed' in their attempt, as well as those who continue to live every day under the shadow of suicidal temptation. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Please take a moment to do the same. The more that we acknowledge and understand mental illness and talk more openly about suicide the more likely it is that we will be able to create an environment in which the Samaritans can, finally, begin to report much more positive news.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span>Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-15527701164755984302016-08-12T16:16:00.001+01:002016-08-12T16:16:34.390+01:00The End of the Beginning - Life in Year Two<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I'd been trying all summer to leave work early enough to enable me to catch some Friday evening cricket at The Oval and now I had finally managed to do so. Sitting bathed in the mid summer sunshine, absorbing the laughter and high spirits of 23,000 spectators all around me, out to enjoy themselves at the start of that rarest of things, a sizzling hot weekend, I was overcome by a sense of liberation, even elation. 18 months almost to the day since Louise's death, my head was clear of the constant churn of thoughts that has occupied it for so long now. The tinnitus of grief had abated. In that moment, at least, I was relaxed and happy. More than that; I no longer felt such a separation from those around me. Their world was, once more, mine too. I could enjoy it as they were. It felt like a profound re-connection with normality.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Moments like this are still rare. The acute stage of grief, the cripplingly intense sorrow, has passed but only to be replaced by its secondary characteristics which perhaps have more in common with depression. While I'm n</span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">o longer bereft, no longer in the darkest of places, the sadness is still never far away and I'm utterly listless, unable to summon the enthusiasm for very much, nor even able to maintain the energy which somehow propelled me through the first year. T</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">he l</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">andscape generally appears as flat as the Suffolk countryside Louise and I cycled through in that last impossibly happy summer together. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Day follows day and I go through the motions. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I remain diminished. I am acutely aware that I have not yet regained my normal capacity for family, work or play, nor my resilience. I declined to pursue a once in a lifetime career opportunity because I knew that in my present condition I wouldn't be able to do myself justice. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I feel my age in a way that I never have before owing to the loss of</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> the stimulus and energy provided by Louise, who was nearly five years younger than me chronologically and decades younger in terms of spirit, and </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I'm uncomfortably aware of the loss of social class and status that I acquired through my association with her. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I'm also more conscious of my loneliness at this point. Understandably and inevitably, the support offered in the early days dries up and the inequality of grief which allows others to move on with their lives while I lag behind, still caught up in the day to day consequences of Louise's loss, becomes ever more apparent. Social invitations which would have come to us as a couple don't come to me as an individual. The phone rarely rings. Once the front door closes behind me after work evenings tend to take on a monotonously predictable solitary form.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Most of all, the realisation has dawned that the future I clung on to during that first year, one in which I would find love again, doesn't automatically fall in to place according to schedule. The disappointments and indignities of several months of internet dating remind me that a new relationship, one capable of bringing me equal happiness, may not arrive quickly, if it does at all.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Louise's death and my widowhood are therefore still the defining features of me, the event and the state which determine almost everything about the way in which I live and the prism through which I see the world. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Even as I sat processing the strange lightness of being at the Oval I found myself watching a young couple in front of me, frustrated that the man wasn't responding to his partners attempts to cuddle up to him. I couldn't help myself from thinking that he might regret it one day - that next summer, or perhaps the summer after, she might not be here and he will be wishing with all his heart for nothing more than one more chance to hold her tight.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">However, in many respects t</span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">his second year of my new existence feels very different to the first. I've long since learnt not to utter the phrase 'time is a great healer' to the newly widowed because its such a cliche that it can't help but sound vacuous. I vividly remember how much I myself resented hearing it from others in the very early days. The pain and hurt is so great that something as trivial as time can surely never overcome it. But......it can and does. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Time provides the comfort of distance. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The events of last year seem to belong to another life, another person.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> They are never more than seconds away from the forefront of my mind, recalled dozens of times a day, but they feel even more unreal than ever.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> My mind struggles desperately to try and understand what has happened, that Louise has died, and still can't do so. I am used now to her absence but have come to accept that I will never be able to process her death. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">That distance also means that the signs of Louise's presence in the house, which have provided me with so much comfort and seemed so normal, are now beginning to feel incongruous. Her bedside cabinet remains exactly as it was the day she died - the photos, books and hand lotions all untouched. I've barely given it a second thought but the other day it hit me with a stunning blow. It now seemed not in place but out of place, a relic from another world. It is slowly becoming easier to envisage moving, or even disposing of, some of her less significant possessions. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The rawness fades. I find that I can smile and laugh. Once or twice I have even found myself about to burst into a song around the house, before checking myself, as if unsure whether it would still at this point be disrespectful, the sign of a bad and unloving widower. I am more easily caught up in other things, slowly returning to my old interests, even beginning, hesitantly, to pick up books again. In recent weeks I have finally found myself working the same long hours in the office as I did before, even if without the same attention span - my mind still wanders after the shortest of periods of concentration. My life is growing around the loss. I meet up with other young widows not for therapy any longer, but simply the social aspects. For all of the frustrations of internet dating the very fact that I feel ready for another relationship demonstrates that I am now in a very different place to last year.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Things are u</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ndeniably better. Not all right, not back to the way they were. That will never be possible again. But much easier than the early days. I know that I have made so much progress. This blog is as good an indicator as any of the arc of grief and loss, and not just in the content but the frequency of posts and the style of writing. In the first weeks and months I felt the need to write almost every day. I had to do so to purge myself of the thoughts catapulting around my head. And when I wrote it was in an urgent, staccato manner. A written expression of a scream of pain. But now I no longer need to write. Or rarely so.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> Rather than a release it's become a chore. Something else that I feel that I need to do but am just too tired to make time for. The posts are much less frequent, calmer and more reflective. I'm all written out. Soon, maybe not just yet, but soon, it will be time to stop.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This reflects a broader sense of emotional stabilisation. Every so often my armour plating is still pierced by an arrow which strikes to the heart, causing breathless pain, but it's increasingly rare. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And even when it does happen</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> the tears, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">which used to come so readily, now don't come, won't come, at all. </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Sometimes I wish that they would because I know that there is still an ocean of them inside, trying to find a way out. As time goes by my response to the trauma of Louise's death becomes increasingly inarticulate, as if it is necessary to shrink from the memories in order to achieve that stability. My mind is attempting to lock safely away anything which might hurt me - and it is largely succeeding. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">A battle, then, is underway between the long tail of grief on the one side and hope and renewal on the other. It is fiercely fought and the ascendancy can swing from day to day, even moment to moment. As I sat this afternoon in the cool shade of the trees where Louise's ashes were scattered, marking a second empty birthday without her, I found myself enveloped yet again in the familiar darkness of mourning, concerned only with what has been lost. It was easy to forget the gains that have been made. The</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> greater momentum, however, surely lies with the spirit of that July evening at The Oval. It will be light which eventually prevails. Louise would allow nothing else.</span><br />
<br />Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-47612523150483299442016-07-09T18:16:00.001+01:002016-07-09T22:09:31.432+01:00Living with Death<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Even as I stood staring up at Louise's body, numbed, bewildered, shocked and silently screaming in despair, I somehow found space in my brain to recognise the irony of the situation. In the course of her professional career Louise had seen, examined and dissected numerous dead bodies. Death was, to her, an unremarkable commonplace. While I returned home from work on an evening and talked over the dinner table of office politics, Louise might casually mention a death certificate she had signed or a patient with a terminal diagnosis as if it was no more important, and possibly less so, than my trivia. I came to understand that this normalisation of death and tragedy was not callous disregard for the suffering of fellow humans but a necessary coping mechanism common to all doctors. But now here was I encountering death close up for the very first time - and it was on a far more personal and horrific scale than anything Louise had ever witnessed herself. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Now it would be me that needed to develop a similar coping mechanism.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The hardening process began almost immediately. When you live surrounded by evidence of death and loss, and have to cope daily with the consequences, even the most squeamish and sentimental of us quickly learn to come to some form of practical accommodation with situations that we would have previously considered to be beyond endurance. Nothing that I might ever achieve in my life will be braver than the moment that I stood in a candlelit undertakers room and summoned the courage to kiss the cold, hard and unresponsive lips of Louise's waxy half-likeness. Other, that is, than the moment seconds later when I decided that I could not possibly say goodbye with such a tentative, nervous and hurried gesture and returned to the room to give my beautiful wife the tender farewell kiss she deserved. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Louise, who was gently amused by my superstitious</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> nervousness of ghosts and spirits, would be surprised by my new robustness and my willingness to engage with the concept of death. Even when well she was always prepared to contemplate death, to face the prospect of her own mortality, and spoke of her desire to ultimately evade aged decrepitude through assisted dying. But I clung only to the concept of life, unable and unwilling to think beyond it. It was no coincidence that Louise was the one who pressed for us to make our wills. I preferred to ignore the subject. Now, however, death and its meaning is never far from my thoughts. I constantly attempt to wrestle with the vast, incomprehensible unknowns of the afterlife, and the even more vast and incomprehensible concept of nothingness, the end of existence. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">To my surprise I find myself able to live with death all around me. I make my dinner in the kitchen without so much as a second glance at the large and austere crematorium issue plastic jar containing the remnants of Louise's ashes, kept, I have now decided, to be one day scattered with my own. I pass and re-pass the spot where she died dozens of times every day and remember the sight every single time, but am never disabled by it. I go to sleep with the stool on which Louise stood once more next to my bed, piled high with the days discarded clothes, and rarely make the connection. I have even become accustomed to the void next to me in the bed. My mind has anaesthetised itself. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Yet while I manage to ignore evidence of Louise's death, I simultaneously draw comfort from holding on to evidence of her existence, however poignant it may </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">be to others. Her pink woolly hat, still where she left it by the front door when </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">she returned home for the last time, which now serves as my proxy for her; kissed every time I enter and leave the house. The notes and reminders in her handwriting still on the fridge door. The walking boots in the porch. To others their presence may say that Louise is gone. To me they say that she was here. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I find it difficult to remember that those who have not been exposed to such close, personal and premature loss, or who do not live with the daily evidence of it, can find much of this difficult. I never cease to be surprised when friends recoil the first time that they enter the house and see where Louise died, or are self evidently reluctant to visit at all. I forget that my normality is not, after all, normal. Only recently I found myself slightly distanced from the shocked and upset reaction in my office to bad news about the health of a colleague and concern for their family. This is a consequence of a self protective, somewhat delusional outlook on a world in which the majority of people on my contacts list have also been widowed young. There are people whose partners are still alive beyond the age of 40? Really? Weird. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I also forget that many people do not share my new language of death. I have never yet found a gentle way to tell people of my circumstances. I don't really want to. There is no point in the words being disconnected from the hideous nature of the experience. I therefore avoid the usual empty euphemisms that camouflage the shocking and baffling reality of death for the sake of the listeners sensitivities</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. My wife hasn't 'passed away', nor is she 'no longer with us'. She is dead. She died by suicide. I need to say this. I need to understand it. If it is difficult for people to hear then that is nothing to what I have had to deal </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">with. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Even when the subject is lighter, I find </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">that people can be discomforted by my desire - my need - to talk about </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Louise. Not the person who died but the one who lived. Too often, when I bring her </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">into the conversation on the most innocent of topics or recount the most gentle of anecdotes there is an awkward silence, a failure to understand that I </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">want</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> to remember. I become frustrated and hurt......and then I recall that until widowhood I would have reacted in exactly the same awkward way, afraid to talk about somebody who had died, uncertain of the response. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">One other unexpected consequence of this experience is that it has bred in me a new dark sense of humour, an ability, again perhaps a need, to laugh at the absurdity sometimes inherent in a tragedy that has so rudely and violently intruded on my life. Sitting in a pub with a dozen or so others widowed by suicide I suddenly became aware of the silence at the next door table as the occupants listened to each of us in turn describe the specific method of hanging our partners had chosen (had we been in the US it would have been the calibre of gun used, or in Hong Kong the height of the building from which they had jumped - suicide takes different cultural forms across the world). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It was a deeply profound and overwhelmingly sad moment, twelve stories of extreme suffering and torment.....and yet it was all I could do not to laugh out loud at the thought of what that poor couple trying to enjoy a quiet Saturday lunchtime drink must have been making of it all -and what they would tell their friends when they got home; "You'll never believe what happened to us down the pub today. Twelve of them....."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Brought up in a society where, for the most part, its possible to be shielded from the impact of death, I would never have believed that I would be capable of living so normally, sometimes even so casually, in the shadow of it. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This certainly doesn't mean that I no longer care about the loss of Louise, or about her suffering, or that I no longer feel her absence, just as her professional resilience</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> didn't mean that she lacked compassion for her patients. Nothing could be further from the truth. I ache for Louise every day.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But I have had no option other than to re-calibrate my sense of the tolerable, to normalise the idea of death, that great yawning, terrifying chasm of the unknown, and to absorb the reality of it into my daily life. If I had not done so it would have overwhelmed</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> me. Sometimes, in order to live we need to tame death.</span><br />
