As an agnostic, she doesn’t believe in anything after death. Life here and now is all we know for sure. There is a force within us that drives us and pushes us - an irreversible momentum – regardless of what happens to us (except murder or suicide). 

She marvelled at her own ability or willingness to go on living her life after the devastating death of her only daughter several years ago.  She would have been less surprised if her body failed to take another breath and she too expired with her daughter. To her way of thinking thiswas a more understandable consequence of such a devastating death – it would have made more sense. Her eggs and her DNA helped with the birth of her daughter, therefore her daughter’s death could just as easily linked  them again. The hopeless irreovocable force of it could have, should have swept them both away – but it didn’t.  She was left. And she chose to do something.

A life force is the only answer. A force through us, outside us, parallel to us, in us and perhaps as a result of us, that causes the self – this miriad of cells and blood and skin and breath – to get up out of bed, put some food in our mouth and go on with the next day and the day after that and the day after that.

I asked L how she moved forward after the death of her daughter, and she told me that after a certain time, she compartmentalised or “put aside” the feelings so that they didn’t imobolise her. She still had the feelings, but they were put in a special place, out of the way, and as such she was able to go on with life. Her raison d’etre is – I guess – is that life is for living. 

L is more driven than I am. So, although only a few years older than me, she owns more, works at a job she is passionate about, has a happy marriage, lots of friends,  she earns more money and believes in herself more than I do, and of course, she therefore contributes more to the world.

I’ve ground to a complete standstill, I’m contributing nothing. I can’t move on past Bloke I guess. I think I might have peaked already – and now it’s just a matter of waiting until I die as well. Because I believe Bloke’s gone somewhere, I can still talk to him. Is this somewhere Heaven? “the other side”, in my head? in my mythic imagination? Whatever the location, it is a location that is still accessible to me. This dialogue, my friend L might call “inner dialogue”. The trouble is – I can’t stop yakking!

Today it’s 3 years since he died.  And as the day before my birthday – I read through the correspondence he’d written to me during our marriage. I’d already stored or “compartmentalised” the missives in a booklet, so I pulled it off the shelf and read each one. Some cards were for birthdays, some were coaching notes when I’d be facing challenges at work, some were consoling, when I was feeling worried, and some were love letters – missing me when either I was travelling or he was.  I began to cry at card No 1.

At the time he wrote the notes, I needed the coaching, the calming, the cajoling and the laughs. I still do. He was one of the funniest men I’d ever met, and amidst the tears I had a few good belly laughs. He was the best medicine for me when he was alive, and now 3 years later – he still hits the mark with his wisdom and consistently good advice.

If L is right, and the dead live in our memories, then it would work the same way as if he was in some “heavenly realm”, it’s just a matter of geography or nomenclature. For instance, I didn’t hear his voice read the notes out to me, but his strong cursive handwriting cut through me like a knife. Not yet cutting me free, just fragmenting me.

What’s life for? It’s for living as close as possible to the centre of love in your life. That’s the force that goes on after death. That’s the force that gets us out and up after devastation. The trick is, to eventually, slice by slice, cut free from the past, but take the love along with you. 

Lub! big!

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What we have here is doubtless a case of psychosomatic illness. As you change your thoughts it reflects in the body.  Your spleen gets damp when you have trouble digesting life, or is that your stomach that gets acidic when you have trouble with your partner? Was the asthma suffocation or was it that my sinusitis was veiled anger? Duh!

I discovered the joys of psychosomatic illness during the neurotic bent of my almost 30s.  I was unable to hold down a satisfying job, and I used the body rather than the CV to explore the boundaries of life.  All was fine in my ill world.  I sniffled my way across every new age book shelf, until at last I could go no farther. My waterloo was a book with the title, “Love your rectum back to health.” Arguably the finest title of all from the mother of all body  illness relativity, Louise Hay. An angel of hope to everyone that had a sneeze, rash or piles. But for me it signalled enough.

I’m happy to say that sort of navel-gazing and rectum loving is all behind me. But the sustaining message I took from the literature is one of personal responsiblity. I was “reared” as a Catholic, which often meant abrogating responsibility. Or at least handballing the lion’s share of it to something called sin, a fall from grace or dodgey advice from a guardian angel. Non- Catholics had no idea that we had a 24-hour 365 days a year counselling life-line (in the shape of a guardian angel.)

The guardian angel was supposed to be good. But there was one religious icon I recall from my early childhood that showed a bad angel talking into one of the saint’s ear, and good angel earbashing the other.  What a conundrum. The secret was to rely on your inbuilt conscience. Truly an elusive component – especially for little kids, who had their work cut out for them managing anything under this 24/7 surveillance.

Angels and colds are, I admit, hardly parallel realities. But, lately my thinking has been preoccupied with both. Perhaps it’s because I just finished a charming book, Miss Garnett’s Angel, by Salley Vickers. In any event, I’m head over heels back in love with the idea of visitations from winged dudes to help you over tricky times.  But then again, my thinking is cloudy with the infected cavities of my head and maybe illness is an essential criteria for seeing them.

My darling bloke saw angels coming out of the walls in our bedroom – as he lay dying. One of them had long hair with body paint, and he danced “between us”, Stephen told me. Those that know Stephen (aka bloke), would know such an image would be most unlikely if he were in good health.  Clearly another great mystery about transition.

Garnett’s book also included a reference to the bridge of separation, over which a soul must travel when they die, assisted of course by an angel. Stephen, in one of the morphia-ridden rambles that characterised those precious last days, also mentioned a bridge. He told me he “was building a bridge between heaven and earth”.

So, Holmes, Hays or Vickers - what next? Is the bridge accessible to me too? Can I get over it? Will I ever get over it? Apparantly that’s the task of those left behind. A chilling idea indeed. No wonder I’m sniffling.

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