A friend, a seismic tragedy, hearts irreparably broken, and a few years had passed when a family member said must you bring that up again? This story told to me, and it made me think about the shelf life of grief, whether the world says there is one, and how there isn’t for the person grieving. Everything must end except feelings which don’t, which go on like recovery forever. These diaries have changed me. I didn’t know how they’d play out. There’s been a freedom here to move around, from fairy story to aging, sobriety to a tall, cold house in London falling down and Christmas in a low-beamed cottage that I didn’t want to leave, there’s been memories and rooms described and a cast list of parts reclaimed, and new friends made and I don’t know what comes next except the need to make space for it. The work goes on; more than any other note I’ve had over these 108 posts, it’s been that they’ve felt real, and that being the highest praise, I’m going to take it. My friend of the seismic tragedy must live with their feelings every day, and so must I and so must you, there is no shelf life, only distance from events that hurt you. I said to some youth recently, you can free wheel until fifty, and then you’ve got to start pedalling because once you’re over that hump all the stuff un-dealt with rises up. I’m amazed at how much I was carrying around unhidden to everyone but me who was oblivious except for all the dysfunction, the broken relationships, the inability to stay in the room. These diaries are a record of the work, and I’ve learnt to stay with uncomfortable feelings, and writing every morning, I’ve learnt to stay in the room. The cat is asleep on the table, there are coats and jumpers thrown on the sofa, friends are staying; last night a dinner out, back late, the joy of parts of my life meeting, how I am me irrespective of company, the roles that I’ve played in the past that are dead I don’t grieve for. There’s a lot to be said for getting old. My shoulder hurts and this week I’ll see my friend with the magic hands and the work, inexorably, continues. I am digging my way out. But everything like art must end and this is it, an end to these diaries. It’s been fun. You know when there’s a big goodbye, and you hug everyone and kiss some people twice by mistake and go back for another last-minute conversation with someone else and finally rush out the door waving and halfway down the path you realise you’ve forgotten your keys?
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I will miss the recovery diaries very much. But happily I can still see you, a lighter, brighter version of the you before the diaries. What a joy.
You may never again write anything as beautiful as that again. I mean all of it, but really I mean this one, #108. I don’t know whether that should be happy or sad for you, but it has been a gift to your readers, to us, to me. What you have given is, I believe, The Point. Thank you for all of them, but somehow mostly for #108. ❤️