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Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-87834150090254075152016-04-29T20:22:00.000+01:002016-05-21T14:27:38.400+01:00The Book I Never Wanted to Have to Write<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">'Just Carry on Breathing - a year surviving suicide and widowhood', containing the collated content of the blog and much new material is <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Just-Carry-Breathing-Surviving-Widowhood/dp/1911121081/ref=pd_rhf_pe_p_img_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=PM0BXYYXDVPT007K0WRK" target="_blank">available to purchase online now, in paperback and ebook form</a> </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">(It is also available in the US on Amazon.com)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The book is raising money for two worthy causes close to my heart. All my royalties will be donated to WAY Widowed & Young, a charity which supports those widowed under the age of 50 and the Louise Tebboth Foundation, the charity established in my wife's memory to assist doctors at risk of suicide. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I always thought that I might one day write a book. It would be a nice project in retirement</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. Probably something on football, or possibly an aspect of local history. Never, in my worst nightmares, did I imagine that it might be the story of a year surviving suicide and widowhood. </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> year surviving suicide and widowhood. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Nothing can prepare you for the loss of your partner, at any age or by any means. The shock is profound, the devastation complete. You are mourning not one loss but many; the loss of your life partner, the loss of the joint living organism that was 'Us', the loss of a way of life, the loss of shared memory, the loss of everything that you thought you knew about your future, the loss of innocence, the loss of the person that you were. Suicide overlays a further noxious cocktail of guilt, anger, bewilderment and, often, a sense of betrayal (though I have at least been spared the latter. Louise was escaping from herself, not me). Even now, 15 months on, I sometimes think that if I were to sit very still in a quiet room I would be able to feel my body quivering with the shock. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There is no shortcut through grief. We can't go over it, round it or under it. And we certainly can't turn round and go back from where we came. That place is gone. The only option is to own the journey, accept that we must walk through the desert. But that doesn't mean that we need to be passive, completely helpless against the storms raging around us. We quickly come to develop coping mechanisms, to understand what dulls the pain, diverts us, provides a sense of purpose, perhaps even gives us energy and hope. For some that might be running, music or charity fundraising. For many it's the responsibilities and the rewards of parenthood. For me it has been writing, first in my diary, then on this blog and subsequently for the book. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">At my lowest point I would invariably reach for my laptop and type through the tears until the eye of the storm had passed. Occasionally I still do. The discipline it required was calming and there was a tremendous release to find the words which gave at least some expression to my distress, inadequate though language is to convey the overwhelming pain in the pit of the stomach and the bottom of the heart. Writing allowed me to process my response to the </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">destruction of my world, make sense of suicide, adjust to the new realities of my life as a widower and to better understand my grief, as well as connecting me with so many others walking a similar path.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But there was something else just as significant. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I can't make a difference to the world in the way that Louise did. I don't have her professional skills, knowledge and experience. I do, however, possess the power of our story and I will use it wherever I can to enable Louise to continue, indirectly, to reach out and help others even now, just as she would wish.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I could not do this by writing a self-help manual. There is no one way in which we should mourn. Although the emotions we encounter on that journey through the desert are almost universal, our responses to them are uniquely individual. Everybody finds their own way through, and must do so alone. Nobody can ease this burden for us, however difficult that may be for family and friends to come to terms with.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br />Nevertheless, I know how closely I watched others some months further down this path than myself. I was desperately looking for reassurance that I was not the only one making the journey, that the maelstrom of confusing and often contradictory thoughts, worries and emotions that swirled constantly around me were normal, that my tears, fatigue, loneliness and, sometimes, my curious ability to continue to function, did not make me a freak.<br /><br />And I was also looking for hope, signs that the journey could be survived and a new, happy and fulfilling life subsequently established. One that was inevitably different, but still good. I was scared that at 46 the short period of happiness which it had taken me so long to find, and which had been so quickly and cruelly snatched away from me, was as good as it got. I feared that the rest of my life </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">would merely consist of a restless search for a poor substitute of what I had once, briefly, enjoyed.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br />That fear persists. A year is not sufficient time to build a new life. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I do, however, now know enough to be clear that this is a journey which </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">can</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> be navigated. We may not realise it until we turn round and look back to see how far we have come, but even within those lonely and bewildering early months – slowly, almost imperceptibly – daily living becomes easier; the shock, rawness and physical pain begins to subside and we commence the long process of readjustment. The strength of human resilience is a remarkable and humbling thing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br />So I now share my journey through the first year surviving suicide and widowhood in order to offer others on a similar path both the reassurance that they are not alone in their distress and the hope that it can and will be survived. It <i>is</i> possible to live again.<br /><br />There is, of course, one other, very personal, reason, for the book. It has become obvious to me during the course of this cruellest of years that grief is, essentially, about love. It cannot exist without its oxygen. This is, therefore, my token of love for my beautiful wife, my means of honouring her. Regardless of the pain and trauma I have experienced these past months, and the sadness that I will now always hold within me, for the privilege of having been Louise’s husband – I remain the luckiest man in the world.</span></div>
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Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-73225733866639038562016-04-02T23:21:00.001+01:002016-04-02T23:21:19.395+01:00Grief Work<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">As I sat huddled in a foetal position on the floor of the ambulance the night that Louise died, I had no conception of what the future held. Everything that I knew about it, without exception, had been stripped away from me. I was staring into a void, both bewildering and terrifying for its complete lack of form. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Five minutes was an impossibly</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> distant and unknowable horizon. I had no clue what was going to happen once the paramedics and police had finished speaking to me, never mind where or how I was going to live from now on.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Some 14 months later there is the comfort of the structures, routines and social networks which have developed over time in order to fill that void. They may only be interim solutions while I complete the task of steadying myself but for the time being that is good enough. I have stumbled, more by accident than design, into a new life of sorts. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And I often reflect on the astonishment I would have felt as I sat in the ambulance had I been able to know some of the unlikely and slightly surreal things I would find myself doing as a direct consequence of the events of that evening. The journey through grief and loss has led me to the strangest of places and activities in the urgency of my need to process my experience and appropriately honour Louise and our marriage; speaking at medical conferences, becoming a blogger and writing a book, working with doctors and other experts to establish a charity of some potential substance</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">in Louise's name</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">, sitting in the early hours of the morning in a crowded bar in Belgium with a large crowd of young widows and widowers completely unknown to me months previously, marking the arrival of the New Year 6,000 miles from home in the sweltering shadow of the majestic Table Mountain.....and n</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ow possibly the most bizarre experience of all for somebody accustomed to mediocrity and quiet suburban</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> anonymity;</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> conducting a radio interview to be heard across the planet.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">One of the privileges of writing this blog is the connections it provides with others walking the same path. Through these I found myself a few days ago speaking to the 'Weekend' programme on the BBC World Service about the experience of grief and widowhood. As I sat waiting for the sound engineers to complete their checks I couldn't help but feel saddened at the irony that the most energetic and creative period in my life, and perhaps the most interesting experiences and noteworthy achievements of my life, have been borne directly out of tragedy and, paradoxically, come at a time when I am more exhausted than I ever thought it was possible to be. One day I will look back and wonder how I did all this, particularly on four and a half hours sleep a night.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Non widowed friends kindly suggest that this frenetic burst of activity is a sign of my bravery and resilience, that I am somehow remarkable for my efforts, but it feels very different from my side of the fence. W</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">hile this should not be the way that energy is released and potential is realised, the desire to do and achieve and the seeds of self growth contained within it is another of those curious hidden blessings in grief that so many of us discover. I have responded in the way that I know best, by talking and writing. Others do so in different ways but the stimulation and the effect is, in many cases, largely the same.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In part perhaps it simply reflects a desire to live life more urgently. We now better understand its fragility and its transience. We know what it is like for somebody to disappear from view in an instant. A living, breathing person, just like us with the same human hopes, fears and responses suddenly and inexplicably gone, vanished from our sides without trace to a place completely unknown. Next time it may be us and we all have much that we want to do before then. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But more than that, it is our love for our lost partners that drives us to new levels of achievement and forces us beyond our comfort zones as we seek to celebrate them, secure their legacy, make them proud of us and hold on to some essence of them, even if only by pursuing a cause or an activity meaningful to them. It is almost as if the love that we can no longer give to them in person finds its outlet instead as a source of energy, inspiration and courage. A bundle of nerves before the radio interview, every instinct told me to turn and run but that was never a possibility; in some vague sense <i>I was doing this for Louise.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It is also, of course, a way of rationalising our loss, making sense of what is otherwise bewildering, grossly unfair and pointless. If we can continue to harness that energy, better ourselves and the world around us, then at least we have something to cling on to amidst the wreckage of our lives and hopes. It is not much of a consolation - selfishly I would much rather have Louise by my side than change the world - but it provides some motivation and purpose when we need it most.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In a sense this is a literal manifestation of the concept of 'grief work'. It doesn't come easily but then nothing on this journey does. I suspect there may also be a less noble motivation too, on my part at least; fear. Fear that </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">if I stop running as hard as I can I will fall to the ground and may not be able to pick myself up. I am being sustained by momentum alone. Sometimes I wonder what will happen when I finally allow myself to slow down for a moment. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I am exhausted. But I hope that Louise is somehow aware of what is being done in her name and proud of me for doing it. I mustn't let her down.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03p31f1" target="_blank">Listen to the interview</a> (the feature starts at 44:56 and I can be heard at 48.34)</span>Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-4038143005108135122016-02-26T19:34:00.000+00:002016-02-26T19:36:10.056+00:00A Touch of Comfort<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">For a brief moment the dull but ever present ache of loneliness abated. Standing embracing a fellow widow in a prolonged hug of mutual understanding and support as we said farewell after meeting for coffee, I allowed myself to become lost in the sheer warmth and reassurance of the physical contact, momentarily snuggling into her and remembering all over again the pleasure of once more holding and being held by a woman, even if only platonically. Embarrassingly, the relief was so strong that I let</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> out an involuntary low groan of sheer contentment. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">One of the most obvious and shocking, but least remarked upon, consequences of the sudden loss of your partner is the equally sudden withdrawal of human contact. In an instant I was catapulted from a life full of kisses, hugs, cuddles, hand-holding and all the daily casual affirmatory contact of coupledom, the touch on the arm as you pass each other in the kitchen, the reaching out of hands across the dining room table, in to a barren wasteland devoid of the comfort and consolation of any form of touch. All gone, without any notice, without any opportunity to prepare. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It hit me particularly hard because Louise and I were an unusually tactile couple, something which had not been altered by the familiarity which comes with three and a half years of marriage. Whenever we were out, wherever we were walking, we almost always held hands. We held hands in church. We held hands at football matches. We held hands in bed. Until our last couple of evenings together when Louise withdrew into herself, we never once watched TV without cuddling up on the sofa. It would have been unthinkable for us to be sitting in the same room and not be next to each other, touching in some way. When we were in the car together Louise's hand invariably rested on my knee as I drove. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Over the years I had become used to this level of physical contact and took it somewhat for granted. More perhaps than almost anything else, it was the disappearance of these everyday signs of affection and support, at precisely the time when I needed them most, which would leave me feeling so isolated and lonely.<br /><br />This was </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">most vividly brought home to me at Louise's funeral. As we stood at the Crematorium in the freezing cold of a February morning watching the hearse slowly pull towards us, I turned and glanced at those family members gathered behind me. Almost without exception all were huddling into the arms of their partners for comfort. Never in my entire life had I more needed to be able to do the same. But I stood alone, exposed. My partner was unable to offer that same support. <i>My</i> partner was lying in the coffin being borne towards me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In the long months since then I have come to yearn for female touch, ravenous for a simple hug in which I can lose myself. It is not about the flickering of sexual desire, though inconveniently that too of course does not magically disappear with the death of my wife. Rather, there is a primal need for warmth, comfort and affection. I am not alone in this. It's no coincidence that the standard message of support, the constant one word refrain in the on-line </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">forums for young widows and widowers is simply 'hugs'.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It's not been easy to satisfy this hunger. Platonic displays of physical affection from a man towards a woman are liable to misinterpretation unless there is a clear understanding, as there was outside that cafe, of the context. For a long time I</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> was in any case also held back by guilt. There was a vague sense that it was wrong and disloyal, a betrayal of my love for Louise, to allow myself to take advantage of those rare opportunities for hugs that presented themselves. Or at least to allow myself to relax sufficiently to gain any comfort or consolation from the moment, however innocent it would have been. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But now the landscape has subtly changed. It so happened that the coffee with my friend came a day after the anniversary of Louise's death. Objectively there would seem very little difference between 364 and 365 days of mourning, but the psychological leap from the first to the second year was profound. There was an instant lifting of some of the constraints and obligations, and some of the guilt, I had burdened myself with for twelve months. It did not mean that things suddenly became easy, that I no longer remembered, loved or honoured Louise. But I felt as though I had a little more permission to breathe, to do what I needed to for myself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Over the days that followed there were other appropriate opportunities to test this new freedom, to lean into and truly savour hugs of greeting and farewell with friends where they were offered. Every time I w</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">anted to hold tighter and for longer, to squeeze and squeeze and be squeezed and squeezed until I was lonely no more. It does not make things all right but it's a powerful, if all too </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">temporary, balm.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">To all who require them, hugs. </span><br />
