This won't be a Happy Christmas

I'm not sending Christmas cards this year. Call me Scrooge, but I just don't feel like celebrating. I don't begrudge other people their happy Christmas (or maybe I do) but I don't want to think about it and I don't want to talk about it and I just want it to be over as soon as possible. I don't have any festive cheer to spare. It took all my energy to put up a Christmas tree for the children. I've booked the panto and the Christmas train and some time between now and the twenty-fifth, I will buy the children some presents. But that's it. That's enough. I have turned off the radio and I'm staying away from the parties. I don't need to be constantly reminded that Christmas is a time for sharing love and that half of the people I love most in the world are missing. Frankly, Mariah Carey has it covered: All I want for Christmas is you. And Santa can't bring me what I want. So it's 'Bah Humbug' from me, I'm afraid.

I suppose I could do what other people seem to be doing and donate to a charity instead of sending cards, but I donate to charities all year long. Charity is for life, not just for Christmas, surely? I'm already saving a few trees. Isn't that enough? Why do I need to offset my sadness? Can't I just be selfish this year? Sometimes sadness is appropriate. We can't all make lemonade every time we get lemons. It's exhausting squeezing every drop of positivity from a negative situation when you're already exhausted.

Don't worry, it goes both ways. I don't want any Christmas cards either. I mean, I don't mind if you have to follow the custom, if writing cards gives you some joy, if it just wouldn't be Christmas for you if you didn't send cards. But please don't send one on my account. Please don't think that sending me a snowy scene with the words: 'Happy Christmas' and 'Happy New Year' is going to improve my lot during this festive period. Putting it bluntly, it's not.

I appreciate you thinking about me but love is for all of the year, not just for Christmas too. The friends who care about me have been here for me during what has been the worst year of my life. Some of them have sent me love on a daily or weekly basis. They have checked in on how I am regularly. Some of them have driven across the country to see me. A lot of good friends have read my blog, religiously or sporadically. They know how I am. They have sat me with while I've cried week after week after week. They know that I will not be happy just because it's Christmas. The word happy is just jarring. It's not appropriate for someone who is grieving.

This Christmas won't be a happy one. I'm not being negative. It's just the way it is. Sure, it will have some happy moments. I have two gorgeous children who are excited and there will be joy in seeing them open their presents and all that malarkey. And, yes, I'm grateful that I have them and that I'm not homeless and that I don't live in Syria. I have a lot of things to be grateful for. I can make lemonade when I need to. But I will mostly be sad and mostly thinking about the people who are missing. That's just the way it is. My life is half-empty, not half-full.

By all means think of me. And if you want to send me a card, send me a card acknowledging that you know this year will be hard. Wish me some peace. Send me some strength. Keep sending me love. Make plans to hang out with me, knowing that there will probably be tears if you do. But don't wish me a Happy Christmas. Christmas will be tough. As for 2017, with any luck it can't be as bad as 2016 but I hear bereaved people and counsellors routinely saying that the second year following the loss of a partner is worse than the first so I'm not counting my chickens and the last time I said things couldn't get worse, you died. I'm not risking saying it again. Probably the second year following the death of a partner is worse, at least in part because friends forget that things don't get better just because the year on the calendar has changed. When the person you love is missing, they just keep being missing. So please, friends, forgive me for the lack of cards and for the Grinchlike behaviour and keep sending the love.

You didn't send me a card last year. You sent me a New Year's card instead. It was a beautiful scene of bluebells and trees. You acknowledged that life had been tough for me for years and that things could only get better. You were a big part of my future plans for life improvement.  

'May all your dreams come true in 2016,' you wrote. 

So much for that. 

Bah Humbug. 

Once upon a time the man I loved died

When I started my blog, I didn't set out to tell a story. I was simply in agony and writing was my way of trying to survive. I wasn't writing for an audience, I was writing for myself. But gradually my blog has turned into a story with an audience: the story of my grief's journey and also the story of a beautiful love affair that ended, like your life, way too soon. I hardly have any photos of you, so my blog is the equivalent for me - a photo album in words, a way to remember every precious moment that we shared. Because our relationship was short and restricted by the fact that I wouldn't introduce you to my children, when you died I was able to make a list of each day we spent together and what we did. I know I will keep writing until I have recorded them all. There are only a few left. And now, for some reason, at my hundredth post, I find myself wanting to put a structure to the story, wanting to write it from the beginning but I'm not sure where the beginning is.

It is always a tricky decision, knowing where to begin a story and this one is no different. I could start it back in the nineties when we first met, when Cupid made a blunder and fired his arrows in the wrong direction. Or I could go further back to when I met your future best friend. Ed, at playgroup while we were still in nappies. I could talk about my divorce and my terrible relationship with the children's father or the break up of my last relationship, to give context to the precious nature of this love story. Or I could rewind time just a short way and start last year when our paths crossed again, back to that good time when Cupid had his act together and everything was aligned, until suddenly it wasn't.

Still, I've been to enough creative writing classes to know that, these days, a story should throw us into the centre of the action and start with a bang. So, if I were going to start this story properly, I would start it with a body, the body of the man I loved -  your dead body. Without that appalling scene, this blog wouldn't exist.

And so it transpires that, at what is the true beginning of this story, I am standing in my pyjamas and dressing gown on your doorstep, staring at the dead body that is laid out on your bed. It might seem surprising to some that I can almost see your bed from the doorstep, but those people don't know yet that you are a surprising hero who lives in a tiny shack in the Peak District. Also a little odd that I am out here in my pyjamas with two male friends of yours that I don't know. They've just bashed the door of this shack in with a fire extinguisher as if we are in some kind of crime drama and a voice is saying the words, 'there's Paul'. Before they've had time to stop me, I am pushing past them into the darkness of the room where you sleep and there is a breath in time where I think you might actually be asleep now and I feel guilty for dragging your friends out here in the dark. But as soon as I am near enough to see your body properly, I know that you are dead. Either that or you have been abducted and someone has left another deformed body on your bed. Part of me wants to run to you and hold you but a larger part recoils in horror and I stay in the doorway, wanting to leave but unable to move. I stay just long enough to take a picture in my mind, a picture that I will never be able to erase. Your head is black and purple in hue and swollen so that your features are distorted. You look like the elephant man, completely unrecognisable aside from your clothes, clothes from which you are bursting, your body inflated and leaking. Your hands are clenched, there is blood on the bed and the stench makes me want to retch. One thing I know for sure. This is a body but it is not you. You are gone.

Your friend calls an ambulance. Someone on the end of the line asks routine questions, trying to ascertain whether there is any hope of resuscitation. We all know there is not but they force him to touch your skin and check for signs of life even though he is saying repeatedly, 'he is definitely dead.' And I just stand there listening to the word: dead. How can you be dead?

Afterwards, I stand on the porch shaking until someone ushers me into a car and I sit, still shuddering and stare into space. I don't know how long I am there. At some point I see blue flashing lights moving up the long drive to the shack where you live, the shack where you are dead and some time after that a policeman slides into the driver's seat of the car and asks me questions that make me feel like a terrible girlfriend. You have been out of touch for three days and judging by the state you are in, you have been dead for all of them. I wonder with him how it can have taken me three days to raise the alarm. Was it just yesterday that I was out on a day trip with a friend? What was I thinking going out for the day when you were lying dead on your bed? If this is a crime drama then I assume that I am a suspect. I'm not yet sure how you died and maybe circumstances are suspicious. So I try to justify myself, explaining to the policeman that you don't always answer your phone, that we don't live together, that we don't see each other every day because of my children. I tell them that I have been sending messages and calling for days but that you haven't answered. I don't tell them that I have been worrying that you were about to dump me but I tell them that I came out last night and that your lights were on but your door was locked. I tell them about the notes I left on the door and on your van.  I don't tell them that I was frightened and crying, banging on your door and shouting your name, pleading with you to let me in.

