How Grief Distorts Time

Posted on by Aimée Claire

Losing your love throws the earth off its axis. It fundamentally shifts your entire universe. Your whole world is ripped apart, the ground beneath your feet shaken so hard that you don’t even know how to stand anymore. Losing your love so early in life is beyond words… your past, present and future has vanished in the blink of an eye. There’s a seismic shift so beyond words that even time itself is reconfigured. It’s not only the earth that’s out of sync, you fall out of sync.

Time doesn’t move and flow in the same way after loss. We are used to time being linear but death rips time and space apart at the seams. You’re stuck in the moment it happened yet it feels like it was an entire lifetime ago… yesterday, yet five years. It’s so raw yet you’re sometimes unsure if it really happened at all. Two seconds ago, yet you’re frozen in time. A discrepancy starts to appear in the fabric of time for you… how does it feel like it just happened yet so long ago?

Grief lives in the everyday. It lives within us… becomes a part of our DNA. Grief isn’t a one-time event where we feel sad and recover, it’s not an anniversary or a funeral, it’s a whole-body experience and we carry it everywhere we go. Grief lives in the day-to-day missing of them, the vacuum their loss has created in our lives… so maybe this surreal feeling of time being changed grows out of that; the space between living grief every day and realising it has been years that you’ve been living with it. Grief lives in the moment their food is no longer in the fridge, the moment when we can’t text them at work, when their toothbrush is missing. Time and time again. Day after day. Grief is fluid, it moves and changes with us throughout life… it is so much more than the initial shock, it reverberates through every part of life, nothing is left untouched… even time itself.

You fall out of sync, out of time, out of belonging. When something as fundamental as time itself shifts… it’s hard to find your footing again in life. When my love died, I was 26. I’m now 31 and yet a lot of me still feels frozen in time, stuck at the age of 26. My life stood still for such a long time that even though the universe keeps moving, keeps unfolding at rapid pace… I’m stuck in the middle of the haze. You try to steady your feet, to find an equilibrium, but the fact is your life has changed, the core of your entire universe has altered. Grief even changes your basic senses. You won’t eat the same again, sleep the same again, breathe the same again. Your life becomes divided between before and after loss. You will regain a lot, as time moves forward your grief will too and it becomes intertwined within you but very much a part of you. We rebuild. We search for new foundations… but we also have to acknowledge that the foundations that grief destroyed weren’t just our home. Just like René Magritte’s painting… it was the universe that was thrown off its axis. We have to rebuild the sky, the clouds, the very stability that our world was built on.

I write this in the hope to not only speak to those who have lost their partner so you know you’re not alone… but for those close to us too. Many of our friends think we’re rebuilding a house, a home that was bulldozed.  We’re rebuilding the whole sky… from scratch.

(Picture – The Universe Unmasked, René Magritte)

 

Grief and The Fluctuating Future

Posted on by Aimée Claire

When your love first dies, the lights of the universe are switched off.  

Time moving feels wrong, you want to scream at the sun for rising and you wonder how you’ve landed in this apocalyptic existence. People will tell you of a time when the pain eases, when your life will return to normal somehow… what they don’t realise is that normal doesn’t exist for you any longer. It cannot exist because the most central person to all of your hopes and dreams has gone… but it goes deeper, bloodier than that. I lost my ability to daydream when he died because it’s not only my future with him that stopped existing, but any future at all. I’ve always been a daydreamer… yet suddenly all I could see was such dark black that everything ceased to exist. There was no life, no air to breathe, the colour didn’t just drain from the world… the world ceased to exist under a blanket of darkness. Grief reconfigures so much of your life that it’s natural for the very concept of a future to feel alien. You’ve just fallen out of sync with the only life you ever knew and the trauma blocks vision.