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Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-7706583472458499382016-01-23T20:05:00.001+00:002016-01-23T20:08:21.965+00:00The Longest Year<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My Sweetheart, it's now exactly a year since the fog swirling around in your mind became so dense that it obscured all hope, a year since you took what you saw as the only practical solution open to you in order to ease the pain. It's a year since we cuddled up to each other in bed, a year since I heard you tell me that you love me, a year since I saw your smile, felt your touch or shared your presence. It's a year since I last read to you, made you your favourite cup of mint tea or massaged away the tensions of your day. It's been the longest year of my life, one in which I have hurt over you more than I ever thought it was possible to hurt, cried over you more than I ever thought it was possible to cry and loved you more than I ever thought it was possible to love.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It's a year which I never thought would end, a horizon which at first I couldn't even imagine, much less see. As I lay on my sister's sofa covered in blankets, shivering with shock and willing that first interminable sleepless night of widowhood away I was able to think only in terms of surviving minutes. Gradually, as time passed this became hours, days and then weeks until, eventually, I knew a significant victory had been won; I had stopped counting the weeks and started counting the months. At every small landmark on the way, at first every Friday, then in time every 23rd of the month, I found myself surprised, and a little proud, to have reached that point, both relieved to have put distance between myself and that hideous evening but deeply sad at the distance that was also emerging between us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I still worry about you endlessly; whether and what you are thinking, feeling, experiencing. I struggle to comprehend your reality now. I wasn't with you when you died but I have been able to piece together most of your last day, what you did and said and, by extension, what you felt. I imagine over and over the sight of your last moments, though curiously it is only in the last few days that it has occurred to me to wonder about the <i>sound</i> of that struggle. Every time that I stand outside the front of the house and prepare to enter it, or look out of the window, particularly in the dark, I remember those moments this night a year ago, beyond chilling, beyond words, when I stood locked outside the house knowing that you were inside, dead. Every time that I walk through the hallway I picture you as I found you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I have done things during this long year which I never imagined I would have to do and would not wish on my worst enemy. In the early weeks particularly each day seemed to bring a new previously undreamed of horror; walking through the door of the undertakers to arrange your funeral, spending hours on the phone to the Coroners Office in order to establish whether your body would be released in time for it, sitting alone in a candlelight room saying goodbye to the waxy half-likeness of your body, trying to find the words for my eulogy, having to announce your death over and over to dozens of call centres as I dealt with the endless bureaucracy. Even the day that I paid off our mortgage was one of the saddest of my life. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I am exhausted. Grieving is a full time occupation. It consumes all my emotional energy and saps my physical reserves of strength through sleeplessness</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> and the restless, incessant drive to memorialise you, to honour you and to preserve your memory. Almost everything that I do is connected in some way to the events of twelve months ago. I look back far more than I look forward. My concentration span is shot to peices. I am still unable to contribute at work in quite the same way as I was before, operating at only three quarters capacity. I find it difficult to motivate myself to do anything which is not connected to you. Getting out of bed on (usually) a morning is the hardest part of the day.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And then there is the loneliness as I struggle to adapt to living alone for the first time in my life; </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The silence and stillness around the house,</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> the</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> cold and empty side of the bed next to me, the empty chair at the dinner table. The lack of anybody to discuss my day with, to share experiences with, the absence of human touch. The lack of your comforting presence by my side when I wake in the early hours after a nightmare and realise that the reality is worse than the dream. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It's a cruel irony that it is precisely because you have gone that I need you more than ever. Perhaps the very lowest point of all was when,</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> watching the hearse slowly approach</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> the crematorium, I turned to see that everybody around me was huddling in the arms of their partners for comfort but at my greatest moment of need, the lowest point of my life, I could not do the same because <i>you</i> were in the coffin.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I know that to those who have not experienced a loss such as this it will sound as if I am not coping, not 'moving on'. I have received much advice over this year, all of it well intentioned, much of it wise but some of it hurtful in it's simplistic ignorance of the complexity of the emotions of grief. I smile politely and refrain from asking how somebody who has not experienced this most shattering and unique of losses can presume to know what I should be doing and how I should be feeling.<br /><br />But please do not worry about me Louise. There is no need. If I have learned anything during this year it is the remarkable power of human resilience. It is almost as if my brain has shut part of itself down in order to protect me from the worst aspects of the shock and trauma. The whole experience has seemed so bewildering, so unreal, that I can barely relate to it as my own. I still cannot grasp the simple fact that you have died and I have been widowed. At the very worst moments I have floated through almost as if it were an out of body experience, present but not feeling, observing rather than participating. It makes the unendurable durable. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I take great pride in the fact that I have got through without a major break</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">down. I still function, still go to work, still meet my other family caring responsibilities. I still watch Brentford</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> every week and, to my surprise, find that the outcome genuinely matters to me. Despite the memories of this night a year ago I am still at least tolerably relaxed in the home that we built together, able to take comfort from your association with it and the sense of continuity and normality. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I have been holed but have not sunk. It is the greatest achievement</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> of my life. I have emerged from the year with a new self confidence, a sense that if I can deal with this I can deal with anything.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And there have been other achievements too. Bereavement has led me to some strange places. In the course of the year I have been inspired to do things that I would previously have thought beyond me, that I would never have had the courage or the initiative to do were it not for my burning need to honour you and to look after myself in a manner which I hope you approve of. I have set up a charity, become a blogger, written a book, travelled further than I have ever done before, spoken at a medical conference, fulfilled our promise to investigate Quakerism, and participated in and established networks of suicide survivors. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And I know that you will be most surprised of all to learn that I have cast aside my natural shyness to wholeheartedly plunge into a whole new social world. Some friends have fallen by the wayside, perhaps those who did not know how to reach out to me, or were afraid to do so. I have not had the time or the energy to take the initiative on their behalf. But other friendships, some of them unlikely, have grown out of the generous support offered to me. I am honoured to be even closer to many of your friends, and your family, than I was before, enabling me, in a sense, to continue to represent you. And beyond that I have joined a whole new social network of fellow widows and widowers, emboldened by the thought that you would wholeheartedly approve.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So, I have finally reached the long anticipated anniversary, a date redolent with meaning and symbolism. I have found myself becoming increasingly distracted over the past week and more tearful than for some months. Much thought went in to deciding how best to mark the occasion - not just the anniversary itself but yesterday too, the equivalent day of the week, the day when the rhythms most closely matched those of your last. It was important to be where I should have been the evening that you died - at home. A candle from our last holiday together in Sicily flickers as I reflect and write.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">That reflection enables me to understand that the anniversary effectively marks two quite different things. It is clearly about endings; your life, our time together. It is a moment to look back on what has gone, to remember you and recall with deep sadness the agony of your last moments, moments which I am replaying in my mind minute by minute as the day wears on, building to the very eye of your storm. The day marks one year of life that you have lost, of things that you have missed out on. And for me, one year of separation from you. It is a figure which will grow inexorably. I hold on desperately to the hope that you are now so happy that you have not missed that year, but I do not have the certainty of faith to properly reassure me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But the anniversary also marks</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> a beginning; the start of my subsequent journey through life without you. The symbolism is strong. Whilst it too is a story of sadness it is one which allows the possibility of recovery and re-growth.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">is a sense of triumph over adversity simply to have reached this point. I often use the metaphor of a journey because it feels very much like a transition from one place of being to another. But perhaps this feels more like successfully scaling a mountain. I can't help believing that now the shape of my grief will change, that I will give myself more permission to move forward. That does not mean forgetting you, or letting go of my love for you. Nor even does it mean that I will stop mourning your loss. But perhaps I will now feel able to begin to grow the rest of my life around that loss, allow myself to smile, relax and enjoy myself without guilt, to lift my head and look forward as well as back.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I'm aware of the </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">dangers of investing too much hope in the landmark. So much focus is placed on completing the first year that it's easy to forget that nothing substantive will magically change. When I wake up tomorrow morning you will not have returned. I will merely be faced with the reality of the grind of starting the second year of the long journey without you. I know that this can be a difficult time in itself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I am, however, extremely glad that I am now here rather than where I was this time last year. The very worst is over and I have got through it. If on that Friday evening twelve months ago I had been able to look forward to this point today I would have been largely relieved at what I saw. My life is infinitely poorer and sadder than it was with you. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I have travelled a difficult path and there is further, much further, to go. I will in fact never stop walking it until the day that I join you once more. But despite the occasional detour into difficult terrain the path gets easier to follow and sometimes, unexpectedly, grants me a wonderful blessing en route. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I would never have chosen this direction for myself but having been given it I have found that it makes it easier to endure if I accept it, attempt to understand it and hope that I will in time begin to enjoy the journey. At least I know now what I didn't when I stood twelve months ago, just a few feet from where I write this now, and looked into your open but unseeing eyes; it is a journey that I can and will survive. And I am doing it as much for you as I am myself. My Sweetheart Louise, my best friend, my hero, my hope, my inspiration, my beautiful wife; I miss you so much. I love you so much.</span>Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-91058169934831965782016-01-03T20:47:00.000+00:002016-01-03T20:47:00.609+00:00For Auld Lang Syne<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The beat of the music from open air concerts on the trendy Waterfront district was interrupted by fireworks soaring into the air against the awe inspiring backdrop of Table Mountain and the drunken cheers of the sweltering crowds of locals and tourists densely thronging the streets and packing the quayside bars and restaurants. Cape Town was celebrating the arrival of the New Year with a carnival vibe and I found myself wondering whether or not to join everybody in welcoming it in or to regret the passing of the old year.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />Louise and I never marked New Year. We preferred to spend the evening quietly at home and were often in bed before midnight. But soon after her death I had decided that it was important for me to be in the country of her birth on the last day of the last calendar year of her life. I was never entirely clear why. Louise was born to a British family and remembered virtually nothing of her early years in South Africa. The family connections with the African continent remained strong, however, and there was some nebulous sense of closing a loop, honouring her by bringing both ends of her existence together. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Cape Town's New Year celebrations</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And having travelled 6,000 miles for the occasion it seemed as though I should do more than sit in my hotel with a room service sandwich and quietly reflect and write. So as midnight approached I joined the crowds and counted down the final minutes of 2015. It was another surreal moment on this strange journey which has led me to the most unlikely of people, places, activities and achievements.<br /><br />Rationally the New Year should have no particular significance. It's just a date. Just the start of another of the 340 or so days since Louise's death. But the symbolism is strong. While it might sound strange to want to hold on to a year which has brought so much misery, the worst of my life by a countless multiple, </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I can't help feeling as though the passing of the old year takes Louise further out of reach, placing her, for the first time, very firmly in the past.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I can no longer talk about what we were doing together this year. Since Louise died in January I can barely talk about what we were doing together last year either. Our last really precious memories and times together, our last holidays, our last Christmas, the last shows and family events we attended together, are now back in the apparently distant past of the year before last. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I can no longer even say that my wife died 'earlier this year'. This is important because of the sense of remoteness it engenders. I worry that people hearing the story for the first time will fail to understand the continuing impact of it, assuming that at such a distance I must be 'over it'. And I worry that those who already know the story will begin to forget. To forget about Louise and, as the firsts turn into seconds, to forget about me. When you have lost your partner in a world designed for couples you forever fret about becoming invisible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It also feels like a step away from Louise because she didn't know this new year. It's part of an ongoing process which will steadily leave her behind. Things that will over time become familiar to me; people, events, fashions, technology, will never be familiar to her. It will become more and more difficult for me to talk to Louise without having to explain background and context. Just as she will </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">forever remain 40 while I continue to age, she will always remain in 2015. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This divergence in experience and knowledge started the moment that Louise died and has continued with each day that passes, from major life events, she never knew our niece, born three months after she took her life, nor the baby daughter of one of her best friends, to mundane domestic rearrangement and refurbishment. She doesn't know that the temperamental dishwasher has now been replaced, the gift from a Guinean Olympic delegate who stayed with us during the London Games has finally been framed or that we (always still 'we' and 'ours', never 'I' or ''mine') have a new TV and broadband connection. Somehow the arrival of a new year accelerates this process. We are connected by the past and separated by the future. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But while the distance from Louise that 2016 signifies is distressing, I welcome the fact that it also offers distance from the act itself, the days around it and the most acute stages of grief. Not a fresh start exactly, but a chance to clear my head and begin to try to live life again. I'm proud that I have at least survived to reach this point, a landmark that was so distant eleven months ago that I could barely even conceive of it. In some respects, contradictorily, the fact that people may treat me as a normal robust human again rather than a bereaved object of sympathy and pity is also good news. The coming year may bring less of the angled head and sympathetic eyes. I might still need to wrap myself in the cloak of widowhood much of the time but more and more frequently it feels liberating to discard it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The reason that Louise and I didn't celebrate New Year was because of the sense of uncertainty and foreboding associated with an unknown future. Last year, ironically, we agreed that for once this was absent. The previous twelve months had been so traumatic both for us and our respective families that we were grateful to escape into a year which we were convinced could only be better.<br /><br /> Perhaps it's foolish to tempt fate in the same way again. However, I have to believe that the coming twelve months will be more positive, a time when I am able to continue to honour and remember Louise but can also make space for other things and allow my eternally busy mind some respite. A time too when hope begins to be converted into something of substance as I lay the foundations for my new life. And a time, dare I say it, when I end a year happier than I begin it. </span><div>