They ask me what your mum's name is and I feel even worse. I don't know. I can tell them roughly where she lives because you once drove me past her house but I haven't met your mum yet. We've only been seeing each other for eight months and we just haven't found the time. I can tell them the first name of your sister but that is all I know. I don't know where she lives. I could tell them so many things about you if they asked: your favourite songs, what kind of tree you would choose to be if you were reincarnated as a tree, how you have changed my life, but I can't tell them anything they want to know.

The policeman takes my number and eventually says that I am free to go. I wait for your friends and find myself browsing Facebook as if it is just a normal evening except for the fact that I am sitting in a stranger's car in my pyjamas at one in the morning. I see that a friend is up and I message her to tell her that you are dead. How can you be dead? She phones and I try to explain through my tears and I say, 'can you come?' She says that she will catch a train in the morning to be there.

Your friends drop me back at home and I stand in the kitchen wondering what to do now that you are dead. I go upstairs and climb into bed with my daughter because I need to be next to someone whose heart is beating. I hold her hand and lie awake for hours. I think about the last time that I saw her, standing at the top of the stairs as I told her that I needed to go out to look for a missing friend, that I was leaving her with a stranger, that I would be back soon. I am wondering how I will tell her in the morning that I found you but that you were dead. It is only three months since I told her that Grandma was dead. It is only a week since she met you for the first time and gave me her approval. It is too much. I am wondering how on earth I am going to get up and get the children to school. I am thinking about you and every snapshot of our beautiful time together, time that is now over, snapshots that I will record later. I am wondering where your body has gone and thinking that I never even turned back to say goodbye. I am wondering if they have found your mum or your sister and what happens next. But mostly I am just lying there thinking that you are dead. How can you be dead?

I am wondering how it can all be over now. This is not the way the story should end. It is not the way the story should begin. But it is the way it happened.

Counting

These days I find myself counting,
I am always counting.
I count breaths, days, months,
log the seasons as they go by:
spring, summer, autumn.
Only winter lies ahead.

I don't know why I count,
don't really know what I am counting.
Life is upside down and back to front
and I'm not sure anymore
if I am counting up
or counting down,
if I am counting towards something
or away.

But I count the days,
tick them off on the calendar
labelled 'After';
you ended as it began.

I don't want to count:
every day takes me further
from a day spent with you
and a day closer to

But I count anyway,
watching time pass by,
amazed by the number of
days survived,
amazed still that you died,
amazed I am still alive.

This time last year - falling in love as the leaves changed 

at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

It sucks, I'm here, I love you - or What to say when you don't know what to say

A good friend sent me a text message yesterday letting me know that her dad had died. I felt terrible for her, as I do now for anyone who has lost someone close, and wanted to respond immediately but I paused before I started typing, edited and re-edited before I pressed 'Send', trying to apply what I have learned. Maybe I got it right and maybe I got it wrong. Everyone is different in their grief. I can only speak from my own experience of the recent, shocking loss of my partner and the loss of my parents from terminal illness, but, for what's it's worth, these are my tips on what has helped or not helped me. I share them in case they help someone else to help someone else who is suffering the agony of loss.

Firstly, whatever you do or say, there is a good chance that you will get it wrong. When someone is in extreme pain having lost someone they love, there is NOTHING you can say that will make it okay. So, it is fair to assume that, at some point in your friend's grief journey, you will offend them. Give them a break if they're over-sensitive. Their world has been blown to pieces and their mind and nerves with it. Bearing this in mind, here are some things you might like to avoid:

1. Beginning sentences with the words 'I hope.....' It is such a natural instinct when we see a friend in pain to want to offer them some hope but when someone you love with all your heart has just died, there is no hope. It is much better to just sit with the person who is in pain and acknowledge that it sucks and is hopeless. Anything else feels undermining. If you must hope for something, make it something small: 'I hope you can sleep tonight,' or, as a widowed friend of mine has said to me, 'I hope you have some moments of peace'. In the early stages of a violent grief, moments of peace are as good as it gets.

2. Beginning sentences with 'at least': 'at least you still have the children,' 'at least you had his love', 'at least you got to say goodbye', 'at least they'd lived a good life'. None of these things change the reality for the bereaved. The person they love is dead. This is all that matters. Children, a nice house, a good job.....none of these things are compensation for losing your loved one. One day, there might come a time when your friend is grateful for the love and able to simply cherish what they had, but probably not now.

3. If your friend's partner has died, unless they bring up the subject, please don't tell them that they will meet someone else. There is no guarantee that they will ever meet someone new and even if they do, that someone new will never replace the someone who has gone. Especially in the early days, all I wanted was for the person that I love to return. That this is impossible is irrelevant.

4. Don't tell your friend that their loved one is at peace or in a better place or that the angels needed them. You don't know that. No-one knows that and, even if you think you do, that is not much consolation for the person left behind. For more on this;
https://griefwriting.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/things-not-to-say.html

5. Please don't tell your friend that this is part of a plan, that it happened for a reason or that it happened to teach them something. What kind of god/universe would take my partner's life just so that I could learn some kind of lesson? Maybe you believe that but I doubt it is comforting to many people who have just lost someone who was a cornerstone of their world.

6. Please don't make judgements about the relationship of the person who has been bereaved.  As my Grandma used to say, 'no-one knows what goes on behind closed doors'. Your friend's relationship may have been 'better' or 'worse' than it appeared to you. Just because the relationship was short or had some issues, doesn't make it less of a loss. Don't make assumptions and judgements full stop. Some people might be relieved at the death of a long-term spouse while others might be bereft and heartbroken at the death of a partner they'd only known for a week. How they feel is up to them and actually not something that is within their control. I had only been with my partner for eight months and we were, in some ways, an unlikely pair but I have been utterly devastated by his loss in a way that I didn't know was possible. My loss is no less valid than someone else's just because the relationship was brief and because I may have told you that we both had doubts. In my case, I hadn't told many people what my partner meant to me because I was scared to jinx it having had my fingers burned too many times before but I loved him very deeply and my grief has been similarly deep. Likewise with other bereavements. The apparent closeness of the relationship is no indicator for the violence or longevity of the grief that follows.

7. Don't judge your friend's grief. People grieve in different ways for different lengths of time. Contrary to popular opinion, there are no neat stages to grief and no linear timeline. Grief is messy and complicated and unruly. From my own experience, one minute I can feel ok, so much so that I actually wonder what on earth I've been making such a melodramatic fuss about and the next moment it is like someone has opened up a trap door and I have fallen into the deepest darkest hole. At those moments I can't see the light or a ladder and it is hard to remember that, only recently, I thought I was doing well. Grief is a tangled mess, a complex maze and a confusing whirlpool of emotions. It is full of ups and downs where the ups are mountains to climb and the downs are the deepest troughs imaginable. In between there are pauses and plateaus where you can occasionally have a tea break and look at a view of devastation.

8. Don't say those words: 'how are you?' especially not by text message. In my case, I'd prefer that people just assume that I am desolate until I have told them otherwise. By all means ask your friend what they've been up to because, of course, the days are going by and they are still living, but how they are is likely to be complicated and will take some time and energy to explain. If you want to know how your friend is, go round, make a cup of tea and prepare to mop up the tears. Or, in my case, read my blog. I'm much more articulate in writing.
https://griefwriting.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/things-not-to-say-part-2.html

9. When your friend is obviously down and weeks or months have passed, don't ask them what's wrong. Just because the funeral is over doesn't mean they're fine now. They're still sad, about the same thing. They will be sad for a long time.

10. Don't ask your friend if they're feeling 'better'. You don't get better from grief. Maybe it gets easier to deal with or maybe it doesn't. In my experience, asking me if I'm feeling better just makes me think about how far I still have to go and, if I was feeling ok when you asked the question, most likely I will feel worse because you asked it.
https://griefwriting.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/grieving-just-as-fast-as-i-can.html

11. Don't assume that someone else is looking after your friend. I was living alone when my dad died and will never forget how it felt. About twenty friends sent text messages but no-one called to see me and no-one phoned. Three days later, I called two of my best friends in tears and they said that they assumed I was busy with family. Nope. That's not the kind of family I'm from. Some of my best support since my partner died has come from people that I had only just met. There's no hierarchy of support. If you feel for someone, see if you can help.