At first the pain was all I could see. The idea of being in this much pain forever felt horrific, yet equally horrific was the idea that the pain would ease… because that would mean he really was dead and I had no idea what my life would look like, a life of After Him. I didn’t want that life. I was desperate for the pain to ease yet terrified of what that means… terrified that I’d be in this intense pain forever and equally terrified that the pain could ever go. That was much of what early grief was for me.

The truth is time doesn’t heal, it gives us space to absorb this loss into your life and learn how to carry it so we can become friends with our grief, a constant companion walking by our side. The intensity of the pain lightens as time gives us the space to build our lives around loss so we can move forward and find new joys… and that, right there, is one of the biggest things that made me realise I could survive this… joy and grief can co-exist.

There was a shift somewhere deep inside me when I realised that I didn’t have to let go of loving Marky and missing him to move forward and find new joys. I felt so much lighter when I realised new happiness and old grief can co-exist. We carry that grief and love and suddenly a future looked possible, with him still by my side, just in a different form. I can’t tell you of an exact crystalised moment that a future felt possible… I think grief lives within us and becomes so interwoven with the fabric of our lives that one day you just realise that the future doesn’t look as terrifying anymore. I still have no idea what the future looks like, but it wasn’t overwhelming darkness anymore. There’s a viral tweet that really spoke to me… ‘You don’t have to be hopeful about the future, it’s enough to just to be curious about what is coming.’

Of course, when you realise a future is possible it is terrifying in a myriad of new ways. Grief makes us simultaneously feel like nothing can hurt us again as we’ve been through the worst imaginable already… yet also makes us feel more fragile to hurt. Invulnerable yet supremely vulnerable at the same time… which is difficult to hold.

Rebuilding a life where every plan has been thrown away is hard. I’ve found the future fluctuates for me… sometimes I am hopeful, sometimes I am scared, some of my plans pre-grief still exist and parts of me are coming back, equally some parts of me are forever changed, reborn. Living with grief isn’t an either/or… we contain a multitude of seemingly contradictory emotions, overwhelming loss and overwhelming joy are not opposites, we walk through this life with a permanent amputation now. Grief doesn’t give us only two choices, to look to the past or to look to the future… we can hold both.

If you’re in raw grief… hold on, you don’t have to look to the future right now, I know that it doesn’t exist for you right now. If you’re in the darkness, those of us further along will hold your hand through it.

When your life falls out of the present tense

Posted on by Aimée Claire

When my love first died, I found I didn’t have words for my life anymore.

I never knew which tense to speak in… using past tense broke my heart, I wasn’t ready for it… but the present tense also became confusing and painful. I felt I couldn’t join conversations anymore. If a conversation was happening about a favourite band of ours, I couldn’t say ‘we love them’ as that is speaking of him in the present, I couldn’t say ‘we loved that band’ as it puts me into the past tense and leaving him out of the equation to say that I love that band feels like it denies my present, my memories and my best friend’s life.

It left me tongue tied… like my entire life had fallen out of the present tense onto this surreal plane of existence that was entirely different, yet I looked exactly the same to those around me.

I found it wasn’t just that people were awkward with my pain and grief, they seemed to be uncomfortable with my happy memories and love too. Averted gazes when I talked about a holiday we had, uncomfortable silences filled the room like a ghost lingering over me. Mark was and is my best friend, when he died so suddenly, I was spun out of orbit… all roads led back to him, every single thing had a connection to him yet I felt like I had a gagging order over my life.

I don’t want my life to become a history book and I’ve found the art of carrying my grief is about holding the past and future simultaneously. Six years into this surreal new life and I still switch tenses and I still want to talk about my life with him, because he is forever present for me, a part of my life and our love that I carry with me and is interwoven with the strands of a new life that I am trying to rebuild. I am bringing him with me… he is not consigned to a chapter of my past or an event for people to talk about in hushed tones… he was and is my love. He is the most beautiful person and I will always be in love with him – and what do you do when you’re wholly in love with someone? You shout it from the damn rooftops!