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Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-74797356017436770142015-12-12T01:49:00.000+00:002015-12-12T01:49:00.820+00:00Making New Memories<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I bought a mug last weekend. An unremarkable, cheap souvenir of a short continental city break. The kind that can be found in kitchens all over the country. But this particular mug represents something profound, something of incalculable value, something so unexpected that it has almost floored me. It symbolises the creation of new memories and in doing so marks the first genuine proof that this new life can still be worth living.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It wasn't just Louise's life which stopped on that January evening. Although mine was not ended it has effectively been on hold ever since. As each successive day has given way to another and the rawest of grief, the acute pain, has gradually subsided, I have stumbled my way through ten months on automatic pilot, seeing, doing, but rarely feeling. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Anaesthetised by shock,</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> I have survived but achieved nothing else. Whereas before life was rich with a succession of moments which I savoured and hoped to be able to remember for ever, no new memories have been created in the course of the last 10 months. Nothing has happened which interests or excites me, nothing which I will ever wish to remember. The year has been a void, offering nothing more than the daily grind of getting by. Stabilisation, it seemed, was all I could realistically hope for at present.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But out of nowhere this monochrome life has suddenly been splashed with colour. A weekend in Bruges with nearly 30 of my new friends in the community of young widows has transformed my horizons, serving to remind me that life retains the capacity to be good. Not right, and certainly not better than it was before. But still good, and that is revelatory. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I have been uplifted by spending three days in the company of resilient, wise, compassionate, inspirational and brave people, all of whom have known tragedy, all of whom have a heartbreaking story to tell, but all of whom have chosen to fight for a new </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">life over surrender to the loss of the old. It was good humoured, supportive, sometimes reflective, sometimes raucous and, ultimately, immensely hopeful. Almost e</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">very one of us was re-learning how to enjoy ourselves, testing and revelling in our ability to do so within the context of a safe community and the certainty of mutual understanding. Within this bubble, surrounded by others in a similar position, we were normal again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It's true that there were tears and conversations of the type that would have made those listening in on adjacent tables recoil with horror (close familiarity with death leads to a certain casual attitude towards the detail of it which can be shocking to those removed from the experience). But the weekend was also filled with the normal tourist activities; </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">over eating, drinking, shopping and sightseeing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And most of all, there was laughter. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Much of the humour was as black as coal, directed at our own fate. Mocking bereavement, particularly when there is safety in numbers, allows us all to feel a little braver. But there was also the banter and good humoured teasing to be found in any large high spirited group. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I laughed more in three days than I have in the past ten months.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> And it was not </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">the shallow mechanical laughter which has been the best I could manage up to now, but deep, genuine and instinctive. I had forgotten what it felt like to experience pleasure and fun</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. And now I did so not just for a few moments, or even hours, but sustained over an entire long weekend. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Even better, I was able to display that happiness without fear </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">of giving the wrong impression about the extent of my recovery. I had no need to worry that my smiles and laughter might be misinterpreted. Here, everybody understood that a good weekend did not mean that I no longer loved Louise, no longer missed her or no longer mourned her. It did not mean that I was back to normal, that somehow things were now all right again. Here it was understood that it simply meant I was enjoying some respite. It was not a cure but a release.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I still felt Louise's absence, of course, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">but my time was so full and the company so good that it no longer seemed quite so oppressive. It was no longer my sole focus. The relentless pressure was lifted, the skies cleared and a shaft of sunlight shone through. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So much so that for the first time since Louise died I felt the desire to </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">remember the moment</span><i style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">. </i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This is the first</span><i style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"> </i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">positive new memory that I have made, the first hesitant entry in the blank journal of my new life.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> I found myself wanting to record the weekend, to capture and hold its spirit. I once more lost myself in taking photos, absorbed in the moment, and looked for souvenirs, including that mug, to mark the occasion for posterity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">That this liberation should happen at all was a surprise. But the fact that it occurred just days after the ordeal of Louise's inquest, a botched process seemingly designed to cause maximum pain to those who loved her, was quite extraordinary. T</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">he strange course of widowhood struck me again and again. If I had been able to clear my stunned mind for a moment back on that darkest of January evenings what would I have thought had I known that it would lead directly to my presence here, in a Belgian bar</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> in the early hours of the morning in the company of</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> a group of widows and widowers?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There is a price to pay for the happiness and it is, inevitably, in guilt. Guilt that I should be enjoying myself when Louise is no longer here and incomprehension that just ten months after finding her body I can obtain this release. There is bitterness too. I have this second chance, the opportunity to re-start my life, but Louise doesn't. Not for the first time I wonder why it was her and not me, why the fates decided that the less deserving of the two of us should survive and be able to go on and enjoy moments like these. Louise was younger than me, more gifted than me, physically healthier than me. She was able, by virtue of her profession, to offer the world more than me and had a much wider spread of family and friends to feel the pain of her loss. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The return home was filled with apprehension. Acutely conscious that the moment was over and the contrast with reality would be stark, I stood in front of the empty and darkened house just as I had done the night that Louise died, dreading the loneliness and the inevitable tears that I expected to overwhelm me once I stepped inside. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And there <i>were</i> tears. But a week later the almost euphoric afterglow, shared with so many others who made the same trip, is not quite dimmed. In one sense nothing has changed. Louise is still dead, I am still alone. Yet this journey can surely never be quite as bad, quite as hopeless, again. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The pain of Louise's loss will not shrink and nor would I want it to. But for the first time I can begin to see how life can grow around it to the point that it is no longer all consuming and it no longer defines me. I am crying again. But this time the tears are of relief because now I know that it is possible to get through this and live once more. Others have promised me that this will happen but I have now experienced it for myself. I have tasted good and will do so again. Happiness is attainable. Opportunity genuinely exists. Suddenly I can glimpse other signs of positivity and hope. I really am going to get through this.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">As I opened the front door on Sunday evening, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">waiting for me in the post was a parcel </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">containing the joining instructions for a holiday I am treating myself to, a once in a lifetime trip that I am increasingly</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> excited about. More new memories wait to be created. </span><br />
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Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-79601412945047225852015-12-01T22:38:00.001+00:002015-12-01T22:38:13.133+00:00Pushing the Boundaries<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Take a deep breath and keep on walking. Focus on the far side of the bridge. Don't glance at the spot where we had our photo taken after one of our first visits to the theatre together and where others are now posing for the camera. Don't think about the Whitehall Gardens immediately behind me, where we decided to give things another try after a short break up in the early days. Try not to look at the glittering night time panorama of London, sweeping across the Thames and taking in St Pauls Cathedral, the distant behemoths of the Square Mile and across to the Shard, the Oxo Tower and the South Bank. Our skyline. Our city. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Ignore the couples walking hand in hand, huddling together against the cold. Hand the beggar a pound because Louise would always do so. Choke back the welling tears and make it across.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Although born in South Africa and raised in Surrey Louise was a London girl to the core. Until we returned from our Whitechapel flat to the suburbs we lived our version of the metropolitan middle class lifestyle, spoilt by the easy access to a vast array of shows, exhibitions, museums, parks and restaurants. We hungrily absorbed the artistic, cultural, political and historical highlights. We may not always have understood them but we were keen to challenge ourselves. London was our playground and the South Bank our favourite corner of it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Which was why returning to the very heart of that life for the first time since Louise's death was enough to threaten my first breakdown in public for several months. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The award winning Hungerford Footbridges which connect</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> the Victoria Embankment and the South Bank are the busiest in London, modern steel and concrete structures crossed by 8.5 million pedestrians each year. Yet my passage felt as lonely, precarious and as challenging as a hire wire walk across a deep gorge. This was a bridge that we crossed and re-crossed together so many times. We never failed to stop to admire the view. It seems like no time at all since I was walking across it on my way home after our second date, light headed with disbelieving happiness at the good fortune which had suddenly engulfed me. Then I had gained more than I had ever dared dream of. Now I have lost it. A f</span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">ull circle of life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Always sentimental, always vulnerable to the emotional significance of place, I feel Louise's loss particularly keenly in those locations which played a part, however fleeting, however mundane, in our lives together. Towns we visited, restaurants we ate in, museums we attended, train stations we stopped at, supermarkets we shopped in, roads we walked down. Every single one of them carries a memory. My mind wanders back to the moments we shared there, airbrushing out today's crowds and traffic and superimposing a ghostly vision of us, as we were then. The streets, buildings and landscapes are the same so its a struggle to understand how Louise too is not still here. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I mentally divide locations in to two categories, those which are 'safe' because they played no part in our lives together, and the rest, all of which are approached with trepidation, as if crossing an emotional minefield. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Certain places, those close to home, are impossible to avoid and I have become hardened to them as the months go by. The second visit easier than the first, the third better again. Gradually, by repetition, they lose their sting. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But substantial areas have remained off limits. Places that are simply too emotionally difficult to return to. Some are easier to avoid than others. I'm unlikely on a day to day basis to have cause to visit the deserted romantic beaches of the Northumberland coast or Kardamyli, the Greek village nestled between the Taygetos Mountains and the Messenian Bay which we thought we would return to again and again. But London, a city of 8 million people on our doorstep, is impossible to ignore.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Bit by bit I have been cautiously renewing acquaintance with the capital in recent months, conscious that I cannot allow myself to be a prisoner of those memories for ever. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Rather than decline opportunities, as I did during the early days, I have more recently been determined to accept the challenge and go wherever invitations and </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">events take me. Therapy by Oyster card. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So I have once again wandered the streets of central London on my way to restaurants, pubs, meetings and conferences, extending my boundaries as I go. I have sat on the low retaining wall outside City Hall where we shared our first kiss, found myself on Louise's daily route to her Bermondsey Practice, ventured onto the District and Central lines through our former home stations, and stood still amongst the movement of busy commuter crowds, staring transfixed at the car park of a wine merchants near Liverpool Street Station, lost in the moment four years previously when we were returning glasses from our wedding reception.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Louise's absence has been felt at every step. How can I be in these places without her being by my side? I push my hands deeper into my pockets, trying to fight the instinctive urge to hold one of them out ready to find hers. Completely lacking in any natural sense of direction myself, I stumble around uncertainly, yearning to be able once more to relax and follow Louise, with her intimate knowledge of every side street and shortcut. And I hope no passers by hear as I talk to her under my breath at every point of resonance, trying still to share our memories. 'Do you remember when we....?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Some particularly cherished places still remain beyond reach. The immediate environs of our old flat, the Bethnal Green church we married in, Victoria Park, beloved by all East Londoners........and until now the section of the South Bank that was dearest to Louise, the cultural hub stretching from the South Bank Centre to the National Theatre, a place which spoke to her love of performance, curiosity and learning. A place accessed via the Hungerford footbridge.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I had no need to take that route across the bridge. I could have avoided it and kept the memories locked away. But memories that I cannot trust myself with are no memory at all. If they are all I have left then I have to learn how to safely set them free and, in time, draw comfort and pleasure from them. I cannot allow myself to be limited either emotionally or practically by the boundaries they impose. A short walk across a footbridge, painful though it was, therefore represented another significant landmark in my journey towards a new life, helping me towards reclaiming both a special place and a host of precious memories.</span><br />