12. Things don't necessarily get incrementally better. In fact, it is probably more common for things to get incrementally worse. At best, it is one step forwards and two steps back. In the early stages of grief, especially unexpected grief, your friend will be in shock. They will also have a lot of practical things to do and, hopefully, a lot of support. Once the funeral is over, the shock has worn off and other people's lives have returned to normal, your friend is forced to confront their new normal on their own. The reality might not sink in until three months or six months or even twelve months later. In fact, for me, it is sinking in slowly, day by day, as I gradually realise that I have to find a way to forge a new life that doesn't involve the man that I thought was my future. Be there for your friend at three months and six months and twelve months when people are no longer rushing round with flowers and hot meals. The point at which you're really bored of your grieving friend and thinking that they ought to get a grip, is probably the time when they need you the most. Believe me, they are thoroughly bored of it too.
https://griefwriting.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/sometimes-i-imagine-that-my-body-is.html

13. Don't avoid the subject. Your friend's loved one and their grief is the main thing on their mind and they are, most likely, desperate to talk about it. It doesn't matter how well you know the person, you can still ask. If they don't want to talk, they won't.
https://griefwriting.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/i-need-to-talk-about-kevin.html

14. Don't expect your friend to be able to function normally. There is no normal anymore. Things that seem simple to you are loaded with land mines to your friend. They may not be able to go to the pub or to a party or do any of the things that you're used to them doing. They will at some point but please be patient. Unless you have been through the same experience, you have no idea how difficult it is. Sometimes, just getting out of bed in the morning is enough of a challenge. Your friend is not avoiding you for any particular reason or because of anything you have done, it's just all too difficult sometimes.
https://griefwriting.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/the-tightrope-of-grief.html

15. Don't ask your friend to call if they need anything. Most likely, they won't call and, more importantly, they probably have absolutely no idea what they need. They probably don't even know what day it is. Come round, bring food, walk the dog, play with the children, tidy up and, most importantly listen. And then repeat, over and over again for months on end.

16. On the other hand, sometimes, you could try asking. I'll never forget the friend who said to me, 'what single thing could I do that would improve things?' It took me a while to think what it was but then she remembered and did that thing and it really did improve things.

So, that's a lot of stuff to avoid. Is there anything you can safely do? Yes.

1. In the early stages, do rush round with flowers and hot meals - meals more than flowers. It is easy to forget to eat or drink in the early stages of grief. I was so grateful for people who brought food.

2. Do phone or call rather than sending text messages. As in my case with my dad, a flurry of text messages over an hour or two, do not make for great support. They're better than nothing, but, if you can, go round or pick up the phone.

3. Do keep phoning to check your friend is still alive. I have been so grateful to the friends who have done this, especially the friend who always phoned on a Tuesday knowing that this was the night that the children were with their dad and a night that I used to spend with my partner.

4. Do offer practical help. Grief is exhausting and blows your brain to bits. Ordinary everyday tasks can seem insurmountable. It is so helpful to have someone share the load even for a moment. Pick your friend's kids up from football training, walk with them to school, go with them to appointments, wash the pots. A little goes a long way.

5. Send love. If you can't think of anything to say, send love. A little love goes a long way. Especially when you have lost the person who used to say 'I love you', hearing those words from someone else is very powerful. When you feel like you just want to dive into the grave with your partner, knowing that you still matter is essential.

6. Do offer hugs and kisses. Especially in the case of losing a partner, your friend has lost the person who used to do this. When my partner died (and still now, six months later) all I wanted to do was curl up in his arms and feel safe. The touch of someone else can't replace the warmth of his embrace, but it helps a little.

7. LISTEN. It is the biggest gift you can give your friend to simply listen without judgment or agenda, without offering your opinions or platitudes. It is incredibly hard to do but so essential that grief is witnessed. And actually, in reality, it should be easy. The best way to avoid all of the mistakes listed above is to say very little. Just sit with your friend, listen while they talk and say, "it sucks. I'm here. I love you."

If you're a friend of mine and you've said any of the things to avoid, don't worry. As I said at beginning, you were bound to get it wrong and, let's face it, anyone who knows me, knows that I have the worst case of foot in mouth disease around. And if you're a friend of mine and you have done any of the things that help, then thank you from the bottom of my heart. With no parents and no partner, I feel like friends (and my brothers) are all the support that I have. It is just as well that I have some great friends.

When you're in love with a beautiful man - and then he dies - then what?

I think about that thing that teenagers do when they're first in love and on the phone. Maybe they don't do it these days. Maybe they just send multiple texts until their fingers fall off or they fall asleep drooling onto the screens of their smartphones. But I'm thinking of the way, in the olden days, young people used to find it so impossible to part that they'd say, 'you put the phone down first,' 'no you,' for about half an hour until a parent's voice would intercept the call and they'd have to say goodnight. We did that a few times, in an ironic way, of course, but kind of not.

It can be a shock to realise that you can still fall in love, I mean really fall in love, when you're a middle-aged man or woman, especially if you're a man or woman who has had a few relationships since those first heady days of youthful romance. Amazing to realise that you can still walk around in a daze, tripping over your own feet because your mind is always with your loved one. Wonderfully destabilising to spend your days waiting for the ping of your phone (because you too have entered the modern age) and your nights so enthralled with your lover's mind, body and soul that you forget to go to sleep entirely. Incredible to feel the kind of love where hours and days apart feel like torture and you can't wait to be reunited, where every parting is a wrench, a tiny grief. You are in the bonding phase of love, the enchantment phase, where you see only common ground and ignore differences. Love is blind, they say. Love is a form of madness, they say. Love is a drug. In fact, scientists have proven that being in love is like being on cocaine. You are bonded to your loved one by a powerful cocktail of hormones. You are attached to your beloved. You are, in essence, like Robert Palmer, addicted to love.

This week I joined WAY, a support network for people who are Widowed and Young. I consider myself neither widowed nor young (even though I am skilled at social networking and can drool on a smartphone with the best of them) but I realised that it might be helpful to talk to other people who have lost a partner and specifically people who have lost a partner before old age. Because the experience has been like nothing I've ever known and I don't know anyone in the real world who has lost a partner. I thought I might find people who understood. I've not been disappointed. I'd only been on the Facebook group for five minutes when someone said, in black and white, so clearly, the thing that I'd been feeling but not quite articulated: that there is a world of difference between losing someone you love and losing someone you are in love with. Suddenly it all made sense.

I've been careful in my conversations with the bereaved, to try not to suggest that there is some kind of grief hierarchy; everyone's grief is unique and incomparable and yet, this feeling has been nagging at me, that this grief is different, that it is violent, that it is visceral in a way that is unfamiliar to me. I've even been feeling guilty that this grief is so much more extreme than my grief for my mum who only died recently, or for my dad. And I get annoyed with friends who suggest that I am feeling so bad because this grief is cumulative, even though I know that they're right to some extent, because my heart tells me that, no, this grief is for you. My grief is commensurate to the amount of love I felt for you and my love for you, as it happens, was enormous. But there is something else going on here. I didn't love you like your family or friends did. I was 'in love' with you. Even when my mum was dying, I didn't think about her all day long. I didn't daydream about the beautiful future we would have together. I didn't pine for her until we were reunited. I loved her and I wanted her to stay in my life but I wasn't addicted to her. I was addicted to you and when a partner dies like you did, suddenly and with no warning, it is like going cold turkey. I am physically ill with grief. My body hums with grief so loudly that I'm surprised other people can't hear it. I am shattered by grief.