This doesn’t mean I am stuck or I am refusing to rebuild a new life… I honour my grief and my Marky’s life by telling his story, our story and letting the world know.

We lose so much when our person dies, we lose a shared language, all our secret in-jokes and knowing looks, our person who knows us inside-out. We even lose some of our memories… have you ever remembered an awesome thing that happened and had a conversation where your memories bounce off each other? You miss the only other person who was there in that moment, who shared it with you, to remember details and giggle about it with you.

When we can’t join normal, every day conversations it compounds that feeling of our life having fallen out of the present tense… We want to talk about them. We now live lives of a seeming duality, holding the sadness of grief and the bursting passion of love. Grieving widows contain a multitude of emotions, whole worlds craving to express themselves, to be present, to be heard, to be lived – as our present is so painful but still our lives, our stories and our love.

On Grief Dreams

Posted on by Aimée Claire

We process huge loss and grief at night… We dream about them coming back from the dead, or being half-dead… My dreams come up with elaborate answers to explain where he has vanished to so suddenly. My grief dreams have been trying to understand and fix this for years now, to solve it like a drama murder mystery. In some of my dreams he is a missing person, in others he is dead but has come back to life, in some he’s come back from the dead and can’t understand why I’m so paranoid about him dying again (while I scream at him that he can’t go for a run because he just died and has to be careful with his heart!), in others he has left me and we haven’t talked in years… in some he has fallen out of love with me, or found love with someone else. I’m often searching and I am often confused. He is so often within reach but I cannot reach him… which echo the night he died and I am desperately trying to contact him. The dreams make me search for him… endless puzzles with every answer other than he obvious… he died.

Our minds process death and how someone is missing from our lives on a multitude of levels… they peel off and crumble at different moments and often in our dreams. Dreams show our grief in the way of a puzzle… our minds take such a long time to process what death is, that our dreams treat it like solving a riddle of ‘where have they disappeared to?’ so they test out different scenarios to make it make more sense… testing out different puzzle pieces to see if one fits and makes sense.

My mind has thrown up every possible scenario about where my beloved has gone… because how do you accept the permanence of death? What is acceptance? It’s an easy word to say but not to comprehend. Even though we know our partners would never ever have wanted to break up with us or weren’t kidnapped by MI5, our poor brains are still telling us it’s still more likely than death as death is utterly overwhelming and utterly illogical. Sometimes it feels like the dreams confront death itself… many of us have disturbing ones where our loves come back half-dead, zombie-like… decaying and parts falling off them as we desperately try to ‘re-build’ them, but they’re not there, they’re not the same. It’s like looking death in the eyes. I had these ones years ago and they still make me shudder.

Our minds are clinging and grasping for that logical answer… the permanence of death is too shocking.

This is not denial of the fact they have died. I saw my love’s body in the chapel of rest. I kissed his cold forehead and told him I love him. I saw his body lowered into the ground. I took earth into my palms and scattered it in the ground. I know he is dead… but tell that to my dreams? They will not believe you. Our minds are trying to explain the unexplainable… what is death? There is no explaining the unexplainable permanence of death.

The first year of grief I would describe like a horror film… Your organs have been ripped out but somehow you are left alive. You don’t know how one human body can hold pain like this. The second year of grief is debris and puzzles… you’re left with pieces of a life that don’t make sense. They look alien. They’re illogical, just like the grief dreams. You stare at this debris as if it could possibly make sense but you’re still working with an illogical puzzle, you’re trying to make a puzzle work that is missing huge pieces and all the edges don’t fit with each other and don’t slot into place. Grief dreams keep trying to form a shape out of our experiences and make them make sense… but they need time, a lot of time.

