Good Grief!

I've been drunk for a month. This is mainly due to being with other people for a month. Other people are an excellent distraction from the horror of life (as well as being the main cause of most of it!) and I have been surrounded by some of the nicest. But I thought I needed to grieve. I thought I needed some time out to be just incredibly sad, to feel hollowed out, to communicate with myself on a physical, visceral level exactly what it is I've lost. Because it's everything. I can't stress the enormous, meteor-hits-earth-and-kills-all-the-dinosaurs impact Kelly had on my life. She changed me when I couldn't. I thought I had calcified at 18 and was slowly eroding from that point, becoming slightly less each year: older, slower, uglier, less funny, more desperate. That sort of thinking leaves you hopeless, helpless and venal. I thought my life was over and then suddenly it wasn't. It was an actual renaissance. I started to breathe again, I could straighten up. I walked tall (with a tall limp). My deepest fear is that I go back. That I become first-life John again, without her guiding influence, her moral stabilisers. Her transforming love.

I also worry that I'm not grieving properly. I don't know how you do it. I can get by very well around other people, laughing and joking, smiling fondly at all the stories people have of her (you would, they're good stories!). I've asked people to send me them, people who knew her years before me, people who knew Kellys that I never did. I love these things.

But alone I can let it in. I can feel the loss, the enormous, head-in-chest pressure of her absence; like a dinghy inflating on top of me, clobbering me to the ground, pushing the air out of me as surely as it draws it into itself. All it takes is the pulled toggle of a thought. Is this the right way to do it? Should I be doing this? Cathartic pain seems intuitive but, as Q.I. has consistently shown me, everything I know is wrong. Surely everything I feel must be wrong as well.

The Kubler-Ross Model (or the "the five stages of grief" as it's popularly known) is largely bollocks as far as I'm concerned. Even its own literature describes no real set order to the stages and that you may experience several at the same time. i.e. Like any other emotional responses to anything that might happen to you. It can be sophisticated, contradictory and not easily attributable. And in any case the model was intended for people with terminal illnesses coming to terms with their own mortality, not for those that they left behind. More interesting is George Bonnano's "Four trajectories of grief" which I shall now nick whole-sale from Wikipedia:


Resilience: "The ability of adults in otherwise normal circumstances who are exposed to an isolated and potentially highly disruptive event, such as the death of a close relation or a violent or life-threatening situation, to maintain relatively stable, healthy levels of psychological and physical functioning" as well as "the capacity for generative experiences and positive emotions."

Recovery: When "normal functioning temporarily gives way to threshold or sub-threshold psychopathology (e.g., symptoms of depression or Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)), usually for a period of at least several months, and then gradually returns to pre-event levels."

Chronic dysfunction: Prolonged suffering and inability to function, usually lasting several years or longer.

Delayed grief or trauma: When adjustment seems normal but then distress and symptoms increase months later. Researchers have not found evidence of delayed grief, but delayed trauma appears to be a genuine phenomenon"

Seems to me that you do not want either of the last two! Sleeper grief coming and nudging you in five years time with a "Wake up! Time to cry" seems almost unbearably cruel.

I don't know what my emotional life has in store for me. And it seems that nobody else does either. I'll just have to get on with it.

If you don't like stories about depressed men taking a walk I'd skip this one.

Back from the counsellor by the usual circuitous route. Well an unusual circuitous route as I managed to get lost in Hornsey. But as I always get lost you could call it usual. "Lost in Hornsey" - the romance of it! Well not for much longer.

The counselling session was the usual hour long philibuster. I was surprised as the depression has kicked in quite badly with Kelly's absense and I had been suffering from a keen bluntness to my faculties. But I rambled on like Robert Plant in a pack-a-mac. There's theatre there of course. I'm such a hollow and unnatural creature that even telling the truth I can't do it truthfully. Two more of these sessions to go and then nothing. Got a few more laughs out of the counsellor again today. Why am I trying to charm and impress my counsellor? What's wrong with me? What's you major malfunction, numbnuts?