I went to a party the other week and your friend found me crying. He thought he understood. 'Paul would have been here,' he said, like I was crying because I'd just remembered you because I was at a party with your friends. But the truth is that I don't just remember you at parties and I don't cry when something reminds me that you lived and that you are gone. I remember you all day long, the way I thought of you all day long when you were alive. I cry, or fight back tears, all day long, the way I fought back smiles when you were alive. I only forget you when I am distracted by something else for a moment. I am in agony, looking all day long for the place to rest my heart and it is gone. 'Are you still sad about Paul?' another friend of yours asked this week. "Of course,' I said. 'I will be sad about Paul forever.'

Today I walked up to the spot where we first held each other as we watched the sun set and I talked to the sky as I often do. 'How on earth am I supposed to do this?' I asked. You didn't talk back, though I do sometimes hear your voice in my head and when I asked you for a sign in the clouds, I found my heart again for a moment. Your love goes on but you are gone.

I think about those phone calls: 'You go first,' 'no you.' You went and I was calling you and there was no answer. You went first and you can't come back. You went and I am talking when the line is dead, waiting for a ping that will not come, rattling like a junkie coming off cocaine, on my own.

Who can reminisce with me?

Your mum is talking about your family, the people that I never met. She mentions Auntie Ethel. 'Did he tell you about Auntie Ethel?' she asks. 'She used to pinch his cheeks.' I beam with delight and picture myself sitting on your knee and squeezing cheeks that were still pinchable even though you were fifty-three. 'Stop it,' you said, batting my hand away playfully, 'you're like Auntie Ethel.'

It thrills me every time I talk to someone who knew you and realise that, at least in some ways, we knew the same person. Another time, I am out in my campervan looking for a spot for the memorial bench with your colleague, Rodney, and he mentions the day that you planted the big tree in Broomhill. And suddenly you are sitting alongside me in the same campervan and Rodney is texting you and asking if you'd rather get up early to do the planting or do it late at night. I tell Rodney that I remember this conversation and we both agree that there was no question of you getting up early for anything.

These moments for me are rare and precious because, before your death, I only knew one of your friends and you barely knew any of mine at all. I hadn't met your family and you had only crossed paths briefly with mine. Nobody really knew us together. It  makes me so sad that nobody knew us together. If we had had a few more years, even months maybe, I imagine things might have been very different. I imagine people telling me how great they thought we were together, how they could see from the way you looked at me, how much you loved me. I could take things further and imagine them saying how they never believed you would get married and what a surprise that, at your age, you finally settled down. How you turned your life around - not that there was anything wrong with your life - but that you changed it, because of me.

Instead sometimes I have heard your friends say that you lacked commitment. People have questioned whether it could have worked in the long run. They're not sure, I know. Sometimes I'm not sure either. We weren't there yet. But I knew from the way you looked at me how deeply I was loved and I truly know how great we were together. And I know that you wanted it, all of it, and that you wanted it with me. I know that, for you, at least as you saw it then, I was the one.

But nobody knew us together. There are no wedding photos to keep on a mantelpiece, no shared stories of day trips or holidays with friends. Our memories are all just mine now and the only photos are five pictures of us captured in the background at a poetry reading. 'You look like you're the only people in the world,' your friend said when he saw this photo. And that's how it felt. And now it's just me. I am the one left behind. The only one who can tell the story. I reminisce alone.

Maybe that's how it always is. Maybe, even when we lose the same person as someone else, we actually lose someone different. My lover was someone else's child, someone else's brother, someone else's friend. We all lost something different. We all grieve alone. But how happy it makes me, just for a moment, to share that loss with someone else who lost you too.

All roads lead back to you

I run a weekly writing group called Get Writing. I love it. For two hours a week, I hold it together for my wonderful group of writers and sometimes I manage to focus on something other than you. I get to remember that, even now, I am more than just grief.

I set writing exercises and try to think of things that have nothing to do with death or love or living but invariably, wherever I start out, I end up writing about you.

Today we were in the Winter Gardens and I asked people to focus in detail on the plants, as if we were artists in a life drawing class on a day out sketching. Almost every writer prefaced their reading by saying something along the lines of 'I tried to do what you asked but......' their writers' minds took them elsewhere - to ceiling fans in Hong Kong, to swimming pools, to fairy caves and lands where fibre glass elephants broke free to bathe in the fountains outside. This is what I love about writing groups: writers' minds will not do as they're told.

I told my mind to focus on the plant in front of me, just the plant and nothing else. And this is what I wrote:

In the rattle and hum of an underwater world, life spreads like wildfire: 

a squeak of pram wheels and a shuffle of shoes as people move under glass, like fish in a tank. 

And a baby squeals like a tropical bird on a breath of air while a child's voice says over and over, 

I can do it on my own.

The fire starts here at the heart of this artful plant. 

It thinks it is a flower though its leaves are tough like the rubber soles of shiny shoes,

splayed out like blossoms in a wedding bouquet, 

pear-shaped, bell-bottomed, 

pointing upwards like flames.

The outer leaves are dark black creatures, deep as ladybirds with tiger stripes, 

they lurk down low, so dark they are almost mud. 

Their tips are pointed like feather quills. 

If I spilled some blood and pulled one from its stem, 

I could write the truth right here, right now, scrawling words on pavement. 

I could make a murder scene of this haven.

On the middle leaves, the black has lightened a little to a dark green.

Orange veins streak across bloody tracks, blood orange, going nowhere,
melting into the orange rim, 

the end of everything.

The top leaves are the green of spring grass and fresh apples. 

Their streaks are tracks of lemon and honey. 

They know nothing of the fire that rages beneath them, 

haven't seen the darkness that lurks,

they don't know yet about the blood. 

But the fire is licking at their undersides. 

They can't escape forever.

 They are not blossoms, just leaves and the fire is spreading.
I can't do this on my own.

All roads lead back to you. Your presence and your absence streaks the plants. I write about what is there. And it is always you. I don't know what else to do but write about life and death and love.

http://beverleywrites.co.uk/writing-workshops/get-writing/

Grieving just as fast as I can

Sometimes, it goes like this.

I'm having quite a good day, all things considered. The sun is shining, the kids are happy, I have ticked some jobs off my to do list. I pat myself on the back. I am doing ok. And then I get a message from a friend asking when she can see me: 'I hope things are a bit brighter,' she says. And the sun goes behind the clouds for a moment and I feel a little bit less ok for some reason. Later a different friend sends me another message: 'I hope things get better soon,' she says. By now, it's raining and I feel thoroughly out of sorts and I still don't know why. These are my really good friends and they love me and love from friends like these keeps me afloat and yet, what is this feeling that they're leaving me with?

Yesterday I went to, not one, but three parties. This, you might call progress, or you might call it insanity. Since you died, so far I have been to two children's parties (and cried at both of them), to one disastrous night out in a pub (from which I walked home crying) and, other than that, social occasions have mostly revolved around you (it's ok to cry at those) or I have been one-to-one with good friends who have been there primarily to support me (while I cry some more). So, three parties was ambitious. I felt like a superhero to even attempt such a feat. If this kind of grief is like carrying a full glass of water all day long or walking on a tightrope, going to three parties is like trying to carry that water on a tightrope whilst making conversation with strangers. It is seriously impressive if you can pull it off. Mostly, I pulled it off.

The first party was the hardest. It was a street party on the road that the kids and I will be moving onto so we were meeting new neighbours. Luckily the natives were friendly enough. The kids had a nice time playing with other kids and I chatted to some other mums about school, about the house and the street. It was ok. For a while nobody asked about a partner but eventually one woman risked the subject and I had the thought then, that I could erase the episode where I fell in love with someone who died from my narrative and just tell her that I was separated. But I couldn't do that to you. I did fall in love and you did die, so I told her. 'I'm so sorry,' she said. 'You're very brave. To move on your own.' I felt it. Very brave.

The second party was easier being at my brother's house and consisting, as his parties mostly do, of running around his garden trying to avoid being soaked by water pistols. In the kitchen he asked me briefly, 'how are things?' He stopped short of asking if they were better but the question hung hopefully in the air and I felt I had to give him something. 'Not too bad,' I said. He didn't have time to chat. And then a friend of his approached me and told me that she'd heard what a hard time I'd been having and told me that she'd recently had a double mastectomy. It was like a breath of fresh air, in a stifling day of small talk. She wasn't ok either and there we were, standing like warriors on a battlefield, comparing tortures, eating nibbles in the sunshine, doing our best to keep living. Very brave.