My most recent grief dreams as someone five years into grief have haunted me in a different way. I have dreams where my love is the backstory… he is there, a constant presence… yet I don’t talk to him. I wake up and feel angry and disappointed in myself… why on earth didn’t I speak to him? I’ve been wanting to connect and to talk to him for so many years now… yet I didn’t when I had the chance in my dream. He was there and I didn’t speak to him. I felt so upset with myself waking up from this dream but on reflection I think it is my mind placing him into my current life. I understand he is no longer here… but he is a constant undercurrent in my life, my guide, a constant presence in an ongoing life without him. His life, our love, my grief…. They are a constant in my life now, they guide me going forward and I carry my love for him forward in every part of life now.

He is a part of my DNA… I don’t believe in guardian angels but he’s a constant guide and presence in my life, my undercurrent.

So, my message to you is… you gentle soul who can’t work out why your love’s death doesn’t feel real or why you keep expecting them to walk through the door… why you keep dreaming of them coming back from the dead or leaving you. Grief isn’t linear… sometimes grief comes and punches you in the face without warning and whispers ‘he’s dead’ with overwhelming clarity and it hurts like hell. Clarity of death and ‘magical thinking’, as Joan Didion put it, can co-exist. It feels the harshest reality on earth yet surreal and unreal at the same time. I remember with horrific clarity the night the police rang on my door bell to tell me my love was found dead, collapsed in the street. We had no idea his heart was in trouble, no warning signs, he was seemingly fit and healthy. I remember with horrific clarity years on when it suddenly hit me out of utterly nowhere, a normal day at work and my mind just whispered to me ‘he’s really dead’… out of nowhere. I couldn’t contain myself. The shock creeps up on you, yet surprises you so often. You’re normal if you’ve wondered if this was all a dream… did your life with your love even happen? It doesn’t feel it often. I’ve written before how grief distorts time itself… the whole universe. I love the title of the book ‘The year of magical thinking’ as it speaks so much to the surreal, not earthly feeling you’re left with after your love dies… you’re waiting for them to return, often not consciously… but your dreams play tricks on you.

The Unwed Widow

Posted on by Aimée Claire

When your love dies, you find out how lacking language is. You find yourself searching and struggling for words to put your grief into but nothing is enough… language does not have the form to express this much love and this much loss.

If you weren’t married this lack of language can be so hurtful as people use it as a way to dismiss or diminish your relationship and your grief. I still remember one of the hardest hitting comments was someone quite innocently and with no ill intent asking ‘oh, was it serious?’ after I said my boyfriend died. I hated that it needed to be asked… I hate that I needed to justify my grief or our relationship. I’ve lost count of the number of ‘you’re young and beautiful, you’ll find someone else’ comments now.

Words are powerful. They give rise to expression, help us communicate, give us community and help us find the right support. This is why I claim the word widow for myself. I lost my love, my future, all our life plans, hopes and dreams. He was my person. We were going to grow old together. We struggle about how to define ourselves in a way that society understands as we have no word for our loss. The term widow fits us outside of law because people can understand what you’ve lost if you say ‘widow’. It gives us a way to express ourselves, our loss and our love… and that means a hell of a lot to me and other unwed widows.

If you are an unwed widow struggling with this… I am here to remind you that love is the best thing we do.

The love you gave and shared with your partner is a gift. The purest form of affection and joy. I find comfort in the idea that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him… but he did spend the rest of his life with me. You made the end of your loves life infinitely better by loving them. Love is not measured in time or marriage certificates. Love is purer, kinder and more human than this.

We talked about marriage all of the time… Marky used to joke that we were engaged to be engaged to be engaged as he would always ask me to spend the rest of his life with him… especially during morning cuddles. Two months before his sudden and unexpected death he told me he knew how he was going to officially propose… and it kills me that I’ll never know what he planned, or get to have a wedding or marriage with the love of my life. We had chosen names for our future children. We even talked about our wedding on the morning of the day he died.