As usual the words don't stop tumbling on the journey home. I am a mad rambling, in both senses of the word, figure striding over the hills of North London on the way out of Hell House. It's taken me over two hours and I'm not home yet. Which means that I have been talking out loud, to myself or someone else, for three hours. If I could write that much a day I ...well I would have a lot more written. Doesnt mean I'd get anything published though.

Today's route took me past the site of Andrew Marvell's cottage near Waterlow Park ("Andrew Marvell, what a marvel! I'd rather have written that than flown through Hitler's legs") past Betjeman and Houseman's houses in Highgate (next to each other" Like a literary "Never the Twain"!). Slightly down the road and towards East Finchley is a house, next to the Wrestler's pub where Charles Dickens "stayed". The plaque was about five times the size of poor old Andy Marvell's; a bit flash seeing as how he didn't even pay rent. On towards Muswell Hill and the last plaque of the day is the house Peter Sellers grew up in, not far from where my parents lived in the sixties. I avoid Muswell Hill and take the "Parkland Walk" to Alexandra Palace and then down towards Hornsey. The only plaques here are on park benches, donated by rich dead ladies from Highgate for poor people to wait on buses in splintered-arsed comfort.

Finally I rock up to Crouch End to check out the The Queens Hotel as a possible venue for Kelly's leaving do, come fortieth birthday party. It's lovely with a proper Victorian horse-shoe bar, molded stucco ceilings and stained-glass windows. It would make a brilliant party venue than Litro, Kelly's own choice, which has rebranded itself as a restaurant and is difficult to negotiate even if nobody is in it, given its size and abundance of trestle tables. Though if it's what she wants I'll move heaven and earth to see that she gets it.

Though I hope it doesn't come to that; it's almost impossible to get any sort of traction on the heavens and I'm rubbish with a shovel. With my back? I should bleedin' cocoa.

Doesn't do whatever a spider can.

There's been a spider living in my kitchen for the last six months. It hasn't moved. It moves; it does that odd bicycling thing that spiders do that makes it look as if they're washing, and perhaps they are. But it doesn't do anything. It doesn't kill anything, it doesnt even have a proper web: it's just suspended on a St David's cross of silk, hanging there.

Robert the Bruce would still be stuck in his cave, hugging his knees with a numb arse, if he were me.

Mr Higgins Changes Trains

A trip to Letchworth Garden City. Should be a pleasant day out but the pin-pricks of annoyance are constantly there - will I ever achieve the sainted state of "chillax-dom"?

Kelly has left some medicines in my sister's house and I am off to retrieve them. It's difficult to work out which train actually goes to Letchworth. There are no signs, the monitors are all blank and there is nothing on any of the platforms. Actually that's not true: there is plenty happening on the platforms; the station is busier than at rush hour. The traditional staples of delayed trains are all in place: milling throngs of slightly disappointed people in hats, foreigners waving their hands and shouting, appearing to be far more annoyed than they actually are. There are home counties biddies with quivering pink chins and jabbing fingers and bemused back-packers prepared to sit it out. The untroubled rail-staff are as relaxed and content as a fat Southern Sheriffs, rousing themselves from hammocks, mint juleps in their fat soft hands.

But there are no delays; the train, my train, arrives unnannounced but apparently on time. I tuck myself into a seat next to the toilet and waft my Earl Grey under my nose to disguise the whiff. All I have to do is look out of the window at some of the finest rolling green golf-courses this country has to offer. Alas no. It's TOO sunny. That harsh white blinding sun that makes motorists flip their flip-down shades and make me, like fully a quarter of the population*, sneeze continually. I stop at Stevanage, which isn't worth sneezing at, but I'm off again all the way to Letchworth, alarming the posh woman opposite me, with her fur hat and Liz Tremaine novel, to the extent that she flashes me (a weak smile) and pisses off down the carriage. Hey ho.

When I arrive at Letchworth my sister isn't in.


*Q.I. trufact.

...in which I'm very depressed

I'm very depressed. And exhausted. And stressed and anxious. It's a real pain in the arse, y'know.