The third party was fancy dress at the big co-housing project where you sometimes worked, amongst some of your friends: socialist performers and reformers. I walked there in twenties-style heels (talking nervously to you in the clouds, asking you for a sign of your presence as I walked, getting more nervous when the clouds kept moving and I couldn't see you.) I was now walking on a tightrope, carrying water, in heels. I knew I was pushing it. But it was a beautiful evening. People sang and read poems and performed tricks. The people who knew you made me welcome as they always do and I chatted to other people I knew from years of working in Sheffield's third sector. As I sat talking to your friend (the one who found your body with me) the most incredible rainbow appeared in the sky and I felt your presence again with relief. The party host talked to me about the new house which is round the corner. We'd stopped short of moving into the co-housing project, though we had considered it for a while, just to be close to you. 'It's nice to stay loosely connected,' I said. And she corrected me, 'no, you are as tightly connected as can be,' and I was so touched. She introduced me to her cousin who lives on the street I'm moving into and he drunkenly asked me something about my marital status and I said, 'it's just me and the kids.' Just like that. So brave. And then the activist singer-songwriter, Grace Petrie, did a gig right there in the central room in the house and she was amazing. And I sat there the whole time marvelling at how the world keeps turning and how people keep living, even the birthday host who told me herself that her partner died years ago. And I was thinking, 'is this it? Is this how you do it? In crowds of like-minded people, singing through the pain?' And then Grace sang a love song and I started to cry again and had to leave the room. Your friend put his arm around me. 'Are you still in pain?' he asked. And he is so kind and such a lovely man but there it is again, the bad feeling I get when he says that word, 'still'.

In amongst the parties yesterday, I chat to people on the Facebook group that I joined as part of my grief writing programme. They call it the 'Tribe of After', refer to each other as grieflings. I ask them why these words, 'better', 'brighter', 'still', have the power to bring me to my knees and they understand completely. They tell me that, of course, it is impossible to feel that the world is bright when my loved one is dead. And how can it get better? My loved one is dead. Unless someone can bring him back to me, it isn't going to get better. And, as if it wasn't bad enough to feel this way, my friends are, with absolutely the best of intentions, making me feel like I'm not doing this grief thing right, like it's not ok for me to feel the way I do. I am failing at grief. I need to change. Don't get me wrong, I want things to get better and brighter too. Sometimes I actually tell myself to snap out of it. But it doesn't work. I am grieving just as fast I can, healing as best I can in the circumstances. There is nothing anyone can do to speed up the process except listen and sit with me while I cry and acknowledge that I am in pain and that it sucks. I tell the Tribe of After that I feel like a superhero just for staying alive and they reply: 'you ARE a Superhero. You ARE.' One of them, in her own posts writes, 'I don't have a hard life, I know I don't...but it does occur to me....that living is the hardest thing I've ever had to do.' Staying alive, without you, is enough. The kids are getting fed, I am managing to work, I am buying a new house for God's sake. I am a superhero. Please, I've lost so much, let me keep the cape.

Casualties of loss

The tow hook on my campervan is deeply embedded now into the metal bumper. I have reversed into things so many times since you died that I have lost count. Driving is another activity that has become hazardous. I remember the advice I read online for the recently bereaved: if you are crying so hard that you can't see where you're going, pull over. Once or twice I had to. But it's not so much the tears that alter my perceptions, it's that my whole awareness has shifted. My focus has changed. Objects in the rear view mirror should appear closer than they are and yet I am looking so far back into the landscape of my memory that I run into them constantly. Reality hits me, like a brick wall, time after time. My eyes aren't on the road ahead anymore either. Instead they are looking into the past or searching for your presence - in clouds, in trees, in the faces of passersby. I still look for you even now. Today, I actually stopped and walked back down the street and peered at a man in a red van. There was something about him. I just had to check. Maybe you hadn't swapped this life for the next, but had just changed your profession and the colour of your van. The driver nudged his mate and they laughed.

The week my mum died, I ran into the back of a man in a shiny white car. He was cross. It was a new car, he said, like this changed everything. He really didn't want to have it repaired. I apologised, handed over my details, explained that I was stressed. His car was the least of my worries, though I didn't say so. A few days later I put diesel into the tank of my vehicle by mistake. I ground to a halt a few yards from the petrol station though it took two young men from the local garage to suggest that perhaps this is what I had done. I sent you a message with a sad face and you replied immediately: 'stay there. I'm on my way.' I had never been so happy in my sadness as I was to see those words, to see your face when you pulled up alongside me, to feel your arms around me in your warm brown fleece, enveloping me with love and care. Being looked after is not something I am used to. It was a treat to see you during the working day and my tears turned into laughter as they always did when you were near. We sat in the campervan together, snacking on Waitrose provisions - stuffed vine leaves, chocolate rice cakes, millionaire shortbread. It was the closest we ever got to a camping trip, parked up at the end of Ecclesall Road, waiting.

You waited alone for the rescue vehicle while I went to see my therapist. 'You go,' you said. 'you need it today'. I didn't need to explain. You understood. You always did. The death had been a shock even though we had been waiting for it for six long years. I needed to talk it through. 'I'll be fine,' you said.

Later you watched with glee as the man pumped the fuel out of the tank, intrigued by the mechanism, asking questions while I hung about, content, just then, to be a dumb girl. I couldn't understand anything the man was saying. Grief can do that too. He taught you how to use the gas conversion and I let my mind wander, knowing that you had it covered. I have no idea now how to do it. I've no idea how to fix the pump either. That too has broken since you left. I thought it was broken once before and you said you'd have a look. While you were fiddling, I realised I hadn't turned the electricity on. We said you were the catalyst that made it work. You were a catalyst for a lot of things. I just needed to have you around and things were ok.

Since you died, it seems like everything has broken. It feels right somehow that things are grinding to a halt without you. First it was the TV. The reception went fuzzy a few weeks after you died so live TV was gone. Which made sense. Why should the TV be live when you weren't? Luckily we still had Netflix and On Demand, but some time ago, that went too. Turns out we can't always have what we want at the click of a button. We were down to watching the old DVDs but a week ago the DVD player froze. The drawer won't open anymore and Rise of the Guardians is stuck forever now. Now nothing plays at all. The silence is comforting. The landline went down in sympathy a while ago as well and though the broadband stutters into life every now and then, often it fades away, like it too is tired of the effort of keeping going.

My mobile is still working though I dropped it heavily soon after you died and the screen shattered so badly that I could no longer see what I was typing. I don't know when or where I dropped it. There are great holes in my memory. It is another thing that isn't working. My daughter and I have been playing Mastermind with a secondhand game but I have no recollection of buying it even though I know we haven't had it long. I often have no idea what I have been doing from one day to the next. I liked the shattered screen on the phone; the pattern had a certain beauty to it - like a butterfly or a spider's web. (I search for meaning in the strangest places now.) For months I have avoided repairing it as if fearing that somehow if I got it fixed it would be a sign of 'moving on', 'letting go', 'getting better'. I like the visible symbols of what your death has done to me.

There have been other casualties too. As if losing you were not enough, I have lost a friend or two. Not everyone is comfortable with broken things.  Other friendships hang by a thread. I struggle to relate to people in the ways I used to and common reference points have fractured, though I have gained new reference points and new friends too. Some people come closer, while others retreat. My world is rearranging.

Soon after you died, I was crying so hard as I tried to phone a friend that I spilled boiling peppermint tea all over my thigh. I couldn't get up quickly enough, was in too much emotional pain to quite feel the urgency of the physical pain, too scared of my emotions to put the phone down. By the time I'd realised how badly burnt I was, it was late at night and my leg was swollen, raw and blistered. Hoards of friends on Facebook offered advice, while neighbours got out of bed to deliver aloe vera plants and people offered to babysit while I went to A & E. I was swamped with care. It is easier to help a friend with a burnt leg than a friend with a broken heart.