I wish we had gotten the chance. Our short time together or lack of official paper doesn’t make our love less than, and doesn’t make grief easier as Mariella Frostrup recently suggested. Like other young widows, we grieve the life that was meant to be, the future that was stolen from us and that part of loss is bigger than you can imagine. Some choose not to be married or have children and that doesn’t make their love less than either, true commitment takes many forms. Myself and my love would travel over 170 miles into a different country to see each other on weekends… That is a commitment to your shared love.

It took me a few months to find my biggest support, the charity Widowed and Young, as I did not think to consider myself a widow. In the early days of grief, I would be desperately googling bereavement support, searching forums and groups to try to find a place where my grief would fit. It was only on the recommendation of someone I met through one of those bereavement groups that I found my place… WAY is for those who lost their partner young. Full stop. Inclusive of all genders, sexualities and relationship statuses. I almost missed out on finding support and my community because I didn’t have the language.

This also takes a political turn… unmarried couple’s children lose out on bereavement payments that they need, deserve and should be entitled to, simply because of the marriage status of their parents. There was recently a landmark case which was won, where this was found to be in breach the Human Rights Act as it’s discrimination on the basis of marriage and birth. The Supreme Court Judge said ‘Their needs [unwed widows], and more importantly their children’s needs, are the same’ yet the Department for Work and Pensions have said the Government is not obliged to change the law following the Supreme Court’s decision.

There are times when filling out legal papers I am aware I will continue to have to select single, rather than widowed… it is painful for my tongue to form the word… like saying he never existed and our relationship never counted… and that sadly cannot be changed. What can be changed is how we accept and acknowledge people’s pain and relationships, no matter of what form they take. If you know an unwed widow, validate how painful this is for them and acknowledge how much they’ve lost.

No matter of time or paper, we lost our happy-ever-after.

On Grief and Social Media… A Love Letter to the Internet

Posted on by Aimée Claire

People make statements about social media disconnecting us from real life but our use of social media is all about connecting with others.

I wouldn’t have met Marky without a facebook group about Jeff Buckley. I wouldn’t have friend requested him if he hadn’t typed the sweetest and most emotional post about people being connected through music… something in his words touched me. We didn’t even meet for years as we had busy lives in different countries but we became best friends through the internet. We shared so many in-jokes and giggles and so much of our lives through messages long before we met and fell in love in person. He was the first person I told when my dad was diagnosed with cancer and he was my biggest support when my brother was in hospital. After we met, we still had to do long distance and the internet let us keep intimacy alive even when over 170 miles apart. Since he died, I often watch people on trains smiling down at their phones. Where others see disconnect, I know those people are talking to their person, fostering new friendships or reuniting old ones.

In the worst time of my life I have been able to turn to the internet for support and community. I feel so thankful to have social media now to write about him, to share photos and express when the pain feels overwhelming and it feels like I cannot go on. When grief leaves me isolated, I can still reach out for help. I found my home in the charity Widowed and Young… this support group is a little bit of magic… finding people going through the same thing has saved my life. Our loss is understood within each other and we support each other through every part of life that grief touches (everything). It feels like a place where everyone ‘gets it’ and you don’t have to explain the nuances of grief or defend your grief to those who don’t understand… you can just share as little or as much as you want and there is always someone else who has been there. We make amazing friendships and build new foundations together in a life that none of us wanted, and that is something so beautiful.

This is before I have even mentioned how many amazing, beautiful, kind and empathetic people I met through online activism. I have met many best friends this way who inspire me greatly. Some dismiss this kind of activism and label it ‘armchair activism’ as if it isn’t worth anything but they’re wrong to do so. People organise rallies through social media, create protests, debate and find new and inventive ways to help.

We create friendships and love through the internet. We create unity and a sense of belonging. We are living in the real world and this helps us through it and connects us to people we may never have met, issues we may never have thought about and experiences we may never have been able to have without it.

Interwebs… ily.

