Ten plus one

Eleven Years

A decade plus one.

We still remember you dear sweet John.

Ever- present in the myriad conversations

And comments.

Your trace remains

Your imprint on us

Who we are

Who we have become

Always here

In some way

In some form

The Flowering

"Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration."

So said D H Lawrence - and he was right

Assuagement

An interesting word and one which I have been contemplating of late.

The process of mitigation
To relieve a burden or stress
To render something less painful
To ease or remove guilt

Literally, from the old Latin, to sweeten.

Interesting!

I have come to see that our burden of loss has somehow been assuaged by all those external agents which affect us: life, time, friendships, family, and dare I say it, work.

It is then something to be grateful for, all those distractions and demonstrations of affection and more which ease the burden of loss and the sense of pain.

What is certain, is, that through all this mitigation, it is still there. I guess we just carry it better now; as though we have learned to wear it well, after a fashion.

I wish yours could have been assuaged in some way.

Feet and Hearts

An áit a bhuil do chroí is ann a thabharfas do chosa thú.

From the Gaelic, which means: "Your feet will bring you to where your heart is."

It makes me think, sweet man, how and why your feet brought you to where they did and where ours might take us now your space is empty.

I said this to a friend recently who has his own existential dilemnas to contend with - the usual; inner chaos, overt and mismanaged direction through work, unfinished business with a woman he once loved and might still love while he had begun to weave his magic and charms on another; bizarre inability to see his own strengths......as I said, the usual.

I got to thinking about how men, in particular, seem to be very very bad at finishing things, ending them, putting ghosts to rest and starting afresh.

I read a theory recently that men, when relationships begin to fail, have a tendency to ignore what is happening until it is too late, until time has been called in one way or another, and then they react - effectively when it is way past salvation. They wrestle and tussle with the erstwhile object of their affection and then don't seem to be able to let go, one way or the other. It is likely that they still maintain some kind of physical relationship, however infrequent, because they think it is the right thing to do, justifying it as some kind of old habit that dies hard, so what the heck - and it just confuses them further.

Women, on the other hand, do their fighting and grieving before the end comes; they battle and tussle with the deaf mute male and eventually, when all their energy is expended, bring things to a close. Generally speaking, then they move on - maybe while reflecting on what they left behind and how it could have been saved but for a minimal communication; and how it might have changed them, educated them, informed them. And of course all those physical overtures left them thinking there might still be something there to salvage; never quite managing to understand the mixed messages from he who could not let go.......

When I read this, and thought about my friend A, I thought about you also - because although your circumstances were different, you both acted in a textbook manner - at least according to the theory:- letting your feet bring you to those familiar places without considering whether your return to those very spots was measured, managed or meditated.
Embroiling yourself again with a person you had left behind; drawn back by obligation and guilt and the belief that the flattery of words of the desperate equated somehow to love. That this futile declaration of need, born out of laziness, fear and fatigue could render you, the man, bigger, taller, more masculine, more of a rescuing hero!! Swoon bloody swoon, and bring on the clowns I say!!
Maybe it and they did - not in my book. I always thought that love was and is a sign of courage and strength; not the manifest forlorn and well-timed looks of one who seeks to depend on you because it is easy, and who seeks to keep you from another whatever the cost simply because they can.

And in both your situations, there was the collusion of family - to engineer a return; through coercion, persuasion, or sheer guilt mongering. And again, you both took the bait, convinced that the manoeuvring was entirely genuine, unplanned and wholly serendipitous.

For smart guys, you certainly showed how naive you both were!

I marvel at how powerful guilt is, and how it renders even the most intelligent and strong amongst the male population weak; and how susceptible it makes you to idle empty words of flattery which massage the feeble ego.
And yet, when you hear those measured assertions of one who would purport to see you as an equal, you could not and cannot reconcile yourself with them. Strange! Strength scares you and obstinacy is misconstrued as loving courage.

In some way, both you and A laboured within the same set of rules; subconsciously I guess.

It makes us that loved you, wonder why our strength and independence were and are not good enough; why our sense of love - based on respect and admiration, could somehow be cast aside so easily when surely it might have brought you more balance and honesty. How perhaps out of self preservation you could hurt those who loved you most.......

It is a conundrum of sorts; your feet can bring you to where your heart is only if you are unfettered by guilt and ego and your eyes have a clear path to navigate.