Today though, I fixed the screen on my mobile phone. One day I will repair the bumps and bruises on the van and maybe I can find someone else to fix the pump. Perhaps, when I am strong enough, I will even be able to sit for long enough at the end of the phone to find out, via the call centre in India, what is wrong with the broadband and the TV. But the scar on my thigh will always be there and the scar in my heart will be there too. Maybe I will move on one day and maybe things will get better, but I know I will always feel this pain. Because this pain is the other side of love.

The safe place

I sit in the counsellor's office and I cry as I try to explain, again, what I have lost. You have left great holes in the fabric of my life. My Tuesdays and Saturdays are blank spaces in the diary now and the ping on my phone no longer makes my heart sing, although I still check, sometimes, in case it is you. (They say the stages of grief are cyclical, not linear, and denial still shows up from time to time.) There is no-one to say goodnight to now and no ongoing conversation. In each exchange with another human being, I am starting from scratch again. There is no adult that I speak to every day, no guarantee even that I will speak to any one person from one week to the next (except your mum, strangely, who I didn't even know in the before.) Mostly, I feel too tired to make plans, too grief-stricken to socialise, too absorbed in my sadness to relate to other people's struggles, too detached from the real world to connect. But I don't want to be alone because when I am alone your absence overwhelms me. And so I make those plans to walk towards even though really I just want to be walking towards you.

I miss my safe place, I tell her. It is the place where I don't have to work to be understood. Where I am automatically understood and where being myself is all that is required, where just being me is more than enough. I don't really want to go to the cinema, or the theatre, or to a gig or to the pub. I actually don't want to do anything. I just want a lazy day with nothing to do and you alongside me doing nothing too, in a world where we were like Piglet and Pooh and the only goal was honey.   I want to lie in your arms all day and forget the real world. You were the real world for me.

I have often been told that I don't live in the 'real world' or that I have my head in the clouds. The phrase resonates more strongly now that I find myself gazing at clouds searching for your presence, knowing that our last words were about clouds, that you had your head in them too.

We were so alike, you and I, not from the outside but the outside is of no interest to folk like us. We live internally, we live from the heart and the imagination. Myers Briggs tests describe us as 'dreamers, healers, mediators'. We were both INFP (Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving.) I didn't know until this week that it was such a rare personality type, just knew that we were alike and that the thing we had between us was rare and special. Apparently only 4% of the population are INFP. Apparently, for our type, 'the risk of being misunderstood is high'. Apparently when we find like-minded people to spend time with the harmony we feel will be 'a fountain of joy and inspiration'. And it really was.

I don't want a busy social life or a full diary. For an INFP that would be stressful at the best of times and these are the worst of times. I just want my safe place, that rare and special connection, the place where I can relax with my soulmate from the tiny 4%. And so I find myself angry that you have been taken away and depressed about being alone and sometimes, I am back in denial, talking to the clouds saying, ' Are you there? Can you hear me? I miss you. Can't you come back? Please, can't you just come back?'

https://www.16personalities.com/infp-personality

This post is in response to one by Megan Devine at Refuge in Grief.

http://www.refugeingrief.com/personality-type-grief/

Stumpcross Caverns and the Coldstones Cut

As soon as we saw the sign, we made up a song with the words: Stumpcross Caverns and the Coldstones Cut. You invented a kind of jazz riff to go with it, tapped out the rhythm on the dashboard. We kept muddling up the words, had to practise several times to get it right, had to debate the best tune to go with it. But there was no debate about what we needed to do. We had to go there.

But, before we did, we walked along the riverside hand in hand talking. We were always talking. I try to remember now what we talked about along that river and during that time, that precious three days together in North Yorkshire. It was exactly a month before you died. It would have been utterly unthinkable to us then that you might be about to die. It is still utterly unthinkable to imagine that you did.

I remember talking about sailing. We were on the other side of the river then. We were trying to walk a circular route. I was trying to take you to an art gallery that I'd been to with my young husband over twenty years earlier, but it was gone, replaced by some kind of chain pub. Wherever we went, the sailing kept coming back. You'd read books about sailing for years and worked on boats in your youth but you'd never really learned to sail properly. 'What are you waiting for Blacksmith?' I said. 'You're fifty-three. If you want to sail round the world, get yourself some lessons.' And then I said that I'd be sad if you left me to sail round the world but that I wanted you to fulfil your dreams. I only ever wanted the best for you and you for me. With you I learned that that's what love is. Sometimes, you would say, 'I just want to possess you,' and yet you let me be myself, would have set me free if you thought it was for the best. For the record, it wasn't for the best. I wanted to be possessed.

You stopped to take photos of doors and I walked on ahead. We had this joke that if we needed space we would set up elaborate signals to each other. We never needed space, weren't together enough to tire of each other, but it kept us entertained. I did the yogic tree pose from my position down the road and you replied by doing a blacksmith arabesque by the doors. (How it made me smile and cry to see a photo of you in that pose from years ago on the memorial Facebook page after your death.) Then we spotted a tiny path leading back down to the river and ducked under the leaves back to the van.

It was a week of mostly walking (and talking and Scrabble and swimming and reading and writing and making love - the perfect break). The day before, we'd clambered up Brimham Rocks and gone through the charade of trying to shift the giant rocks with our bare hands. (Somewhere there should be photographic evidence of you playing the caveman, pretending to topple the rocks down the hillside. They must be on your phone. The police should release your phone soon, surely. There is no longer an investigation. The case is closed. You died of natural causes. Nothing untoward except for the abomination of a heart filled with love that stopped beating one random night in March.)

We stopped in a jeweller's workshop. You chatted to the jeweller about rivets and working with titanium and I was proud to be with you, enjoying your interest in the craft she was engaged in. I asked you if you'd ever tried to make jewellery - you were a metalworker, after all - and you said that you had plans to make me something. 'I've been saving silver in a coffee pot for years,' you said. It made me laugh and I wrote it down in my notebook. Only you could have silver stored in a coffee pot. (We found the silver after you died and I wrote to the jeweller. She says she will make me something with the silver and titanium. It won't be quite the same but it will be nice to wear your ring, even so.)

We ate lunch in a cafe in Pateley Bridge and then we headed to the Cut. We missed out the Caverns. I prefer to be up high, not down below. It was bitterly cold and windy as we assailed the hillside next to the quarry, striding towards the massive limestone sculpture carved into the landscape. We chased each other round the maze like children and stood, wrapped in each other's arms, staring at the view, like sailors on the deck of ship. We didn't stay long. We hurried back down the hill and holed ourselves up in a cosy cafe. I got out my notebook and wrote this poem while we drank tea and you leafed through a magazine. Perfectly content, alongside each other.

I read the poem at the funeral but I had to change the last line. I couldn't bear to stand up there and break the already broken hearts of the congregation with my own heartbreak. I had to give them some hope, even though I had lost mine. And so I changed it to 'through love, we live again.' It is true, we do. And we love even though death can tear us apart.

Stump Cross Caverns and the Coldstones Cut

The stones are cold, sober and grey,

sand in the wind, whipping around a spiral

sculpture, cut from the cliff,

a giant conch swirling up the hillside,

ice cream on a cone

but made of stone.

I am not alone.

You are my buffer against the breeze,

forging a path through the maze,

smiles frozen, eyes ablaze.

I put my hand in your glove,

remember honeymoon days of youthful love

as we race time around the bend.

You and I are streadfast friends.

On the banks of the Nidd, in Pateley Bridge,

artists trade silver and glass for cold hard cash.

We tread the well-worn river's path,

laugh our way through the bleakness.

You smell of metal and sweat and sweetness.

We marvel at doors we won't walk through

and you glimmer like a hint of February spring

bringing sunshine to everything,

daffodils in the snow.

And down we go, slipping through the snicket

arched with leaves. We are thick as thieves

stealing a moment as precious as titantium

as a light fans into a flame.