Grief looks like me

Posted on by Aimée Claire

I was the picture of grief in the earliest days, when the shock left me unable to walk and breathing ached. Grief looked like me when I’d burst out crying in public or when my mum had to desperately force feed me. Today is 2 years 9 months since my Marky died and today grief looks like me. I carry it with me always. Grief looks like me when I do my eyeliner perfectly and my hair is shiny. Grief looks like me when I talk to friends and laugh with my whole body. My grief is ongoing just as my love is.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a comment that actress Holly Matthews made in an interview about losing her husband… ‘Grief looks like me’. Grief looks like anything you can possible imagine. Sometimes you might look like a depressed wailing heap on the floor (and trust me I have been there and I am the Queen of crying on public transport!) but sometimes you put your makeup on and go to work and smile, interact with the world seamlessly and no one knows how much you’re battling to survive. I always liked that quote… Be kind, for everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about.

Today marks 1005 days of grieving. 1005 since my love died and these days people look at me slightly oddly when I say I am grieving or have had a bad grief day, as if the act of grieving was a static place in time and I should be past that now. I know many widows who wish for the Victoria era of black mourning clothes so we can tell the world that we feel fragile, yet so far along in this journey I would be looked at quite oddly even in Victorian times for still wearing my black veil. I believe grief is something you carry with you for life… it gets easier to handle and feels lighter at times, a huge dull weight at others and sometimes you learn a new way of carrying it. It changes shape constantly and fluctuates but you carry it with you always… ‘Some things in life cannot be fixed, they can only be carried’ writes Megan Divine. My love died utterly suddenly and unexpectedly. Within one minute his life stopped and my entire universe changed and I will always carry this with me as I love him, it matters, it hurts. He was magical and he was beautiful and our lives will forever be deeply intertwined. Yet in our culture when the supposed time for grieving has passed, people don’t understand why or how you are still grieving or how much it effects every part of your life. It is not something to be scared of but to embrace. If you have a friend who has lost someone, ask them how they are today, mention their loves name because it will help. Death is such a natural part of life yet we run scared of it rather than embracing the pain. Sometimes we need to embrace the pain. We want to say their names and tell their stories. We want to smile at those memories but we also want to cry when it stabs us unexpectedly. We want to share it with you on the bad days and the good, but we’re stuck in a culture that tries to shut down pain.

Today you will have passed strangers in the street who have just lost someone, friends who lost their parent a few years back, colleagues who lost their best friend 10 years ago and for no reason at all, today their grief might have hurt just that little bit more… whether on day 1 or 1005. Grief looks like us all because grief is a natural part of life, we need to stop running from it and open ourselves up to the idea that grief lives with us, not opposite.

A letter to the doctor who compared losing my partner to losing a pet rabbit

Posted on by Aimée Claire

My first GP said I was young and beautiful and I would find someone else

A nurse said she was sure I would feel better in a month

Friends compared my love dying to a break-up or divorce

You compared losing my love to losing a pet

Many people told me it would make me a better person

In the long run… stronger, more sensitive, more able

When my world was disintegrating at the seams

Many well-meaning people told me

I would love again

Many people wanted to help,

By absenting my pain.

You’re the first place people turn to after loss. When the police came to my house near midnight to tell me my love had been found dead in the street I remember I just wanted to walk. I felt like I could keep walking for the rest of my life. I kept repeating tell me this isn’t real tell me this isn’t real tell me this isn’t real… I had no idea what to do or what happens now. The next morning I went to see my doctor.

The morning my rabbit died I had to get up at 4:30am as I was on the morning shift. I was heartbroken, he was a beautiful companion and he had been in my family for seven years. I did go to work… and the day after, and the day after. I didn’t need anti-depressants to keep me alive, I didn’t want sleeping pills to just-for-the-love-of-god help me sleep… my dreams for the future weren’t utterly shattered to pieces and although I loved that little bunny my future still existed. It is wrong I have to even type these words… to explain to someone why losing the love of your life is simply not the same as losing your pet. It’s not the same as losing your parent. It’s not the same as losing your sibling. It’s not the same as losing your grandparent. It is not the same as any other loss as each loss is different and should never be compared.