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Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-78370122504824019432015-11-20T23:56:00.001+00:002015-11-20T23:56:38.589+00:00Receiving Signs? <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Perhaps Louise is closer to me than I dared hope. Barely a week after writing about the lack of signs, I left the house this morning to discover a small white feather sitting nestled between her muddy walking boots which still sit in our outer porch. </span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br />Rationally I know that this must simply be a coincidence. Before Louise died I would have been dismissive of anybody seeking to find meaning in such a simple occurrence. How many countless times over the years must I have come across white feathers without ascribing any significance to them, without even noticing them? I'm emotional, vulnerable and actively searching for meaning everywhere that I look. In these circumstances I am almost bound to find something but the value of what I find deserves to be questioned even more closely than would otherwise be the case. I know the risk of confirmation bias.<br /><br />Yet I can't help myself from setting aside the scepticism. In spiritual terms white feathers are seen by some as signifying the presence of a recently departed loved one, a token of protection and love sent by a guardian angel. The porch is partly protected from the elements. Its not somewhere you might expect a feather to drift, particularly when there are no others in the vicinity. The likelihood of a random feather coming to rest on Louise's boots, sitting proud on top as if it was being offered up directly by her, must be infinitesimally small. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And it reminds me that I came across another single white feather in the back garden some time ago. I largely disregarded it because the coincidences and the symbolism did not seem as strong but brought it inside for safekeeping nevertheless. Somehow a feather seems the most appropriate of all ways in which Louise might choose to communicate with me given her fascination with the small and everyday beauties of the natural world around us. Both feathers now sit alongside her fading collection of pine cones, conkers and assorted flora.<br /><br />I am almost embarrassed to find myself writing in these terms. Guardian angels? I can imagine Louise's gentle but firm dismissal of the concept. And why now and not before, when I was still reverberating with shock and the raw intensity of the pain of loss was shredding my soul? <br /><br />But I still need something to hold on to. I deserve to allow myself comfort and hope from whatever source I can find them. The thought that this might be a sign that Louise is close by, with me, watching me, communicating with me, makes me happier than anything else during these ten long months, even if at the same time it concerns me that I might be inadvertently holding her back from wherever she might need to be. <br /><br />It may well be almost a conscious self deceit but there can be no harm, and much good, in me choosing to interpret this as evidence that Louise is still by my side. I am trying to move beyond grief and mourning, to lift my head and look towards recovery, focus on the life that I must re-make. The belief that Louise is with me, and that we might therefore one day be reunited in some form, will enable me to do so with all the more strength and confidence. I suddenly feel less alone.</span></div>
Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-72232794193736850902015-11-14T03:05:00.001+00:002015-11-20T23:58:15.973+00:00Waiting for Signs <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I had resisted the temptation for months until finally I cracked. Sitting under the trees around which Louise's ashes were scattered, in a moment of desperation I choked back the tears for long enough to ask her for a sign, an indication that she was in heaven and that she was happy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">One of the privileges of this journey through grief (and they do exist even if you have to look very hard to find them) is that it has enabled me to finally understand what pure love is, and to know that I have been blessed to experience it. The highest form of love isn't really about desire, longing, attraction, passion, compassion, understanding or a need for physical contact and intimacy, though all of those things feature in it. I have discovered, that it is, rather, essentially about an intrinsic unselfishness, an intense desire for the happiness and wellbeing of another person to the point where you place their interests and needs above your own. Had I been a parent I might have come to this realisation earlier. But now Louise has enabled me to know. I find myself caring more about what is happening to her, what she is now experiencing, than I do my own immediate needs. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I tell myself over and over that separation from Louise, her absence from my life, would be tolerable provided that I know that she still exists in some meaningful and recognisable form and is happy. If Louise is happy then so shall I be. The not knowing, however, is unbearable. She has disappeared into a complete void. Nobody can provide me with the reassurance I crave other than Louise herself. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Others in my position report signs, events or experiences that confirm in their own mind the continuing presence and happiness of their partner. Putting aside rationality and scepticism in my emotional vulnerability I yearn for the comfort that this must bring. But however hard I have looked I have found nothing myself. Not so much as a single coincidence that I could hold on to. A particularly vivid dream in the early days, one in which Louise was leaning over me as I lay in bed and was so lifelike that for the briefest of moments, a split second, I experienced the most remarkable inner glow of peace and happiness was dismissed as just that; a vivid dream.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">To my astonishment I briefly found myself contemplating an attempt to make contact with Louise via a spiritualist. As somebody who in addition to those aspirations to high minded rationalism still also holds a primitive fear of the consequences of calling up unknown worlds it was the last place that I expected to find myself in. But I should know by now that this journey leads us to unlikely destinations and I was eventually only dissuaded by the knowledge of Louise's probable disappointment with me for thinking in such terms. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Or rather, that was one of the reasons. The other, equally compelling, was a fear of asking in case it brought no response. What would that mean then? The risk was every bit as great as the potential reward.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So I was careful not to ask for anything until that moment under Louise's trees when I weakened. In the days and weeks that followed I waited anxiously for some extraordinary coincidence or inexplicable event to answer my cry for acknowledgement and reassurance. I didn't know what I was looking for but felt sure that I would recognise it as soon as I saw it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Not a single thing turned up that I could hold on to. Since I cannot believe that Louise would not answer me, seek to comfort me, if she possibly could, and for the sake of my sanity I cannot allow myself to believe that she does not do so because she no longer exists in any form, I now need to rationalise this disappointment. Perhaps Louise <i>has</i> previously reached out to me and I have missed the significance - was I meant to find meaning in that battered old family hand-me-down nursing manual which mysteriously fell off the bookcase? But then why should she speak to me so opaquely? Why does it seem that such messages only ever come wrapped in riddles? Maybe, knowing my nervousness of ghosts and the spirit world, Louise has decided not to frighten me, not to give me any more cause to be anxious in my own home.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Or perhaps, as her Christian friends and family hold, Louise has simply moved on to a higher plane and genuinely found peace with God in a place where she can no longer connect with this world. If that is the right place for her to be then I am genuinely happy for her, even if the thought simultaneously makes me feel even more lost and alone for myself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">None of these explanations entirely convince me but any or all of them are sufficiently plausible to serve to continue to allow me to hope; for Louise's continuing being, for her happiness and for the possibility of us one day being reunited. I will not get closer to a definitive answer, so in this life at least they will have to suffice. Louise continues to speak to me, even in the silence.</span><br />
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Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-15558068734897407182015-11-01T00:32:00.001+00:002015-11-01T00:34:50.933+00:00Maintaining Standards <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When we moved into our current home the one luxury purchase that we allowed ourselves was a large and ever so slightly stylish dining room table. This was the house we were going to live in for the rest of our lives and we envisaged many years of entertaining large gatherings of family and friends. The rooms would be full of people we loved and admired and the walls would ring to the sound of their conversation and laughter. Now, even while the hopes and ambition mock me, that same dining room table is something of a symbol of my determination not to collapse into chaos.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Louise's death has led to a swift recalibration of my sense of achievement. When the heart and soul is ripped out of our existence one of the first things that is threatened is the veneer of order and routine that normally sustains us, nourishes our self identity. Like a ship which has broken free of its moorings stability, direction and control are lost. There is nothing to anchor us. Motivation evaporates. Purpose is destroyed. The chore of daily living becomes overwhelming. Easy everyday tasks become difficult. Difficult tasks become impossible. Essential tasks become optional. In these circumstances the real measure of success becomes not those by which we normally judge ourselves, perhaps academic achievement or career progression, but getting out of bed - or at least getting out of bed on a morning. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Some people are temperamentally well placed to deal with this, if only in the early days of bereavement, before exhaustion overwhelms them. They instinctively respond to crisis with frantic displacement activity, a need to clean, cook, wash, do anything which can mask or dislodge the pain. Louise was one of those people. I am not. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My default reaction to fear, anxiety or distress is to become paralysed with</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> listlessness. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Even in the distant good times I muddled through life with a slight air of disorganisation. Louise provided my structure and momentum. She was practical, organised, purposeful. Whereas I talked about doing things she did them. Adrift without her and floored by grief there was a very real danger that I would sink into a mire of apathetic helplessness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And its true that there have been some things I'm not proud of. Going to bed in the middle of the night because I hadn't the energy to get off the sofa. Getting up in the middle of the day because I hadn't the energy to get out of bed. Arriving in work late almost every day for the first six months. Reaching the point where most of the lights in the house were out because it was just too difficult to establish which bulbs I needed to buy and then go and and purchase them. Abandoning my daily ritual of a hot shower because it took too much effort and.......well, what was the point? Nobody was cuddling me. Nobody was sharing my space. Nobody was sharing my bed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But while its been a constant struggle I'm still afloat. The house is still orderly, the garden, although slightly ragged around the edges, is still broadly respectable, my clothes are still clean, there is still food in the cupboards. I admit I cheat. I am grateful that I can afford to employ somebody to clean the house once a fortnight. My first independent purchase was a new dishwasher. I swallow the hefty daily parking charges and drive into work rather than waste precious sleeping time by getting up early enough to take the bus. But I'm gentle enough on myself to allow these shortcuts.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And every evening I still sit down to eat at that large dining room table. Its a desperately lonely experience. Other than climbing into an empty bed almost nothing reinforces Louise's absence more. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We almost always ate dinner together no matter how late one or other, or both of us, got home from work. It was the time we talked about the day, discussed stories in the news, planned our futures. And we did so amidst a clutter of Louise's possessions. She used the table as an informal workstation and it was usually occupied with her laptop, sketchbooks and piles of course notes and BMJs. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now these signs of her existence are gone and I sit eating in isolation, alone save for my iPad. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Yet every time that I do so is a triumph of sorts, a gesture of defiance from which I draw strength and pride. I am not taking the easy option and eating from my lap in front of the TV. I may struggle in other ways but here, and with countless similar small gestures, at least I'm maintaining some standards and self discipline. Its a </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">token of order, normality and continuity. A sign of my determination to survive. I may be lethargic, forgetful and disorganised but I am still holding on to my sanity and self respect. Chaos is staved off for another day.</span></div>
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Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-79720559960148556222015-10-16T13:06:00.000+01:002015-10-16T13:06:38.907+01:00Beginnings and Transitions<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Its not often that I compare myself to a Roman God. In fact I am reasonably certain that I've never done so before, nor will I ever do so again. But at this particular moment in time there is something of a connection to a classical deity, albeit a rather unheroic one. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Just l</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">ike Janus, the God of beginnings and transitions who looked simultaneously to both past and future, I increasingly find myself with a foot in both worlds. Since Louise's death I have focused almost entirely on the past.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Insofar as I have thought of the future at all it was only in terms of what has been lost, the future that I can no longer have. But w</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">hile I remain partly trapped within these memories, still mourn Louise's absence, and will no doubt continue to do so for the rest of my days, </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I have reached a point on this journey where I am also able to, indeed need to, lift my head and look forward. I am beginning to devote more and more time to thinking about the future that I can </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">still</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> have. I am starting to work on the blank canvas that is the rest of my life. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Less than a year ago the pattern of that life was settled. I knew who I was, where I belonged and where I was going. Now everything is up for grabs. All the certainties were swept away in seconds that January night. I instinctively recognised this immediately. Even as I stumbled out of the house after finding Louise's body, prominent amongst the explosion of thoughts ricocheting around my reeling brain was the realisation that nothing would ever be the same again. <br /><br /> But its only now, nearly nine months later, that I am beginning to understand the full transformational impact of the events of that evening. I no longer know where I fit, who I am or who I will be. Everything is challenged, everything is possible. Its frightening, destabilising, disorientating and full of risk - but there is also the seed of excitement and opportunity. This is the mother of all mid life crises.<br /><br />The questions tumble out in a jumbled confusion, fighting for space in my head, challenging almost everything that forms the foundation of my life. Where will I live? How shall I live? How do I honour Louise and find meaning in life, to make a difference to the world? Do I reappraise my career path in order to do so? Will I be alone or will I find another partner? Will I thrive in this new life or will I have to accept that the 4 1/2 years with Louise were as good as it ever gets? <br /><br />Perhaps the most pressing question is where I will find myself living. How much longer will I be able to stay in the house that was once our home but is now just four walls and a roof? I can't continue to live here but nor can I move away. The horrific memories of the night itself, both those that are first hand (the things that I did and witnessed) and the vicarious (the re-created pictures in my mind of Louise in her final minutes) weigh me down. I need to escape, seek a fresh start where the reminders are less vivid. But this is the home that we built together. It is where I feel closest to Louise, where she is most alive. Her imprint is still visible on everything. When it is not weighing me down it comforts me. Breaking that link will be indescribably painful.