With you I start to live again.

The reality of this grief

Sometimes I imagine that my body is full of water. Someone has left a tap dripping inside me and each drip is full of grief and love and memories of you. They say the female body is sixty per cent water, but at the moment it feels more like ninety per cent. I am at least ninety per cent grief. Still. Almost four months since you died. Grief is my constant companion. I feel the water sloshing around inside me constantly and it makes me feel unstable. The noise of the dripping is like tinnitus that I can only drown out temporarily and I have to tread carefully to stop the water from spilling. The longer I go without talking about you, about it, the more the water builds up, the drips getting faster as the day goes on. Eventually, I am full to the brim with grief and it spills out in tears. I am still crying every day for you.

Today the tears came as I was standing in a sandpit at a children's party and a friend asked, with genuine concern, how I was doing. I don't know what I said but the tears and the words came unbidden and with them the relief that I feel when I am allowed to talk about it, to say to someone, 'this is how it feels', to share, just for a moment, the unbearable pain that somehow I am expected to bear, that somehow, I am bearing. I want to tell people about it again and again.  I want to tell them how awful it was to find your body; how terrible it is to have to live without you; how painful it is to have loved you and lost you so soon; how horrendous it is to have been the person you shared your dreams with; how your unfulfilled dreams are carried in my body now, like the weight of that water.

But I have told everyone I know all about it. This isn't news. And yet, somehow, for me, the bereaved, it is. Somehow, when you have lost someone so close to you, that person dies again and again as you wake up each day and with every day, they just get more and more shockingly dead. It isn't getting any easier, in fact is is getting harder, I guess because denial has retreated and I am facing the reality that you are never coming back and that somehow, I have to build a new life without you.

When some people see me crying and hear me still talking about you four months on, they look at me with concern. Their usual response is to ask if I am still seeing my bereavement counsellor. They look relieved when I tell them that I am: at least the professionals are involved. Others ask if I have seen my GP, the implication being that perhaps I need some pills, that this sadness is not normal, that it is out of proportion to the loss. Sometimes I wonder if they're right. The professionals tell me they are not.

Part of the problem is the length of time we were together. We were only involved for eight months. Sometimes I remember the break-up calculation that someone once gave me. Theoretically, according to someone, it should take half the length of the relationship, to get over it. By this logic, I should be over it by now. How great that would be. To be able to put it neatly away in a box, along with the other failed relationships and move on. But this isn't the same. You didn't leave me for another woman, we didn't get bored of each other and we didn't hit that point where we realised that it just wasn't going to go anywhere. You died, completely out of the blue and disappeared from my life without warning. It is a huge loss.

And yet, I am not a widow. We weren't married. We hadn't even established whether we would ever get married, or even whether we could live together. For comfort, I read books written by widows and I see the difference. They describe the way in which family and friends descended on them with food for weeks and months on end, how they moved in with relatives or how relatives moved in with them. They describe not having enough vases and buckets for the flowers, their houses overflowing with letters of condolence. It wasn't like that for me. I got two cards and a bunch of tulips. A wonderful friend stayed for two nights and other friends brought food occasionally, listened occasionally, helped with the kids occasionally, but, essentially, I was on my own. I am on my own. It is hard.

The professionals agree. My bereavement counsellor tells me that even if I had just found a stranger's body, I would still be in shock. It would be normal to still be reeling. And, as she points out, I didn't find a stranger's body. I found the body of the man I loved, deformed and decaying, three days after he had died. The memory haunts me still. It is natural to still be crying. And even if I'd had a happy life and then this had happened, that would be hard enough but to have it happen on top of the loss of my mum and previous partners and the long-term sickness of my son, is really too much. 'No wonder you have lost your optimism,' she says.

And the GP says that, no, I don't need pills. I am having a normal reaction to a horrendous set of circumstances. This week I took the coroner's report to show her because I don't understand the medical terminology. She visibly flinched as she read it and acknowledged that she has had no experience of post-mortems, that she has never seen a body three days after death, that it has just struck her how horrendous that must have been for me. I remember the therapist I was seeing when you died and her reaction when I told her. She sent me home because it was too upsetting for her to deal with. The shock was unbearable for her. She had been listening to me talk about you for eight months and needed time to grieve herself. She had become fond of you and suddenly you had died and she was completely unprepared for this turn of events. She couldn't help me.

Only people who have been through similar bereavements understand how completely earth-shattering this kind of grief is because there is no widespread recognition of the pain of grief in our culture. In other cultures and historically in our culture, the expectations around grief are much clearer. People wear black or rend their clothes to visibly show the world that they are grieving. They are not expected to act normally. And there are recognised stages to the grieving process, that go on for months and years. No-one expects someone who has experienced a close bereavement to socialise and after my attempts at going out and attempting to be normal, I can understand why. Yet, in our culture, we are expected to 'get over' someone's death once the funeral has passed and get back to normal as quickly as possible. My bereavement counsellor likened it to the way in which we deal with having children. These days, celebrity magazines show us photographs of women who are back at work with their bodies slim and toned, weeks after giving birth. We are meant to assimilate these huge changes effortlessly and are left feeling like failures if we acknowledge that birth and death have completely rearranged our internal and external landscapes.

I read about bereavement and am reassured and horrified in equal measure. I keep reading, with dismay, that the second year is worse than the first and that grief takes not months but years to work through. I read that uncomplicated grief, such as for the death of a parent in old age (uncomplicated because it is at least somewhat expected) takes four years to come to terms with where shocking death (like the one I have experienced), takes seven. I feel like I don't have seven years to lose to this grief having lost so many years previously to other griefs and losses and sickness. And then I realise that grieving is not going to be the only occupation of these next seven years. I will live alongside the grieving process and there will be moments of joy amongst the sadness. But I read, also, that it will never go away and my bereavement counsellor tells me that this is true, that she is not in the business of making it better. I will carry this grief, like water, for the rest of my days. And sometimes it will spill over. And I will need to keep talking about it. And I will write about it because spilling ink is as healing as spilling tears for me.

A friend recently sent me this quote from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross:

'Telling your story is primal to the grieving process. You must get it out. Grief must be witnessed to be healed."

So I keep talking about it to people who listen and after I had cried in the sandpit, I felt a little more able to carry on again. The tears that spilled out made room for a little more pleasure and made the grief easier to carry. And now that I have written, I feel a little better, until tomorrow morning when I will wake up and realise that you are still dead and it will all start again.

Through your lens

I've never had a decent 'author' photo. It's been okay because I've never really quite seen myself as a proper author. I never thought I was good enough, as an author, or as anything really. I've always been plagued by self-doubt. It was something you and I had in common, along with the difficult fathers. But when I published my first book last year, I thought I'd better make a website and I struggled to find one of those suitably enigmatic portraits that authors have. So I cobbled something together using inadequate snapshots taken by friends. Some time after we got together, I asked you if you'd take a good author portrait for me but you never did. Like so many things we had planned, we never got round to it. Or so I thought.

And then I found this photograph amongst the files on your laptop after your death and instantly thought that here it was, a gift from you to me - the author photo that you never took. It is extra special to me because, though you'd never shown it to me before, strangely, you had written about it in a message to me, the message that you sent me when you were wavering about whether you were good enough for me. It was taken in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park last October on the day that we got together (for the second time!) This is what you wrote:

I was looking at one of the pictures I took of you yesterday on the bridge where the poppies are. I could eulogise. I'm not going to though, except to say that one of the qualities I saw there seemed to be a tremendous maturity and yet last night as I looked at you I saw a completely different face, youthful, angelic almost, such grace. I am overwhelmed.

So am I, when I look through the photographs that you took of me. Somehow, looking at myself through your lens, I see a different version of myself. I can see myself the way you did. And the gift isn't just the pictures to put on my website and on the jackets of the books that I must now write, it is the gift of having been truly loved. I can see myself through your eyes and know that, just as you were, I am loveable. I am good enough. It is the most precious gift. Thank you.