Your words not only tried to compare but they exposed a sad picture of how our culture views grief. You used losing a pet rabbit as an example to tell me I should be coping better. If your pet rabbit had died, you would expect to be feeling better by now. You wouldn’t be coping by taking pills. In your eyes I was failing. I was grieving wrong. I was taking too long. I was too sad, for far too long.

We label people with complicated grief when it doesn’t fit into our standards. We desperately want the bereaved to move on… a phrase that feels like acid to our skin. We try to cover their pain with platitudes about healing and finding another love, as if one love replaces another or that falling in love with another would stop our grief dead in its tracks. Excuse the image. The bereaved are always too much.

So let me tell you a secret that all bereaved people know, no matter who they have lost. The first two to three years after a loss is the immediate aftermath. Then the beginning starts. The beginning is when we start to be able to live rather than survive, when hopefully, we can move with our grief instead of against it and build a life around it. Our grief is messy, strident, consuming and yet invisible to you at the same time. All bereaved people know this secret that grief is life-long. It does not mean we are broken. It means we’re human, we loved and still do.

When you dig down to the roots of the thing, there lays something that isn’t nothing, it isn’t emptiness, it is love with no place to go… it is love that still grows and love is a powerful thing. Yet you view us as weak. I turned to you for help, you’re in a trusted position. I came away from seeing you feeling more isolated than ever, feeling like the only people who would ever understand were those who were also widowed… and suddenly the world looked very narrow, very disconnected.

I wish I could write to you what grief feels like but there is a reason I call my writing a nameless pain… language does not have the words to express this. Each loss is unique, even when they share so much… there are universal experiences but so much is individual. Your words came from a place of judgement but many try to compare losses in a desperate attempt to connect and show us they care… but no loss is the same.

I feel some hope that there are charities trying their best to get our not so hidden secret into the minds of others. The bereaved community feel like we’ve been screaming it at the top of our lungs for years yet nothing changes. The charity Widowed and Young has many resources for outsiders to read. The Good Grief Trust aims to bring all bereavement charities and organisations together, so no one slips through the net and no one feels alone.

If you’re a doctor and reading this, or a nurse, or a friend… please pass this message on. We need to be heard. Please stop trying to absent our pain.

Love isn’t passive

Posted on by Aimée Claire

Love doesn’t stop just because death takes the person away from our physical presence on this earth. I think love continues to be a very active thing… an ongoing feeling and experience. Love isn’t passive… it remains exuberant and outspoken. That’s why I still love ‘doing’ things for Marky, because my love continues to grow and that bond is still expanding. The grief is so intense because the love is so intense.

Happy Anniversary, my love.

The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death… One year of Grief

Posted on by Aimée Claire

In 365 days I have died 365 times. It is true that you do not lose someone just once, you lose them a thousand times, in a thousand ways, on a thousand levels.

I wrote this exactly a year into this grief. I wrote it as a solo statement… somehow hoping I could bring something profound to the table about living with this grief for a whole year. I wanted to write something uplifting or resourceful. I stopped writing when I realised I was stuck and I could not write anything remotely positive. I stopped writing. I think one of the most important parts of grief is to be honest… If you are widowed your life is now full of clichés… people telling you that you can survive, you will ‘find another’ (a phrase that makes me feel ill), that god never gives you more than you can deal with, that they are in a better place… etc etc etc etc… Underneath all of this is the fact that I had consumed all these phrases so well that I could no longer write. I stopped writing and being honest about my grief. I stopped dead.

So more than a year into this journey (a year, three months and 21 days) I have started to write again… not because I have anything to say as such… but because part of this journey into grief is that I feel I should be honest about this grief. I cannot write anything uplifting, so I will write about enduring love… love greater than death.