As Laura Cantrell says:

"She lent her voice, and she gave her heart
And I guess that must've been the hardest part
She figured out exactly what was going on
All the love she had given for a song
And then things unravelled as they usually do
She got her old heart busted up by......number two
Have you forgotten? Have you forgiven?
Tell me are you livin' just a little in your past every day?
Time sure has changed you; it's walked right on by you.
Does it satisfy you to have so little to say?"

And that is the point; for all the battling and railing against the obvious, you boys always have so little to say at the time - or too much, when it is way too late.

It is a futile endeavour - as you showed us dear dear heart.

And so you and your feet just go round in circles, as you well know.

At least that is how it seems.

xxx

Persistence

Sometimes, dear John, I think that the only thing that separates me from you is persistence.

I canot say that you did not try; if anything I think you tried way too hard - to engineer, to construct, to contrive, in short, to ensure that everything worked as it should.

What is clear, sweet long-gone-boy-of-mine, is that there are many things which still don't quite work as they should without you here; and it is only our persistence that allows us to keep going, to persist.

Love is a fate resigned, or so the song says and that is what I have come to understand. It is an odd place we inhabit still, that place of resignation; I know now, after much soul searching, introspection and thought that you do exist in memory form, as a part of a life I have already lived. In a sense you are suspended somewhere in between my past and my psyche; and there you shall remain. I know that I have now spent more time without you than with you and I wonder if that means the balance will tip at all, at any time.

I sense that you have deifned me in some way; which I can attest to in many ways. I resist the temptation to be defined by your death dear heart, though there are times when I wonder.

I persist in my desire to keep going, to live, to do all the things you would have done and maybe to take a little bit of you forward. I am not sure that I succeed though.

I notice that my footfall going forward is not as sure and confident as it once might have been; occassionally I feel that life is a bit more of a battle than it should be and I sense that my unfailing optimism has been forever dented by losing you how and when I did.

And that is really all, we persist in spite of these feelings and indeed because of them; fuelled in a way by the hurt we still feel. It does recede and allow us to continue on, to persist.

I guess that is enough to be going on with.

Empty

I am thinking at these times, we fall back into the zone, John, back under the spell of wondering about you, why you went and where you might be now and how we are still feeling the hurt nearly two years on.

Mr LaMontagne expresses it perfectly:-


I never learned to count my blessings, I choose instead to dwell in my disasters.
I walk on down the hill, through grass, grown tall and brown
And still its hard somehow to let go of my pain.

On past the busted back of that old and rusted Cadillac that sinks into this field, collecting rain.
Will I always feel this way ?
So empty, so estranged.

And of these cut-throat busted sunsets, these cold and damp white mornings
I have grown weary.
If through my cracked and dusted dime-store lips I spoke these words out loud
Would no one hear me ?


Well I looked my demons in the eyes,laid bare my chest, said "Do your best, destroy me.
You see, I've been to hell and back so many times, I must admit you kind of bore me."

There's a lot of things that can kill a man, there's a lot of ways to die,
Listen, some already did that walked beside me.

There's a lot of things I don't understand,
Why so many people lie.
Its the hurt I hide that fuels the fire inside me.
Will I always feel this way ?
So empty, so estranged.


Well ?

Mean Streets

Your favourite movie of all time - along with any other of Italian gangster genre populated by Pacino, Pesce et al.

It always seemed fairly evident to me having seen the movie why it should be entitled so - then I started reading around the grief and loss I felt when you left and I discovered the man: CS Lewis, a scholar and writer of note.

He tells us about the world being a "mean street replete with human squalor"; I'd like to add to that a further thought:- replete with human squalor and emotional bankrupts. Sounds about right to me.

I am back in the blog zone John, back here in the parallel universe where we spent a lot of time communing.

I think of the Mean Streets you inhabited and understand that you had a great deal to contend with; too much evidently. You sidestepped as much as you could, but every now and again you would trip over some of that paucity and unkindness. The more you encountered, the harder you tried to overcome it.

And you didn't.

You gave up on this.

We instead keep tripping through those mean streets.

Detritus

The stuff that gets left behind, the mess, the tangling, what needs to picked through and at some point swept up.

I am not sure it is that easy. How would we know where to start? I think about this legacy of sadness that you left - and how we still carry it with us.

I wonder how long it will be before we accept that we should not be defined by your death - and your suicide. At times it seems impossible - we cannot undo your passing and, certainly for me, it is almost such a large part of me and who I am that I cannot see a way forward.