Perfect for me

'How do you just keep getting better and better?' you once said, as we'd discovered yet another shared pleasure. It was something we observed regularly, this amazing compatibility we had and yet, when you re-joined the dating site that I was on, just in order to view my profile, I didn't even notice you, didn't actually recognise you, would certainly not have considered you as a romantic prospect. And yet, there it was, an irrefutable, wonderful, easy connection between the two of us that did just keep getting better and better.

'Are you like, just my perfect man?' I asked as we were walking along Ecclesall Road on an early date.  'You tick all my boxes.' We were on our way to Ann Atkinson's Memorial book launch, the night that you would dance with me for the first time.

I don't think you replied, just smiled and held my hand a little tighter, walking with an extra bounce to your step. You'd just told me that you'd quite like to learn to tango. I had always wanted a partner who would learn to dance with me. We hit a slight problem when you realised that the tango lessons would be at the Millennium Hall; you'd had an altercation with the manager having parked your van in the space reserved for religious officiates, but, hey, it was a small obstacle.

Other boxes that you ticked:

• Like me, you loved to be outside but saw no need to turn the enjoyment of the countryside into a competitive sport. ('Beverley', one internet suitor asked, 'on your country walks, do you ever break out into a run?' 'No,' I replied. 'Never. Running would spoil a good walk.')
• You loved swimming
• Your idea of a good New Year's Eve night out was to be alone (or alone with me) contemplating the big questions of life, outdoors with a good vantage point - not a party or a drop of alcohol in sight
• You loved a good bonfire
• You loved music
• You loved making things
• You loved talking
• You loved books
• You loved words

This last one, along with the dancing, swung it for me. When I discovered that you liked doing crosswords and playing Scrabble, my head nearly exploded with joy. How I had missed having a man to play Scrabble with. Once we had discovered this shared delight, we played many times, mostly at my house but also on the mini-breaks we had together; you would neglect to pack food or clothes, but always remembered the Scrabble. I'm sorry to say that, when you died, I was in the lead. I know this will displease you immensely and that it was something you wanted to rectify. I'm sorry you won't have the chance. You will be pleased, though, to know that your mum and I have plans for a game soon.

The first game we played was on the 19th September. I know the date because it was the day of my son's fifth birthday party. After our first night together had left us confused and overwhelmed that week, we had agreed to be friends but there was no question that we were still assessing the situation, that we were on probation. That day you notched up a few more points in the wider game that we were engaged in. You were on call all day to help with the building of the Ninja Lego birthday cake for my allergic son and you fetched bouncy balls from Tescos for party bags, delivering them just in time for the party - as usual, I was running late. And then you waited for the evening when the children had gone back to their dad's and you came round after the party for Scrabble. I was exhausted and longed to curl up in your arms but instead we just hugged for a little longer than was decent and then set about playing the game. We disagreed on some of the rules but agreed, crucially, that there was to be no looking up of words. In my tiredness I knocked the board over at a crucial point in the game and impressed you with my ability to completely reconstruct the whole board. I can still picture the scene. You sitting across from me on the kids' dressing up box. You always looked big in my living room, like some kind of Hagrid figure who didn't belong in a normal house. When you died, I found a description of the game that you had written. Funny to think that, to you, I looked small.

Her son's birthday party has left her tired leaving our choices diminished.We hug for a long minute - her lonely, I needy. Small talk, pictures on laptops, then we play Scrabble. We appear close matched. I sit opposite her over the board and she looks small suddenly on a big sofa in a big room whilst I observe disembodied a fact in the room, not sure what to make of things. The game ends. It couldn't be better, a kind of quantum superposition of victory: by my rules she wins, by hers I win. Perfect. 

It was. You were. Perfect for me. 

The tightrope of grief

Every day I walk a tightrope in the darkness over a gaping chasm. I have no idea where I am trying to get to as there is no light out there to aim for but I know I must keep moving, edging tentatively towards some kind of unfathomable future. It is a balancing act, I am told, between grief and recovery.  Spend too long looking at the chasm and you risk falling into the blackness, never to return. But run too quickly over it and the darkness will eat you just the same, perhaps slowly or unexpectedly. Perhaps at some point in the future when you think you are sitting safely on the other side on a sunny patch of grass, the ground will open up and swallow you whole without warning. You can't escape from this kind of grief. The only safe way to go is carefully, inch by inch, breath by breath, word by word, day by day, putting one foot in front of the other, hoping, and yet I dare not even hope anymore, that one day you will be glad that you kept going, that one day you might reach the other side.

The best way to keep your balance on a tightrope is to focus on something directly in front of you which is fine by me because I can't look too far ahead; the emptiness is too overwhelming. So I put things in my diary, not because I look forward to them, but because they keep me looking forwards and, sometimes, looking forwards keeps me from falling. And sometimes I fall anyway. I don't yet know my limits in this new world. I have to test the rope to find out whether it can take the weight of me and this grief that I am carrying, this unwieldy monster that I haul around with me in the dark. Sometimes it is sleepy and well-behaved and I can carry it gracefully; the crowd don't even notice the beast on my shoulders. And sometimes, they notice it and are impressed that I can still tiptoe onwards with such a burden on my back. But sometimes, it is wild and wakish and it pulls me off-balance.  And when this happens and the rope is slippery and the spotlights are too bright in my eyes, when the noise of the band and the crowds is too much, I go down. And you, my safety net, are not there to catch me. Luckily, at the bottom of the chasm there is water. Luckily I can swim. So far, I have not drowned.

I have started to compile a mental list of the things I can do so that I can put them in the diary and keep walking towards them. These are the things I can still do: writing, swimming, walking, talking about you, talking about grief, reading about grief, leading writing workshops, talking about work, reading stories to the children, getting children ready for school and bed, listening to music, playing games. I hope that I can move house. The new house is like an investment for the future, a pleasant place for some future self to dwell in some future life where there is joy. This week I added tennis to my list. I grew up playing tennis and the memory of how to play is strong: hold racket, move legs, hit ball. Repeat for an hour. Success.

This is the current list of things I can't do: keep the score whilst playing tennis, drink, go to the gym, watch TV, read normal books, make flapjack, manage money, listen to the news, listen to other people's problems, talk about other people's relationships, not talk about you, make small talk.

I have never been good at small talk but now I feel completely inept. I can't get my face or the tone of my voice to match my words and find myself smiling whilst explaining breezily to strangers that I recently found my partner's body and that my mum died too and that's it's all been a bit tricky. But, hey, I'm lucky that, because everyone is dead, I have money and so I get to buy a lovely house. And they don't quite know what to say and I try to change the subject and then they start talking about their families and I realise that I can't bear to listen to them. I try to join in with conversations about partners and I fall back on the conversational female staple of comparing experiences and then I remember that I'm talking about someone who is dead and that no-one wants to hear about the sex life and domestic habits of someone who is dead. And if people are talking about their divorces, I have no empathy anymore because death trumps divorce every time and I know because I've experienced both. I am positively, twistedly smug in my misery. It feels ugly and unkind and not at all like me. And even when people talk about illness I lack sympathy and for a moment I find myself thinking, hey, worst case scenario, they're only going to die and death looks pretty appealing to me compared to this farce. We're all going to end up there and right now, that feels like a blessing. Death holds no fear for me. It is living that scares me. I would have hoped that all this tragedy would give me empathy but at the moment I am self-absorbed and all off-kilter, tumbling off the tightrope under the bright lights while I feel the audience is staring aghast.

So, I walk home crying and long to curl up in your arms because you get me even when I'm weird, but you are not there and so I curl up with your jumpers again and realise that, for now, socialising is on the 'things to avoid' list.

And then I wake up and get back on the tightrope and put one foot in front of the other again, walking towards some unfathomable future. And as I walk I am so grateful for the people who walk alongside me and for the ones whose hands form a safety net beneath me and for the people who fill the gaps in my diary and listen to my self-absorbed, inept talk. And I am so grateful for you and your love, the tiny light in the darkness, that tells me that, even now, I am beautiful and wonderful and enough.