If I were to describe the first year of grief… my entire description would be a bloody horror film. Your organs have been ripped out but somehow you are left alive, you try to tear off your skin but that cannot save you… you cry so much it makes you vomit every day. You want to die but your body will not give up the ghost. You drink, you abuse, you cry till your eyes swell.

Year two… you are sitting in the debris of destruction left spilled around you.

You stare at the debris and hope it will make sense somehow, fit together or form a shape… but no. It looks dull, pointless, alien… unkind. Upon reflection I was in shock for the entire first year, and it is not a pain I would wish on my worst enemy… but in the second year your body becomes less numb, you realise this is your life… your life really did vanish in an instant. He really did die. He really is not coming back.

I think one of the cruellest things about grief is that it feels like utter hell every second… but a hell that you call a home and settle into because you don’t know what moving forward from that point looks like, and you don’t want to move without your love by your side.

I stopped believing in magic the day he died. I didn’t believe in much before he died… I felt myself agnostic, and as someone who identifies themselves as an activist, a feminist and a leftie… I was under no delusions that life was fair. Yet something in me died the day he did. A deeper sadness filled into my bones… One of missing, one of longing, one of aching. One of mourning rather than grief.

I suppose even though I was 26 when he died, I had the optimism of a 16 year old… I felt life really could be as beautiful as the love I felt. It’s strange how one minute life can feel so short… I had so much to fit in; travelling, experiences, moving… everything before children and then children are a whole different part of your life. Now my life feels so long… unreasonably long to live without the one you were supposed to grow old with. All I think every day is how many years I have to live without him. As soon as he died I started counting the hours till those I loved would die and I could take my life peacefully without interrupting my loves.

Grief is love I repeat to myself…

I miss how he would say he loved me to Gallifrey and back. I miss how he used to count our days till we saw each other next in sleeps. I miss how we would say “do the thing” and I would know it meant to shuffle up in bed. I miss how we would even say those words when 180 miles apart from each other, in different countries. I miss how our intimacy could span that distance, our nights of watching Netflix together and phoning till the small hours of the morning. I miss the dinosaur he would leave me with a post-it note on the floor to welcome me home. I miss how he would check when he hadn’t heard from me. I miss how he would try so hard to stay awake to talk to me on my night shifts. I miss his hyper mornings. I miss the way he would kiss me on the nose after his morning shower when I was sat on the floor doing my make-up. I miss his singing in the shower. I miss how he would send my bunny cards all of his own for birthdays and Christmas. I miss how he would talk about Doctor Who and how he said I was the only person he could ever watch it with. I miss his youtube playlists like a mix CD. I miss how often we would think the same thought and shout “SAME BRAINS!” at each other and how much we giggled. I miss how I would get a new stuffed animal of some sort because I can’t walk past them without naming them and he would say “let me guess… it is called whatever-the-animal-was-pot”. I miss sitting in a pub near Charing Cross with him and discussing how my idol feminist was slut-shaming. I miss that he got this. I miss that he wanted me to move to Wales, but after watching the episode of Gavin and Stacey together where Stacey finds it so hard to be away from her family, he told me he would move anywhere in the world with me. I miss his voice, his laugh, his beauty, his passion, his music, his cuddle, his love. I miss my future. I miss the future we should have had together. I miss our children. I miss the way we would have painted their bedrooms, the values we would have tried to instil in them. I miss thinking life could have been that fucking beautiful. I miss how even when in different countries, we were so inseparable that we would fall asleep on the phone together… hours of silence and sleep till one of us would wake and realise the phone was beside our face, whisper goodnight and finally hang up the phone.

I miss my best friend. My love endures, it still grows… I hold it within me alongside this grief. Love, just like grief, is a living thing. I will always love you.

“The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.” ― Oscar Wilde

I will never stop hating the universe for taking you but I love the universe for making you in the first place.