I am mindful that there are few who could ever reach your benchmark - which is by definition stuck at the final point of its evolution - your death.

And so we continue John, with you in our hearts and a fear that we cannot, nor will not ever quite surmount the sad legacy of your passing.

We still miss you big man.

x

Love Life Loss

In that order I guess.

For you, maybe not sweet man. I think it might have been loss and life and then the love.

A simple summary of your existence; the compromise which continued from sometime around August 1990 - the continuial ersoion of your choices - by your own hand at times, and the clinging to the hope of some kind of new love, which arrived in the form of your only son.

And then it was not enough to sustain you; try as you might there was no easy exit from that impasse; and so you persisited. At that point you knew, as you atested to more than just me, that you were done. Your hopes for an improvement did not bear fruit and your attempts at bringing things to a better place just met with more resistence.


In summary, at this point you were lost. In too deep to make extrication easy and not strong enough to face what you knew would be the onslaught from she who would see this as a betrayal.

And your efforts at forming a new and love-filled relationship further exacerbated the pain and hurt; for all concerend I would say now.

You lost. We lost.

Endgame.

Freewheeling

This is like freewheeling.

If you allow yourself some respite, you gain momentum, and in some way are able to pick up again where you left off.

I wish somebody had told you that - given you a sense of permission, so you could have given yourself some space; instead of always punishing yourself; albeit in silence.

I wanted to tell you, that as we predicted, the monstrous spectacle of your estranged spouse's behaviour rears its ugly head once again: she has now taken to claiming that your closest family members lie in wait for her as she goes to the supermarket and unleash torrents of abuse at her when she walks past.

This is intriguing to say the least, as when you were here with us in all your glory sweet man, she indulged this fantasy with you - set you up to go to the hospital and when you arrived, her equally deranged outsize sister was there hurling abuse at you, aided and abetted by her late, mother. I remember when you recounted this to me, I informed you that it sounded like a pikey sopa opera! And what surprised me was not the type of behaviour, but that you should have tolerated this for so long.
So convinced is she of her own deluded fantasies regarding this relentless imaginary abuse that she filed a police report, anticipating arrest and incarceration. Except, she forgot to check that your family were in the country at the time of the alleged incidents!

No surprises there, then, she continues to be as mad as the day you married her. My guess is that something has happened, somebody in authority has questioned perhaps her parenting skills, your son's ever increasing obesity, something; and now she needs a scapegoat.
If there is one thing we learned from your own story, it is how she never ever takes responsibility for her actions, and why should this be any different? I imagine she never stopped to think when she harassed and harangued you into submission, that she would need a replacement - that you fulfilled that need in some way, always shouldering the responsibility like the naive dutiful and frankly idiotic husband that you were; easier than fighting it all the time I guess!

Oh, and the story she fabricated to the officers in question - unbelievable! Like you had never left. How tragic your death was and how this cruelty would surely send her over the edge. Let's hope not, or the whole of Merseyside will be engulfed in a seismic wave of tsunami like proportions.

So I just wish, dear man, that you had learned to freewheel more, to not pedal so hard like your life depended on it. I wish you had come to understand that you were just one man with one will and one life, and for all that others say and do, we are only responsible for the officially dependent ones, not those who believe that there is a moral or emotional deficiency on their part that you have to prop up.

In the meantime, we try to allow ourselves a little space and time to freewheel, as the date of the first anniversary draws nearer.

And our sadness stays the same.

Half A World Away

And so we still survive you John.

Somebody asked me how I feel now that you are gone; I guess anticipating that I must have accepted your demise by now.

The answer is simple - the same! You are still dead and we are still waiting, to see if in some way you will ever return to us.

It is true to say that the legacy you left is great and all encompassing. We talk about you often and think about you more so; all for one thing: - to fill the void, to bridge the gap, to circumvent the abyss.

As they all told us, things are easier, life is easier. The struggle for control has in some way diminished, because in the end, our own sense of survival has guided us to the point where we can function again, on a daily basis; making the right noises, interjecting, interrupting, concurring, dissenting, assenting - all the interactions of life are there in place again. There is though, one thing missing: you dear man.

I want to tell you that the loss doesn't lessen, it takes its place in your psyche and reminds you now and again to think about the man who went before us and before his time.

In cliched style, I can tell you that there is not a day goes by when I don't think of you and all that you were and all that you gave us; and all that you took away.
And I doubt that will ever change.

Your death and you have changed me. I am not the same girl. I am not the same person. Difficult to articulate, let me tell you.

