Something your dying has taught me is that the bond forged through love is unbreakable. 67 years softens the emptiness, but the sense of loss and longing, fed by sweet yet bitter echoes of a voice and presence remembered, is permanent. How can we make so light of dying and the suffering it brings, especially for youngsters?
You never let me down, even now in your dying I will always find joy in that music you shared with me.
An old lady I knew died last week, she was 101. You died this very day 56 years ago at 44. I would have loved sharing your 45th birthday but had to celebrate it alone as always since 1966.
I always knew that your dying would wound me irrevocably, how could it not when I learned to be joyous with you, and that living has only one true joy, ‘to love and be loved in return’. When those you love die, living becomes so much more pointless.
It is, as they say, a savage irony that in making such a fundamental contribution to opening my experience to ultimate joy, love, when you were taken away too soon on this day in 1966, leaving we five bereft of your comforting presence in our similar yet different ways, I was ill-prepared for life’s greatest tragedy, living with a broken heart.
Another freezing, solitary covid morning. It was about now, 16 years ago, that you could fight no more. A different type of morning, freezing yes, but I was with you and no pandemic. We had spoken our bedtime words as always last night, our last conversation, a conversation that spoke of your pain and no ‘sweet dreams’. Not long afterwards a phone-call got me driving to your hospital bedside in my sky-blue racing car. I rubbed your cold feet and sang quietly in your ear, our bedtime songs, songs you sang to me as your boy, to make me feel safe. I sing them now, but quietly to myself, as if. You’re safe now.
You died at 44 – it is difficult to see any fairness or justice in that. Now, 54 years later, I look around and hear people talking loudly and passionately about fairness and justice, but see little evidence for such commitment. Who are these people so fervently debating issues of fairness and justice? They are idealists, pedlars in linguistic sleight of hand such as monarchs, presidents, politicians, employers and others with influence, who pay priests, philosophers and mathematicians to concoct and supply fallacious notions of which fairness and justice are but two. Why is this so important to them? Ideals have at least two functions. Firstly, they offer certainty and a comforting capacity for control over our fears and anxieties, equipping us to feel safe and able to sleep at night, immunized from a world that is cold, brutal and unconcerned. Secondly, ideals can be associated with more insidious goings on, by enticing us, under banners proclaiming justice, freedom etc., to put aside our feelings of empathy and compassion, to authenticate and sanction terrible acts of violence against those with whom we disagree: killing people who are unquestionably wrong is easier to justify.
Experience tells me that there are in fact no certainties, no truths, just contingencies; mundane, day to day involvements that are always comparatively uncertain. Nevertheless, these ordinary little experiences, these momentary happenings can make an unpredictable, insecure living feel worthwhile. One of these is joy. Once when I was a boy, I watched Dad dance to an Artie Shaw recording of Begin the Beguine and shared his joy in music. Tragically, in his dying, he also introduced me to another, more difficult form of joy. This is a joy that comes from having engaged with, and seen off feelings of grievous loss and self-pity, without resort to idealistic comforts. I have learned to live unhappily and still feel joy. It has been a long, lonely, sleep deprived journey, since those days of his dying, that at times has tested me sorely. Would I live through it all again? – yes, I would, because it has made me, me. Crippled though I am, I am still prepared to be joyfully empathetic and compassionate, and still willing to engage deceivers. Part of that joy finds me contemptuous of ideals such as fairness, justice, equality, freedom etc., and those who profit from them.
Mam, thank you for that rare, sacred, precious gift of love you gave me. Love is giving and you gave and gave and gave so that I can love too. I have lived without you now for 15 years, but your love never dies; it lives here within me, warming me, nourishing me, driving me, guiding me, comforting me, strengthening me. It sustained you through all those woundings that lovers’ suffer, just as it sustains me. You were truly a remarkable woman.
For three years or so I have been going through what has often been, and in some respects still is, a painful and distressing reconfiguring of my habitus, in order to put my teenage traumas and 55 years of fatigue and self-sabotaging to bed. My aim is to flourish as I did when a child.
As part of this process I have needed to test my relationships past and present to see who I can trust, to see who loves me and cares for me. By opening yourself up in all your vulnerability, you expose people for what they are and find those who are worthy. One wonderful example is my father. I lost him both physically and emotionally this day in 1966 when he died – why did he leave me so broken and unprepared? Through my re-evaluation I have found him again in all his joy, love and warmth. An essential aspect of my habitus has been restored.