<br /><br />Even if I do move, where do I go? Family ties pull me in one direction, the desire to remain as close as possible to the spot where Louise's ashes are scattered drag me in another. And what type of accommodation does my new single self need? A bachelor pad or something larger in the hope of eventually finding love again? Do I accept and plan for the immediate reality of a solitary existence or try and second guess an unknown future? Somehow, having known a family home it would be extraordinarily difficult to step down to something smaller. Downsizing in my 40's was never on the agenda.<br /><br />And if I am lucky enough to find that love once more, what will it bring? While my heart clings to the hope that it would recreate what I had with Louise my head tells me that it will inevitably be different. Indeed it must be different for the sake of all of those involved, not least the new partner. <br /><br /> But different is unimaginable. Marriage and absorption into your partners lifestyle and family can change who and what you are, defining your outlook, activities and opportunities. I had settled happily and proudly into Louise's world, my social status and everything that goes with it elevated into the educated middle classes. How much of this connection will I retain? How much will be altered? There would be new places to live in and visit, new family and friends, new shared activities, a new rhythm to life, perhaps new values. Even the possibility that children will, after all, feature in my life. This chasm of uncertainty may persist for years until the 'right' person presents themselves, if they ever do. I know no more about my future than I did at 21, freshly graduated from university.<br /><br />Perhaps in some respects I know even less than I did back then. I have found myself questioning my sense of self, direction and purpose in ways that I didn't all those years ago. This is not a drive to cleanse myself of the past but to absorb it, to fully embrace Louise within me, to honour her and ensure that, through me, she can continue to live. In the process I am becoming a different person, both consciously and unconsciously. I do not yet know how far these changes will go and where they will take me, but I know that they are happening.<br /><br /> And the search for meaning, the sudden desire to make a difference in Louise's name, causes me to question yet another of the cornerstones of my life which I had thought was settled upon entering the adult world; my career direction. The perspective that I have acquired during the course of Louise's illness and the subsequent events has lead me to belatedly realise that there were more worthwhile career paths I could and should have chosen 25 years ago, paths which would have allowed me, like Louise, to assist people in need every day of my working life, particularly in the field of mental health. I find myself picking up and playing with radical ideas for a complete change of direction; psychology, psychiatric nursing, counselling. Anything that can tend to that most wonderful but sometimes troubled of human features, the mind.<br /><br />These are romantic indulgences. Is it realistically possible to start a new career at 47? Do I have the energy and courage to give up everything I have worked for, seniority, salary, status, in order to start again, with years of study ahead of me before I even reach the very bottom rung and find myself in a position to make that difference? My head and heart differ. Perhaps more realistically the question I ask myself is how can I use my recent experiences to make that difference in other ways, through charitable and voluntary work And how can I use the power of personal narrative, of our story (my story and Louise's are two sides of the same coin) to affect the change in peoples lives that would make at least some sense of Louise's death and cause her to be so pleased and proud?<br /><br /> This restlessness and self examination is, like so many things on the long journey through grief, exhausting. But it is a necessary process. I cannot just revert to my former life prior to meeting Louise. She changed me too much for that. And clearly I cannot continue entirely as I was with her. So I must find a new direction. <br /><br />My life has been on hold for the past nine months, during which time I have been focused entirely on survival. I don't underrate the achievement of that goal. Its the greatest of my life. But I am increasingly impatient to begin the task of moving forward since I know so painfully well how short life can be and want to lose as little of the time left to me as possible. There is enormous sadness that this must happen without Louise but she would be the first to point out that continuing to love her does not require me to stop living. On the contrary, the greatest memorial to Louise will be to take what she gave me and made me and learn to live better still. </span>Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-52404830079695610792015-10-07T01:28:00.000+01:002015-10-07T14:14:33.345+01:00Changing Seasons<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I remember the snow so vividly. I had been waiting impatiently for it all winter and now, as I stood in the middle of the road outside the house listening to the approaching emergency sirens draw ever closer, I noticed it had finally arrived. Just the lightest of flurries but nonetheless beautiful and mesmerising as it fell gently and silently. Even in the very moment that my world was falling apart I somehow managed to register the irony that it should do so in conditions which on any other occasion, on any other day, would have given me so much pleasure.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I used to love autumn and winter. The magical October and November hues of yellow, brown and red, crisp frosty mornings and the prospect of my favourite time of year, Christmas, to look forward to. But most of all it was the cosy nights indoors, the curtains drawn, the central heating on, safely protected from the cold and darkness outside. There was almost a womb like sense of security and comfort which became even more marked once I met Louise and our shared home was filled too with her warmth, love and companionship. I could never understand why others struggled with winter. It was my time of year. I even proposed to Louise in two feet of snow in Berlin's Tiergarten. This year, however, the onset of the shorter, darker days fills me with apprehension.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I have been watching the markers ever since Midsummers Day, </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">acutely aware that the return of the dark days of winter will bring with it a heightened sense of connection with that January night Louise took her life and every certainty I knew was swept away. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Somehow I felt myself in something of a protective bubble during the summer. The sights, sounds, smells and rhythm of the days were sufficiently different from those of winter to enable me to feel some measure of escape from the memories and associations. The hours of darkness, the period when I am most likely to feel isolated and insecure, when my mind is liable to conjure up fears of chilling visions and flashbacks, were mercifully short. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The summer has also enabled me to stop dreading the period between 5-9pm on Fridays, the hours covering the time during which Louise died and I returned home from work to find her body. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There will always now be something of a shadow, a sense of disquiet, over a point which as the end of the working week used to be a time to relish. But t</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">he light and warmth of June, July and August were so different from the darkness and cold of January that the association with place and time faded. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now, however, the inexorable rotation of the earth is steadily bringing me back to where I started. I notice the days growing shorter and the temperatures falling. Summer has left me behind. Things are beginning to feel more and more like that darkest of nights. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />When I find myself almost alone in the office on an evening with darkness reigning outside I am taken back to those moments when fear began to grip me, slowly at first but ever more tightly as my texts and phone calls continued to go unanswered and the first pin prick of suspicion turned into panicky realisation. Every time I drive home through the darkened streets I remember that gut wrenching journey back from work, fearing the worst but clinging on to the hope of an innocent explanation. Every time I turn into the road I remember what it was like to see the house lit up in such an unusual way that I instantly knew those fears had been realised. And every time that I stand outside the house fumbling for the door keys I remember the horror of those desperate moments trying to break in through the locked door, but already knowing what I was going to find, knowing that I was too late.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The shorter days don't just re-awaken memory. They heighten my already acute sense of isolation. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Life retreats indoors, away from the public space. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The curtains drawn, I am more thoroughly cut off from the rest of the world, left entirely to myself in an empty house with just my thoughts, recollections and fears to occupy myself until the following morning. I flood the house with light to banish the shadows, turn up the music and hunker down as best as I can. But its a poor substitute for the warmth, brightness and activity of summer where the sights and sounds of the outside world; children playing, lawns being mown, ice cream vans chiming on their rounds, penetrated the house and offered comfort, reassurance and a sense of connection. The same internal world that once provided cosy security now feels more like a prison cell.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Winter also brings with it the indignity of the hot water bottle at night, as sure a sign of the emptiness of the bed as anything. It still means Christmas, but the significance of it has been transformed. The holiday now looms like an unwelcome reminder of infinitely happier times past. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Whereas I would normally be eagerly planning how best to celebrate the occasion, now I am focusing on how to avoid it, looking for diversionary activities. And above all, winter means the anniversary of Louise's death and the build up to it, days which will inevitably bring the events back into the sharpest of focus. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But I remind myself that I can and will deal with each of these things. If nothing else, sudden bereavement and widowhood have served to transform my confidence in my resilience, recalibrated my notion of what difficult means. I have faced the very worst that life can throw at me and am still standing, unsteadily at times but with increasing sure footedness. And this is no longer the very worst. That is already behind me. If last winter was an earthquake the challenges presented this time round are more in the nature of aftershocks, uncomfortable reminders of catastrophe rather than a re-run of it. Already the first few days of truly autumnal weather suggest that the anticipation may be worse than the reality. There will still be beauty in the season. I will just have to experience it alone.</span><br />
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Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-47044426568863072092015-09-24T22:13:00.002+01:002015-09-24T22:13:37.294+01:00A Letter on our Special Day<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I haven't written to you Sweetheart since my reply to your farewell letter. The tear soaked one that I somehow managed to read out to you while sitting next to your coffin in the undertakers, stroking your hair for the last time. The one that accompanied you on your final journey. I haven't really needed to write. I can talk to you at any time, no matter where I am. But today is special. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> This time four years ago we were walking on the clouds. It was the happiest moment of our lives. The day that we became man and wife. Our East End wedding.</span><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HKswZ0Gee9E/VfYrLRMKXNI/AAAAAAAAXrc/l83yHDHwrbw/s1600/Gary%2B%2526%2BLouise%252C%2B%2526%2BFr%2BAlan%2B%2526%2BFiona.%2BSt%2BJohns%2BChurch%252C%2BBethnal%2BGreen.%2B24%2BSept%2B2011%2B%2528107%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="424" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HKswZ0Gee9E/VfYrLRMKXNI/AAAAAAAAXrc/l83yHDHwrbw/s640/Gary%2B%2526%2BLouise%252C%2B%2526%2BFr%2BAlan%2B%2526%2BFiona.%2BSt%2BJohns%2BChurch%252C%2BBethnal%2BGreen.%2B24%2BSept%2B2011%2B%2528107%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Do you remember how you were literally shaking with nerves as we stood at the altar? How overwhelmed we were by the ovation we received from nearly 200 of our family and friends as we walked hand in hand into the reception? How we were so busy kissing that we barely noticed my Best Man burning himself trying to light the candles on the cake right next to us? How everybody, without exception, told us it was the best wedding they had ever attended? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I spent every moment of that day reminding myself to savour everything, to remember every last detail. I thought that it would be a day we would recall together for the next 40 years. As we danced that night away (well OK, you danced, I stood and swayed with you) never, in my worst nightmare, could I have imagined that less than 3 1/2 years later the photos of that day which we displayed with such pride would be the backdrop to your death. That I would be returning to the wedding guest list spreadsheet we created in order to invite people to your funeral. That everybody, without exception, would soon be telling me that yours was the best memorial service they had ever attended. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now all my carefully nurtured memories of the day are darkened by the shadow of what was to come so soon afterwards. Every picture of your gorgeous smiling face, the very definition of life and joy, shocks me, leaves me gasping for breath as I try to understand yet again how it can be that something so precious to me, so familiar to me as you no longer even exists in bodily form. I'm not sure that I can even grasp the concept of what those words mean. No. Longer. Exists. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I have been dreading this day for months. It is one of the anniversaries that stand like formidable road blocks on the route through grief. I have watched it approach helplessly, unable to alter the course of the calender. The date has become invested with far more significance than we ever gave it when you were alive. The need to remember is so much greater when it is all you have left. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But in fact memories are not all I have left. I am still blessed by the profound way in which you changed me, made me a better person. You gave me confidence in myself, stretched me, challenged me, helped me to understand my own needs, taught me compassion, the need to hear others and to avoid judgement, enabled me to appreciate the wonderful natural world around us, to glory in the joyful possibilities of life and to see the beauty in everybody, even where most see none.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I still have the gift of your friends and family who have become my friends and family. And most of all I still have our love for each other. Mere absence, even through death, isn't strong enough to eradicate that. It still nurtures me, sustains me. The grief which I have endured over these eight long months, a period which feels more like eight years, is in itself an expression and a consequence of that love. All the indescribable sadness which I have borne and will continue to bear to the end of my own days is a price worth paying for the privilege of knowing the joy and strength of our bond.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It would be wholly wrong to come to fear this most special of days in the years to come. I am determined that it will remain an occasion to celebrate our love and our enduring marriage. The one wedding vow which we barely noticed at the time, the one that added the caveat </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">'Till death us do part' may now cause me so much anguish but I disregard the meaning behind it. Nobody suggests that siblings or parents and children cease to be related upon death and so it is nonsense to suggest that we cease to be married. We remain husband and wife. There was no divorce settlement, no loss of feeling. We simply happen to be physically separated by circumstance.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It may be that I will eventually find happiness again with somebody else but there is no contradiction in this. It is something which I know you fervently hope for me. The human heart has no limit on its capacity for love and you will be held no less tightly. I promise that </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">you will never be left behind. You will come with me into that relationship, your values will continue to guide me, your memory will continue to be honoured. My love for you will endure. As your husband I will forever be both the luckiest and proudest man in the world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Sweetheart, I am <i>still</i> yours. You are<i> still</i> mine. We are <i>still</i> One. </span></div>