Sometimes I think I walk with a dead man.

Who isn't coming back.

Ever.

Levitation

There are times, sweet man , when I try and levitate so I cannot miss you so much. I take a step outside myself to see if I can fathom this reality.


You are still here in my head: undenied and real.

I HAVE RETRIEVED YOU.

I still miss you.
I still love you.
I am still without you.

In the words of Atonement:" come back to me! " - she said jokingly - but with spirits in her mind.

My grief is like the sky: it covers everything and uncovers nothing.

You cloud my days and leave my nights so clear. And empty.

Without you.

Dead boy.

Silent soul.

No man Atheist.


I love and miss you Johnny still.

The Girl You Left Behind.
xxx

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday wherever you are.

I am a day early sweet man, but I am sure that in the heavenly realms of Paradise, time is irrelevant - so you will be thankful for the wishes.

You spent your last birthday with me - hard to believe that it is a year ago. There are times when all this seems so far away and moments when it feels like you just left us yesterday; the yo-yo effect of grief, sadness and the receding shock.

I can only hope that you are somewhere; it feels somehow wrong to imagine that you ceased to exist - certainly not for the small circle of those who held you dear and loved you unconditionally. We still remember you every day. You have become the backdrop to our lives, the constant in your absence - strange how that can work, but let me assure you it does.

I hope you hear us when we mention you, think of you and recall you. Just wish we could have you back.

So the missing goes on - we still love and laugh when we think of you; it's just the living part that has ceased.

Anyway, big man - you are still here in spirit and our birthday gift to you is remembrance and love.

In infinite amounts.

Rehabilitation

Welcome back to rehab.

This is how it feels to be rehabilitating.

Like you have to pick up your life again and live it. Even though you are not quite sure why you should or how you will.

I've taken this long break to work out where to go next.
There have been interesting conversations about bereavement and emotion. Apparently, John, just like you must have done, I am postponing the heavy duty hurt - or so believes the counsellor.

Another interesting observation is that I have been over-analysing every aspect of your life and death; trying to understand what drove you to take your own life and abandon all that you had in this life.

Too right! I wonder how else you can manage this. Losing you was the biggest shock - not so much how you died, though if you were here now, I would kill you all over again for doing what you did - and passing on the pain to us to live.

I have in my possession the last note that you wrote, and how sad it is. Your first words were those asking us to please forgive you - so you had a complete sense of what you were doing and how "wrong" it must be - and I guess it also means that you knew you would leave some kind of devastation behind you. If only you knew, sweet silly man. I am not sure it would make you think twice about what you have done and how it has left us.

So, sometimes John, I think about you and how your legacy to us is very much what you yourself must have been experiencing - this feeling of swimming in a mire of uncertainly - of getting why and what keeps us here, but not really having a guide to pull you through to the medium and long term. In essence then, we live in our present and reflect on the past. Perhaps we don't think much about the future, because a crucial element is missing: you. Not much fun to look forward any more.

Only in short bursts anyway. For now.

We miss you as much as the first day - be sure of that wherever you are.

Summer solstice

23.06.07

And so time takes its toll.

No John, no love, no fun.

No summer sun to look forward to.

No long nights.

No breathless mornings.

No sighs of relief.

No sighs of summer love.

Full stop.

Wish You Were Here

14.06.07

This is my cyber-postcard to you John.

I am in Greece, as you should well know, given that we planned to take this holiday together. In fact, this was one of the last things we talked about and the last leave entry you made in your work diary - just a day before you killed yourself.

So I am with the same people who sat with me through the aftermath of your death - my frinds Sandra and Marija - and with whom I waited until my twin brother was able to come and collect me. It's good to see them - a welcome distraction from my thoughts of you, which, if left unchecked, consume most of my waking hours.

They see a change in me since we last met - how could they not? I am more focused and balanced, as every day I remember that you are no longer here- the shock has receded.

And that is all; we talk about you endlessly, analyse the why and how, cite experts on suicide and self-death and begin to make sense of the fact that all the promises you made and all the plans we had are part of that same past and not a future of anticipation.

So this is, I guess, the first step in redirection. This is the first time since you died that I have slept every consecutive night at normal times, without waking or spending the night reading and thinking. My body is taking back some control at last.

So outwardly, things are better. Inwardly, it is still the same battle to understand and come to terms with your untimely death.

Your choice lovely man, and ours is now to wonder why.

