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/