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Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-79363099814378288112015-09-19T00:08:00.001+01:002015-09-19T00:08:37.135+01:00The Bravest Act<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Louise was normally a confident passenger, happy to sleep while I was driving long distances. But on this occasion she couldn't settle and sat watching the road ahead anxiously. It was 2am and we were driving a strange hire car in the dark on unfamiliar Sicilian motorways, returning to our holiday villa a couple of hours south after a long, happy but tiring day trip to Mount Etna and the chic resort of Taormina. I was tired, feeling unwell and driving on the 'wrong' side of the road. Louise was alert to the risk of an accident. Three months before she took her life her will to live, her instinctive desire for survival was strong. This was not somebody who treated life carelessly. She valued it and did not want to die.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Before I met Louise my attitudes towards mental illness and suicide were probably typical of those of the population at large; they were signs of weakness, a deficiency in character. I probably even fell back on the tired old cliche that sufferers simply needed to exercise a degree of resolve and 'pull themselves together'. While many people were enduring 'real' physical ailments I could find within myself little patience or understanding for something as complex and intangible as a troubled mind. Only the vulnerable and needy experienced mental ill health. Suicide was a form of cowardice.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Nothing, I now know, could be further from the truth. Louise was as far removed from my antediluvian stereotype as it is possible to be. Independent, resourceful and a natural optimist, she loved life with a passion which put most of us to shame and lived it every day with a glorious, inspiring sense of hope, opportunity, generosity and vigour. Louise was, quite simply, the happiest person that I have ever met. She would frequently cuddle up to me at night and simply declare 'I'm so happy'. The light in her eyes in the photo above does not lie.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But neither does it tell the whole story. For unknown to all but those close to her Louise suffered periodically from anxiety and depression throughout her adult life. At the age of barely 18 she demonstrated remarkable insight and maturity when describing something of this state of mind in a school leavers booklet so acutely that it was instantly recognisable to me when it was brought to my attention after her death, 22 years later.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To battle a debilitating darkness of mind for a lifetime is extraordinarily exhausting and requires incredible bravery just to summon up the strength and the will to keep going. I saw the daily struggle during those periods when Louise was unwell, when her head was, as she described it, so 'full' of a cacophony of destructive and doubting thoughts that it was impossible for her to escape, to switch off. I saw how much energy this consumed, how it corroded self belief and led to uncertainty, indecision and restlessness. I saw and admired Louise's openness and honesty in confronting the illness and the way in which she sought to take responsibility for it and identified and pursued means of throwing it off. I came to understand how little a part reason or logic could play in soothing such troubles, the futility of rationalisation. I came to learn that mental illness is as real, insidious and dangerous as any other, one that sufferers have no more control over than they would cancer or multiple sclerosis. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And I came to be in awe of Louise's resilience and fortitude, not only in enduring the illness but fighting back, never allowing it to define or limit her. To be the person that Louise was, to achieve what she did both professionally </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">and personally, even had she been completely well at all times would have made her very special. But to do it all despite the recurring illness made her quite remarkable.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That same bravery followed Louise right to the very end. I know, both from conversations beforehand and the content of her farewell letter, that Louise saw what she was doing as a pragmatic answer to her mental torment. In her muddled thinking at the time she also looked upon it as a means of releasing me from the stress and challenge of a wife with mental illness. Louise had enough spirit and tenacity to fight the darkness hard, right up to the very last moments. As that episode in Sicily illustrated, her survival instincts remained strong. She didn't want to die and had no comforting vision or expectation of an afterlife to fall back on - her Christianity always focused on the grace in this life. But</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> having identified what seemed to be a practical solution she acted on it for her sake and, as she thought, for mine. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Here I have to split my mind in two. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There is no romance or redemption in suicide. It is always messy and tragically wasteful. It leaves loved ones with unique emotional scars.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> I still cannot easily fully describe what I witnessed. Not because I lack the words but because I am afraid of setting the tightly held memory free to roam. Despite</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> the fact that I understand why Louise was driven to take her life, where the bleakness of thought and outlook had led her, and </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">that I understand it was not an act of free will because of the malign power exerted by the illness, I am still taunted by the cruel needlessness of it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Nevertheless, i</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">t is possible, even while loathing the act and the shattering consequences, to recognise the logic that sat behind Louises decision and the incredible</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> courage, generosity and determination it must have taken to arrive at this point and then follow her thought processes through. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We tend not to think of suicide as a rational act. Even here I have talked of Louise's confusion and muddled thinking. But rationality is the luxury of a healthy mind. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to avoid the grip of darkness are in no real position to sit in judgment on what makes sense from deep within it. Oblivion must appear to be at the very least a viable alternative to life when you are so tortured, know that you have been tortured in the past and suspect that you will go on to experience the same torture over and over again in the future. Within the context of her illness <i>as it was affecting her at that moment in time</i>, Louise's desire for escape from the pain is no different to that of somebody with a severe disability who seeks a form of assisted dying. The tragedy came in the temporary nature of that pain, the certainty of eventual respite if she had only been able to hold on a little longer. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But regardless of however wrong and misguided we who are well can see the act to have been, it was a far brave</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">r and more selfless thing than I or most of us would ever be capable of. The easy option would have been to continue to try to muddle through but, as always, Louise went a step beyond, to do what she thought was necessary and right. And typically even in the midst of her distress she was thinking of others, applying herself to what, in her mind, was the best outcome for me and attempting in her last moments to protect me from its immediate impact.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Louise was not, therefore, guilty of weakness, cowardice or selfishness. On the contrary. She was the strongest and most giving person I have ever been privileged to know. Her determination in her long battle against mental illness and her monumental courage to follow through with such a drastic solution are testament to her remarkable character. Louise died in the manner in which she lived; courageously, practically and imbued with love and generosity of spirit. Her only fault, it turned out, was that ultimately she was too brave. </span>Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-58006279366027184942015-09-13T03:21:00.002+01:002015-09-13T03:21:53.603+01:00Standstill<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I've been kidding myself in recent weeks. Proud of my strength and resilience I had begun to believe that I had mastered grief, that I was exempt from the setbacks and continuing struggles experienced by others. I was beginning to find living tolerable again and, trying hard to think positively, even to sense hope and opportunity. I know</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> the theory. I've read the books, talked at length to those further on in this journey than myself. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I should have known better. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Grief might temporarily relax its hold but it doesn't give it up that easily. It merely changes its grip, alters its character. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This is quite different in nature from the early days, not the violent paroxysms of emotional distress, despair and hopelessness. It's less dramatic but nearly as debilitating and more entrenched. I've simply come to a standstill. The accumulated impact of carrying the grief for nearly eight months, the emotional and physical strain, has finally worn me down to the point where I feel as though I can go no further. My reserves of strength have been exhausted. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I thought that I knew true tiredness before but I was mistaken. Both my mind and body feel as though they are shutting down. I have no energy or motivation even to perform the simplest of tasks - getting out of bed on a morning, never something which came easily to me, is now the biggest single challenge of the day. Earlier this week I was so tired that I overslept the alarm clock and woke to find that I had already missed most of the morning at work. What had previously seemed to be a relatively orderly progression towards recovery and the establishment of a normal - if different - lifestyle suddenly began to feel chaotic. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For the first time in months I have begun to question my complacent pride in my progress. Louise and I had no children. I therefore do not possess the clear motivation, the essential need, to maintain structures, routine and self discipline that those widowed with young children are likely to. Instead my inspiration, the source from which I draw the strength to keep going and to work towards recovery, is Louise herself. She was always incredibly proud of me.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> I could never quite work out why. I am not very remarkable. But however undeserved it</span><span style="font-family: Verdana;"> may have been I drank that pride in like the purest nectar. When Louise told me that she loved me I felt good. When she told me that she was proud of me it felt like nothing I have ever before experienced.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana;"> So the thought now of letting her down, of not coping, is crushing. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">One of the reasons why Louise took her life was because in the confusion of her mind at that time she thought she was releasing me to have a better future. If I remain locked in my own struggles, if I am unable to go on to build a new and rewarding life, her sacrifice will somehow seem even more ridiculously wasteful than it already does. I <i>must </i>come through this for Louise's sake. Its the only way that I can possibly make any sense of such an utterly bewildering act.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Yet I seem to be going backwards. Six weeks ago I felt that I was coming close to a return to my normal capacity at work. Now my concentration span is once more shredded and my function significantly impaired. The toilet cubicles are again a place of refuge, though this time not to hide my tears but to allow me to close my eyes for five minutes, to snatch enough half-sleep to keep me going for another hour or two. The stress is beginning to have a physical manifestation beyond mere tiredness. The night sweats may have stopped but my long dormant hypochondria is running riot. Worries about my physical health and the strains of a difficult domestic issue have tipped the balance from coping to not coping. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana;">And there is always the lack of sleep, my inability to properly manage my routines and sleep patterns, to impose structure and order. I go to bed in the middle of the night. At weekends I get up in the middle of the day. During the week I just get up without sleep.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I should be better than this. I do not like the exhausted and chaotic person I have become. And I am scared of the potential consequences if I continue on the same path; the risk of inadvertent self harm through accident or of psychological damage. To my enormous relief I have, so far, been spared the visions and flashbacks so many warned me of. I pass the spot in the house where I found Louise’s body dozens of times every day. The open plan nature of our house means that it is almost never out of sight whenever I am downstairs. Even the most mundane of daily activities trigger direct memories and associations. Every time that I open the fridge I find myself standing exactly where I did that night. So far I have handled this much more easily than I would have thought possible, but I remain constantly frightened of once again seeing Louise as I did then. It would not just be emotionally devastating but would also, surely, force me out of my home. Emotional and physical exhaustion must make this possibility more likely.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The temptation is to retreat into myself. To take time off work, pull up the drawbridge and curl up in a corner to rest and lick my wounds. But there is danger in this. Work provides structure and distraction and offers some form of validation and an alternative purpose. It would be too easy to find myself at home, isolated, wallowing in introspection. I have kept going over the months through the force of momentum. If I stop I may not find it easy to start again. If I do step back briefly to try and refresh myself I must therefore retain a focus and keep active. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As I write these words I am forcibly struck by the parallels with Louise's dilemma as she struggled unsuccessfully to cope with the emptiness of time while off work during her last days, beset by the bleakest of outlooks and the darkest of thoughts with nothing to offer uplifting diversion. The challenges facing me are, in some respects, similar. But the parallels stop there. I am not mentally ill, I am tired and grieving. This is my lowest point for a while but I know that it is merely a diversion on the road to recovery. I have already come a long way and briefly glimpsed the hope and possibility that are waiting for me. I continue to believe in their existence. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I can still make Louise proud of me.</span>Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-25643410011569645642015-09-05T14:53:00.000+01:002015-09-05T14:53:26.827+01:00Help Along the WAY<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">An image sprang in to my mind the other day. It was of one of the iconic pieces of Great War film footage so often replayed on television; grainy and rudimentary newsreel coverage of injured troops, all of them blinded, marching unsteadily, their hands outstretched holding on to the shoulder of their comrade in front. None of them could see but despite their incapacity they were each able to help others suffering similarly. And by this means everybody was able to make the same journey along the road to safety. It struck me that there were parallels to be drawn with the young widowed community, a group of vulnerable, grieving but immensely resilient men and women groggily but generously helping each other through the most shattering of experiences.<a name='more'></a></span><div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Like most of us I have become accustomed to turning to the internet for the answers to problems in life. It can help me fix a broken boiler, find the best savings rates and provide me with directions to pretty much anywhere. It was even the means by which Louise and I met. So, in the early hours of the morning a few days after she died I naturally found myself looking online for assistance with my response to the most shattering event of my life. But this time my expectations were rock bottom. Googling 'help for young widowers' wasn't going to be able to bring Louise back so what could possibly come of it? The answer was </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">WAY, <a href="http://forum.widowedandyoung.org.uk/" target="_blank">the Widowed and Young Foundation</a>, which describes itself as a </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">peer to peer support group for men and women aged 50 or under when their partner died. I prefer to describe it as my lifeline.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is not normal to suffer the loss of your partner before you have even fully adjusted to the concept of middle age. Family and friends attempt to offer support but its unlikely that any have even a remotely comparable experience to fall back on. I am the first in my circles to lose my wife. Few amongst my friends, thankfully, have yet even experienced the death of a parent. For many Louise's death was itself the closest they have been touched by personal loss. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">People tried to do the right thing, reach for the right words. I am immensely grateful for the support and kindness shown by so many. But they knew as well as I did that they couldn't possibly fully understand. They could not really know how it was for me. I was alone not just in the immensity of my loss but also in the whole experience. I didn't have the words to begin to explain the maelstrom of emotions and the thoughts catapulting around inside my head. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I desperately </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">needed to find people who had trodden the same path, who understood. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Acutely aware of how exceptional my circumstances were, I felt something of a freak, the object of sympathy, concern, pity and countless conversations. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The first time that I walked into a pub full of widows and widowers, some eight weeks on, I therefore came close to bursting into tears of relief. It still felt odd to be associating myself with the terms 'widow' and 'widower', words which conjure up visions of sour elderly ladies dressed in black and sad old men whiling away their time sitting on park benches. But these members of the local WAY group were remarkable only for their normality, indistinguishable from any other group out for a Friday evening drink. They were the same as me. Evidently </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">being a widower did not have to mark you out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Even better, I immediately discovered the commonality of experience between us. We may come from all walks of life and we may all respond to grief in different ways, influenced by the many variables derived from our individual characters and the circumstances of our loss, but the basic human emotions in bereavement are universal and the practical challenges faced by young widows often the same. I suddenly found myself surrounded by people who 'got it'. Here I was normal. Here I found myself needing to explain less since understanding came instinctively. Here I could smile and laugh without fear of people misunderstanding how difficult things really were. Here I had nobody telling me I was brave when I knew that all I was doing was trying to get on with my life. Here I heard people voicing my own pain, fears and distress. Here I was surrounded by people who knew exactly how difficult it would be to part at the end of the evening and return home to dark, echoing, empty houses.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I continue to rely on this community to get me through. While there are frequent social events and activities and private real world friendships also develop, much of the support is inevitably virtual. A day never passes without contact with my peers through the online forums. These are places where you can seek advice on everything from procedures at inquests to the perils of navigating new relationships, where you can obtain reassurance that your wild emotions, dark thoughts and irrational coping behaviours are perfectly normal, where those who have children discuss how to cope as single parents, where you learn to count your blessings when you encounter those whose situation is even more difficult than your own and where you can go at the end of the day and express the small injustices, irritations and victories of daily life that previously we would have shared with our partners over the dinner table. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Perhaps most importantly, however, the forums are places where you can cry out in pain in the middle of the night and know that there will be an instant response from those who are on the same journey and where you can draw comfort and hope from the encouragement and example of those further down that road. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is here that I draw the parallel with the image of those injured soldiers. For every person within this community is struggling with their own grief, loneliness and exhaustion. Yet everybody gives generously of their time, devotes some of their precious reserves of strength to listen, encourage, guide and support others, many of whom they have never met and will never meet. And they do so in the knowledge that when they too need a helping hand it will be quickly offered in return. It is not a world that you want to have to belong to in the first instance, nor is it one in which you wish to have a need to linger in any longer than is necessary to prepare you for a return to something approaching a normal life. But in the moment of need it is practical, uplifting and a source of never ending inspiration.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Louise, who was a passionate believer in the power and virtues of community and constantly sought it in her daily life, would be thrilled to know that it is doing more than anything to help me heal. </span></div>
Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-64337064565176747232015-08-29T12:07:00.000+01:002015-08-29T12:07:14.171+01:00Letting Go of Grief<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">At every point in this journey through grief I face loss. Louise's death represented not the end of the process but the beginning. The bewildering and shocking loss of her physical presence is reinforced and multiplied by hundreds, thousands, of smaller but still significant deaths. Whenever something which was part of her life, which stood as a proxy for her existence on this planet, her part in my life, disappears I mourn all over again. When I throw away her favourite food, cancel her driving licence, remove her toothbrush from the bathroom, I experience another break with the past. I take a further painful step away from the person, and the life, that I loved so much. But there is a loss which is rarely recognised as such; the loss of grief.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">By this I do not mean the loss of sadness or remembrance. They will be enduring, eternal. I would not wish it to be any other way since they are a mark of the extent to which my life has been touched by Louise, proof of the love that existed between us. I will shed tears for Louise and her suffering for the rest of my life. Nor do I mean the loss of loneliness - if only that could be so easily waved goodbye. I don't even necessarily mean the loss of some of the individual raw emotions of grief; the despair, the guilt, the fear.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But I am approaching a point when I will have to have the courage to let go of the mindset of acute grief, of victimhood and exceptionalism. When I stop framing my whole life in the context of Louise's death, defining myself by my loss, identifying myself primarily as a widower. When I stop looking only over my shoulder, back towards what I had, what I have lost, or looking forward only in the terms of what I will now never have. When I stop expecting to receive preferential treatment. I cannot carry the intensity of raw grief forever. It is not sustainable. It is too exhausting, too destabilising, too disabling. If I try it will destroy me. I have to let light, hope and opportunity back into my life. I have to start to live again, tentatively at first no doubt, but hopefully with increasing confidence and certainty. This, to some extent, will require a conscious decision to do so, and a determined effort to maintain it. It is the use of the power of positive thinking on a grand scale.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You might think that I would embrace the loss of grief gladly, that I would be only too keen to be rid of something so dark and destructive. And of course I am. A few days ago, after selling the car that Louise and I shared together, that took us on so many holidays, so many visits to friends and family, and in which we enjoyed so many conversations I again found myself prostrate, disabled by tears wondering when, or indeed whether, this nightmare will ever end, when the pain will stop and I can emerge in to a gentler and more hopeful world.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But the transition from grief can in itself be painful and frightening. It is a form of loss in its own right. It is very easy to cling to grief like a comfort blanket. Its become a familiar part of my life over many months. In fact its <i>become</i> my life, my identity. Who am I? 'I am a widower'. How am I?' 'I am grieving the loss of my wife'. That's it. Nothing else about me or my life has mattered for longer than I can now easily remember. I have become consumed by the rituals and activities of grief and memorialisation to the point where I have had no other connection with the rest of the world, no other form of conversation and precious few other forms of thought. I have</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> come to understand the </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">rhythms and routines of grief. In a world where I have lost almost all my reference points this is a form of certainty. A normality of sorts. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Grief protects me from the need to plan, to think, to act. This is convenient because I know that I am not capable of doing so. It reduces peoples expectations of me to a tolerable level, one fitting to my crippled capacity. It means that I am treated gently and with respect. And perhaps above all else its easy and comforting to come to interpret my grief as evidence of my love and a sign that I continue to hold Louise in the present. For so long as I cry every day, for so long as I feel that wretched, twisting void in the pit of my stomach, for so long as I feel myself a stranger separated from the rest of the world around me by an invisible but insurmountable barrier - for so long as I hold on to grief - its easy to prove to myself, to others and most importantly to Louise, how much I cared for her. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Grief can be taken to validate love. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">By clinging on to emotion I cling on to Louise. She is still here, with me, because I feel so deeply.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Letting go of all this is not easy. It means that I have to learn how to remember and honour Louise, to demonstrate my love for her, in ways which are more positive and celebratory. I have to </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">lift my head and look towards a future that is uncertain and ill defined. I have to find the energy to make plans, take charge of my life once more, begin to take risks in establishing the new normal, work out what feels right and what doesn't. I have to allow myself once more to be judged by the same standards as others and open myself to the possibility of rejection and failure.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> And I have to do all these things on my own.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It also means that I have to come to terms with how others see me. While close family and friends will no doubt recognise and adjust to my development and understand me for who I am, not what has happened to me, many people will continue to define me by my loss. And as I take Louise's story out into the medical community, using the power of the personal narrative to raise funds to support the needs of doctors battling with mental illness, I will come face to face with those for whom the news of her death is fresh and find myself, yet again, the object of sympathy and condolences. None of us see ourselves as tragic figures and it is a curious and potentially destabilising thing to be viewed in this way, particularly when we ourselves are trying to find a new self. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I will have to learn to accept that for many Louise's death is what I will be known for and find a way to wear this lightly, to prevent it dragging me back into the identity of grief.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There is plenty there to frighten me. And it makes me feel guilty, as if in the process of saying goodbye to grief I am also bidding farewell to Louise. Every time I laugh, every time I find myself distracted, every time I plan an activity my conscience pulls me up; 'W</span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">hat do you think you're doing? Don't you realise its only months since Louise died? How can you have forgotten already?</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">' </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Nevertheless, I believe that I am ready to take the first faltering and imperfect steps beyond acute grief. It will not be easy and I will frequently fall back, perhaps particularly as Christmas and the anniversary in January of Louise's death approaches. But I can carry with me the confidence that I have acquired merely by surviving these past seven months, the knowledge that however difficult it may be to learn to live again nothing can be as challenging as what has gone before. I will not be moving <i>on, </i>leaving Louise behind. I will be moving <i>forward</i>, taking her and everything that she gave me into my new life. It is by doing this, and not by grieving, that I can most appropriately honour Louise and continue to uphold my love for her.</span>Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4399052145354473018.post-59690961299209877902015-08-19T12:12:00.000+01:002015-08-19T12:12:17.547+01:00Exhaustion<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Early on in this journey I came to the conclusion that the overwhelming experience of bereavement wasn't loss, despair, guilt or anger but love, a love for Louise of startling purity and raw intensity. That love hasn't dimmed. I will hold it for ever, Louise's most precious gift to me. But now, nearly seven months on, the overriding day to day sensation is perhaps different and somewhat less noble. It is exhaustion.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Grief hollows you out, both physically and mentally. I came to it already on my knees. While Louise's death was sudden and shockingly unexpected, we had together been fighting her severe depression for several months, managing the strains and pressures and the emotional distress this brought on a daily basis, the darkness pervading every aspect of our lives. During this same period Louise had lost her father in traumatic circumstances and my mother had been cripplingly disabled by a catastrophic stroke. Neither of us had any reserves of strength left to draw on. We agreed that we wouldn't have the capacity to deal with even the smallest further crisis.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And then I found myself dealing with the largest crisis of my life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In the early days after Louise's death I was carried through by a cocktail of shock, numbness and a form of adrenalin. Friends and family were notified of the news, funeral arrangements were made, eulogies written, paperwork dealt with. I was rarely off the phone. The whole world, it seemed, wanted to talk to me. And I needed to talk to them. But gradually the formalities and rituals of death and commemoration were observed, the calls dried up, people returned to their lives and I was left to begin the process of coming to terms with my new reality, the grim day to day slog of life without Louise.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's a wearisome journey in every respect, a supreme effort simply to maintain my composure, keep going and appear strong in public. The lack of sleep is physically punishing. Even those of us who once slept soundly find that in grief the facility deserts us. Four hours sleep a night is barely sustainable over seven months.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> It</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">s not that I cannot sleep. In fact I am so tired its a constant struggle to remain awake. I find myself dozing off, my head dropping and eyes closing, while I am at work and talking to family and friends. I constantly fear doing so while behind the wheel of my car. The ability to drive while exhausted is, like driving while crying, a key survival technique the newly bereaved quickly acquire.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But I will not allow myself to sleep, even when I should do so, even when my body is screaming at me to switch off. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My brain is so active processing thoughts, trying to make sense of what has happened that it is almost impossible to stop, even in the middle of the night. My natural body clock tends towards the late shift anyway but </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">without Louise's restraining and moderating influences, or the motivation to discipline myself, I keep going, thinking, doing, turning night into day in the process.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The emotional intensity is sapping. Imagine just one thought on your mind almost every waking moment for seven months. And its a destructive, despairing one. Outside of work, and when I can escape into football on a Saturday afternoon, there has been barely no time since that January evening when I have stopped thinking about Louise's death or been doing something in some way connected with the consequences. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The daily outbursts of tears, holding and processing the traumatic memories of the night itself and the events leading up to it, learning to live alone, trying to envisage and re-plan a future utterly different in every way to the one that I thought would be mine. And all the time, never far from the surface, the guilt and the 'if onlys' which play on a constant loop.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then there is the seemingly never ending bureaucracy which needs to be attended to, the process of officially closing down Louise's life, from filing her final tax returns to returning her library books. And above all the compulsion, one which I am completely unable to resist, to spend every spare moment in some kind of activity to memorialise Louise, to honour her memory and record our lives together; to write this blog and my diary, to use recovery software to search for hours for lost fragments of video footage, to print out email and text conversations, to digitise hard copy photos and documents and print electronic ones in the interests of secure back up. I will not be able to rest until this process is complete, until I can be satisfied that Louise, the person and my marriage to her, is safely captured and stored for posterity in every possible way. It is the closest that I can come to keeping her alive, alongside me. This is now all I have left. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Before I returned to work I at least had the time and space to grieve. In those initial weeks I could devote myself almost whole time to my needs. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But they have long since somehow had to be fitted in around the demanding responsibilities of daily working life and supporting my partially dependent Mother. And when I am not working or on caring duty I have tried hard to 'do the right thing' and resist the temptation to retreat into my shell, to sit at home licking my wounds. I try to make the effort to reach out to people. Not only to maintain contact with old friends and my place in Louise's family but also to meet and interact with new people through support groups. In doing so I am partly driven by a genuine desire to help others struggling along the same path as myself but I am also mindful that some of my old networks, those built around Louise, will fail and I need to look for new ones if I am not to risk bitter and lonely isolation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This unsustainable whirl of activity and thought leaves me exhausted, my head full, my nerves frayed. I y</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">earn for a break, to be able to find the off switch but it seems not to exist. Relaxation is beyond me. I cannot watch TV or read a book. I have no interest or energy to do so and my concentration span is shot to pieces. A holiday would be pointless. Whenever I think about the respite it might bring I realise I am chasing an illusion because my vision of a holiday is inextricably bound up in those I shared with Louise, moments and experiences that are now gone for ever. In any event, grief and loss cannot be escaped and would follow me wherever I went. Louise's absence would be as keenly felt on holiday as everywhere else, perhaps even more so since they were times when we were never parted.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is somewhat ironic that as I find myself stabilising emotionally I realise that I am still at risk of breakdown. The difference is that now it is less likely to be from the despair of grief or the trauma of the experience than from sheer exhaustion. I urgently need rest. I need to be able to step outside the world I am trapped within, if only for a short period. I am, however, completely unable to work out how to do so.</span></div>
Gary Marsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08587249626085885847noreply@blogger.com14