As I said, wish you were here.

Disconnection

03.06.07

Every day I think of you and every night.

I tried this new approach, John - not writing - but it doesn't work.

I thought, as I am now in counselling, that somehow the sadness would lessen, and that I would find an alternative place for it.

To some degree, it has worked - but after three sleepless days and nights, I realise that this disconnection is not so easy. Would that it were. And that you were still here.

And so , we try to pad the wound you left behind. It is a difficult task. I read and read to try and find an answer. But, as any good psychoanalyst will tell you, we can only ever offer conjectural hypotheses - I think that may be a tautology, but I will let it rest for fear of breaking my stride.

So, I got to reading and thinking and realised that the word of others in a similar situation not only buoy us up, but they give us hope for the future, and right now, I am all out of that.


Let's see:-

"After he died, there were moments of total blackness when I felt I was trudging through a tunnel with no escape. I felt so heavy with depression.........let alone imagine being able to make a new life.

At first I felt a sort of despairing anger at the gods for dealing me this lousy hand. Until then, I had always thought of myself as lucky, so this was a terrible blow....."

"At times, I had to fight hard against self-pity.......And I missed terribly having someone to hug me.

Some of the best advice was also the gloomiest from friends who said 'This is a black time, but you will survive it. It is possibly the worst thing that will ever happen to you, but you will get better.'

Those words were so realistic about the emotions that go with bereavement that it was like being given permission to hit bottom."

AF



"I think was anaesthetised by shock at first,......I keep expecting him to walk in and I still have moments of disbelief. And I talk to him all the time.....You cannot bypass the stages of bereavement.....I began to believe that nothing mattered any more. I was scared that I would never get out of bed again. I might have looked as if I was coping, but it was touch and go. I was angry too.

I cannot imagine meeting a man like him again. I would not even try. I just know that I have been incredibly fortunate to spend my life with someone whose company I adored....."

SB



Enough said great man.

I cannot disconnect.

Solitude

26.05.07

Pão duro da solidão
Ē somente que nos dão
O que nos dão a comer
Que importa que o coracão
Diga que sim ou que não
Se continua a viver

Todo o amor que nos prendera
Se quebara e desfizera
Em pavor se convertia
Ninguem fale em primavera
Quem me dera, quem nos dera
Ter morrido nesse dia

This dry bread of solitude
Is the only thing we have to consume
What matters if the heart
Says yes or says no
If it keeps on living

All the love that siezed us
Was broken
Was undone
And became fear
Do not talk of spring
That we, I might wish
To have died that day


Primavera - D Mourao Ferreira / Pedro Rodrigues

Something or Nothing

22.05.07

My recent cogitations have brought me to this conclusion; that the simple choice you made was between something and nothing.

Pretty ordinary and generic terms really, but they had a great deal of significance for you in the context of your life.

The "something" was an amalgam of history, change, circumstance and a series of errors of judgement that began to undo you instead of the inverse, which is how it should have been.

We can see now that what on the surface appeared to be a life well-lived was one, at least in adulthood, that was marked and defined by the demands of another, riddled with negativity and a sense of never being good enough.
Twenty years of dysfunction and emotional battery which completely wore you down. You were careful to spare others the detail and assimilate this as part of your lot in life, though your forays into the other side of your life - work and external influences taught you that it was not normal: the constant refusals to discuss your point of view, the lies, the inertia, the constant toing and froing to the doctor with a list of mystery ailments which always seemed to be diagnosed in absentia and then never treated with anything more than a handful of pharmaceuticals- no follow-up, no suggested path of treatment- cancelled holidays, curtailed days out and constant moaning and misery about what the world owed.
This ground you down - your own philosophy was expansive and inclusive - the diametric opposite of what your internal environment provided.

The "something" you saw then, was, despite the 17 months of separation and new life, a constant and effectively infinite battle to gain access to your son - obstruction, lies and denials at every turn.
It had become like a soap opera and you were unable to see how A would ever let you live your life. You made that clear to me, reiterating your understanding of her and her modus operandi - once the seed was planted, she grew her own philosophies and stories and touted them to those who would listen - always careful to attribute their provenance to a third party so that she would take no responsibility when it all blew up in her face. Her spite and vitriol was not just reserved for the adults in your life - naturally all women you were close to fell foul of her critical and viperine tongue - but included innocents and minors; nobody escaped her misery and criticism, although extreme bile was reserved for the female of the species. This extended even to pregnancy when she clearly outlined her desperate desire to not have a daughter - citing them as wasteful and evil!! It, apparently, never occurred to you that this may be linked to her own self-loathing; super-morbidly obese and hirsute in a world which prefers the waxed, bronzed and toned variety.

