Today, for the first time since you died, I sat with someone in a room and wept and wept for the loss of you.
I know you will understand why it has taken me these whole six months to find the strength to grieve for you. You well know the strength that grieving demands. You thought Freud was firstly a poet, with his “labour of mourning.”
I am trying to imagine which quote you would find for me now, because you always found a quote for me in all my situations and at times, I was less than grateful.
Perhaps it would be Auden: “In the deserts of the heart, let the healing fountain start.”
Perhaps it would be Dylan: “He not busy being born is busy dying.”
Perhaps it would be Blake: “For all eternity I forgive you and you forgive me.”
∫
I am lost without you. I have no idea how to proceed in a world that no longer has you in it.
He asked me, the man in whose room I sat today, a quiet man who well knows the uses of silence, he asked me, what did he do, your husband?
I told him your doctorate was on Shakespeare’s comedies. I told him you loved Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen, and Lenny Bruce, and Seinfeld, and Larry David, and William Blake, and Tony Soprano, and John Donne, and Bach’s concertos, and Mahler, and the list of what you loved was way too long, you were interested in everything, and I told him how sometimes I would tell you that your mind was so open, everything just fell out.
I told him that you fought with me about Foucault, and feminism, and I fought with you about F.R. Leavis and fucking white male privilege and the damn canon. I told him how you were the only man I’d ever known who was confident enough in himself to tell me I was smarter than he was. I told him how you used to look at me and say, “I could die happy right now, just being with you.”
But mostly I just cried, love.
No Place For Sheep 
These intimate moments leave me gasping. You have a way of letting us inside while keeping enough to yourself to leave me intrigued. And the pain shines through like so many mercies. It helps to feel with another whose experience resonates with your own.
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xxxx Thank you.
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So sad for your loss. Truly am.
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Thank you, Michael.
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Some say, no gain without pain. Pain characterises and perhaps even builds humanity.
Losing someone significant is a terrible jolt, not least because people rediscover limit and disempowerment.
In the Beatitudes, though, it says, “Blessed are those who mourn” and it is to do with Elisabeths contentions re justice and ‘Witnessing’..it must be done for another, for also, eventual self respect and a realignment to unfolding reality that include a revaluing of what is meaningful in life.
Have a good day, Jennifer Wilson.
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You always write something that reminds me or enlarges on what an event is deeply about, PW. Thank you for today.
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Life is an endurance test, Guinevere. The meaning of life may as well be 42; it makes as much sense as anything else.
Without any religious connotations, bless you.
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Ah, DQ. Thank you.
And I like it when you call me Guinevere.
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Dear Jennifer, I just want to give you the largest hug. My deepest sympathies and best wishes to you. Joa xxxx
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I most gratefully accept that hug, Joan. Thank you.
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Can I add an afterthought?
After a while it occurred to me, to realise that mourning is actually an honour and a privilege, an assumption of adulthood, the beginning of healing and getting of wisdom.
Is it not true that the people we have mourned or still mourn are people we realise could also understand the beauty of a view from a cliff out toward the ocean, as we do?
Yet, does their leaving infer they can no longer enjoy this intensity and magnitude of life seemingly gifted them and us..can it be that it ends, or just what happens?
The thing cant be reversed from this point, it is shattering and humbling, the epiphany of limit combined with the co realisation of the sheer overwhelming majesty of experience, I think.
I sincereley wish I had the answers, too, as to this last and greatest Mystery. How I, too, would like to give comfort to the perplexed.
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Beautiful thoughts and words in your ‘afterthought’, Paul. Jennifer is right, your writing adds and enlarges the ideas that sometimes seem so unfathomable.
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If I begin to grasp certain ideas and realities, it is because people smarter than myself have perservered with me, I beleive including you, in your quiet way, Elisabeth.
I feel honoured to grieve, if that’s the word as to Jennifer and in a funny way I get to pay respects to her late partner, can’t have been an insignificant fella, to win over someone like that.
Ive had a snuffle in sympathy and thought, her dog leaving can’t have helped also, along with someof the callous nitpicking that has also turned up.
The odd thing is, it may have done ME good also, broken me out of a carapace of my own infliction and had me in touch with feeling I usually suppress; also reminded me of who and what I am and should be and what my responsibiities might be to real people actually outside of my own selfish little multiverse..
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No, he was far from insignificant, PW.
I sometimes do that Gestalt thing of imagining him in the empty chair (you know, like Clint Eastwood did that time but not as daft).
As DQ points out, life can be something of an endurance test when fully lived. I really hope there is something like reincarnation, I feel as if I learn so much I need at least another life to put it into practice. What a waste it will be for all our personal evolving just to die with us.
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You would feel like that just at the moment. There will be better times, but sober reflexion is the mode just now, while Jennifer Wilson is in the process of integrating some pretty profound events and their implications.
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Beutiful. I still hear his voice 29 years since he left. I will arise to meet him again.
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