This absolute misogyny continues after your death - nasty letters of denial issued to your female family, issuing edicts of responsibly to them for your demise and refuting the already documented campaign of harassment.

And your "nothing", sweet man, was exactly that.

As an atheist, you believed there was nothing after death. I guess that is the hardest part for me, aside form the gruesome details of your death, the lies you told us in order to be able to carry out your plan and the revolting prospect of out lives without you. The very fact that you didn't take your own life in the belief that you were going to a better place, where you would be free from the hassles and pressures of this world is something that is extremely hard to bear. Especially when you left us here and we had so much still to give you.

Your firm belief was that there was simply blackness, darkness, nothing; an infinite void.

I can't say that I am any wiser despite all the time I dedicate to analysing every aspect of your existence and subsequent demise. My wish is a simple one - I would have you back here in an instant and sod the suffering and complications! - I understand that the pressure you felt must have been so huge that the latter seemed preferable to the former. Your life force was spent.
No energy left to continue this battle which had begun all those years ago when you allowed yourself to be duped into marriage by a fat and lonely woman who saw you as her only hope to escape her own unhappiness and dysfunction. But instead, you became infected by it and colluded with it to such a point that it controlled you and you were unable to ever escape it.

I can't make a judgement either way now, because my own upbringing in the Catholic faith affords me this background of afterlife and eternal happiness. And should I follow the theory through to its natural conclusion, then this suffering we bear, and indeed that you experienced, is all part of the mortal cargo we carry and of which we will be freed in the next life. A very convenient theory - if life is shit, be grateful, because it will be better in the next one and you will be paid in kind. Which is all well and good - but it does lead me to the conclusion that if you are right and there is nothing, then it doesn't matter, because you are lost and gone forever sucked in to the infinite black void, feeling nothing at all.

If the prophets and preachers are right, then you are perched somewhere on your celestial cushion, looking down on us, drink in hand watching perpetual reruns of the Liverpool Cup Finals, oblivious to our pain, because there is none where you are.

I still wish you had chosen to stick with something.

We are left with nothing but emptiness and memories.

From Hankering to Hurt

18.05.07

That is the spectrum on which I reside at the moment - from hankering to hurt and back.

There are days when I wonder how you could have done this to us; how you could have left us behind, with just a simple note of explanation instructing us not to mourn you. Such a sad thing to say - and a ridiculous one. You, of all people, knew how much the loss of someone you loved hurt and how learning to live with the loss was not a simple readjustment, but a painful process of assimilation and grief.

We are at the beginning of a very long road. Some days are unbelievably exhausting - just getting up, getting dressed and continuing on - t seems so bloody pointless to do anything without you here to share it; it feels like cheating or betrayal to laugh and smile without you and thinking about the future, is for the first time, something that brings dread instead of excitement. There are no plans that resonate or dreams to be constructed - just those to deconstruct and pack away.

I am not sure if I will ever really accept that you are not here. Or indeed that you are at peace. I watched a brilliant documentary in which Joan Rivers, the American comedienne, talked about her own husband's suicide 18 years ago - and how she still felt hurt, anger and fury after all this time.

Her acerbic observations really hit the spot for me: "everyone tells me he is at peace - well I hope not, the bastard, because look at the torment he left us in!"
It is no good telling us that you loved us more than life when you ran out on us - and how - what price you paid!

The other point she made, brilliantly, was how everyone feels the need, if they are not in the majority of those who simply ignore you, to tell you how you will see him again in heaven; how we will be eternally reunited. So, therein lies the tacit wishing of death upon you - that's the only chance you'll get to meet again - thanks for the sentiments, well meaning but slightly skewed!
She said that she didn't want to see her husband in heaven again, because if she did, she would fucking kill him for what he did. And that is how I feel about you, John. No matter how much I love you, I think my first reaction if we should ever meet again would be to shake you so hard and scream at you for the longest longest time.

How could you leave us here hankering for you and all that we had? - and with the enormous task of rebuilding our lives without you. And the incredible spiralling pain.

Joan said that even after 18 years she is still furious - that she accepts this as part of the package of feelings you are left with when your partner makes the decision to end his life without consulting you.

And I guess that is true for me too.