After seven painful months, the search for healing goes on

I WOKE up the other morning, turned around, and remembered he wasn’t there. Of course, he wasn’t there. He killed himself seven months ago.

This has happened a few times. Not every morning, or even once a week, but a few times. It’s not a good feeling.

When I sat down to write this week, I had the same thought any columnist must have: what’s my subject? Deciding on the topic is half the battle. Once that is done, the words tend to flow. This week, I sat at the computer and tossed around ideas. The election? Some acid commentary on global warming as we all shiver in the unseasonal weather perhaps?

But I just couldn’t get Jean-Claude out of my mind. It was probably because on Monday I went to see his grave for the first time since he left. We lay him to rest in a beautiful garden of flowers facing the French sun. I had always promised that if anything happened, I would take him home to France, never really imagining I would have to keep my word — or, at least, not so soon. I don’t think even Princess Diana was surrounded by quite so many white lilies.

Of course, in December in the snow it looked and felt very different. Cemeteries are not nice places but it is a particularly undistinguished one. It’s on a bit of a hill but all around is just flat, nothing that sticks in the brain. Parts of the south of France are like that, unfortunately: just everyday, nondescript. But it’s where his father is buried so that’s where it had to be.

The first time he took me to France, we went to that cemetery to see his father’s grave. Little did I know that six and half years later, I would be going back there for my own reasons and JC’s name would have been added to the gravestone.

I was just running my fingers across his name and years (far, far too short) when I noticed a plaque.

His brother, sisters, nephews and nieces had placed it there: in French, ‘To my brother, to my only brother, to my uncle.’ Beside the words is an engraving, a representation of the ballet Swan Lake: a ballerina dressed in black, her arms stretched behind her as if in flight amidst a lake full of white swans.

He loved Swan Lake. We saw it together many times. And now there he is depicted, a beautiful swan but different from the rest — black and in flight while the rest of us are just floating around, looking on. He always had to be different. I cried. No month is exactly easy right now — the last few have all been pretty grim — but December, with Christmas coming, was always going to be tough. The first Christmas without him around. The tradition was always a gluttonous lunch with all his family and course after course of French delicacies. Now I can’t even think of eating fois gras again: it seems too luxurious for these times.

I went to see his poor, aged mother. What to do for Christmas, I asked her? It’s not as though we can all gather up as usual and sit looking at an empty chair. We have resolved to do nothing. It will just be a quiet day, a day for doing not very much except thinking our own thoughts. I have promised myself a bottle of Bushmills which hopefully will make it a bit fuzzier.

I might go to church, I might not. Frankly, I prefer to go when I know it will be empty. A church full of happy families and over-excited kids doesn’t suit my mood. So maybe I will get up very early and go then. I haven’t decided.

Life does go on, of course and, yes, time really is a healer — but not a great one. When I had lost loved ones before, I remember the sadness but I had never felt grief before as a physical pain, as opposed to a purely mental one. That sense that my chest is being crushed has, thankfully, passed. It left me around the time of the inquest and the memorial service in August. Now there is just paperwork still to sort out and the occasional dark nights of the soul.

I look more myself again. Losing a stone and a half didn’t suit me. I walk down the street and I answer my phone. I do my work and I manage, more or less, to look like a normal person, but I still don’t feel normal. Or is this just the new normal?

I get the odd email, card or letter asking how I am which is kind but, generally, people assume all’s well: I don’t look different anymore. I don’t burst into tears at embarrassing moments. The rawness has gone from my voice. But I am hardly skipping around either. A friend who lost her husband through suicide told me it took her three years to get over it. I hope not, but who knows?

He had the most horrible illness. Manic depression is doubly cruel because the person afflicted isn’t truly aware that they are ill in the same way as if it were a physical disease. So people write or call to say “At least he isn’t suffering anymore,” but it doesn’t give me much relief. I just want him back, to have a second chance at overcoming the disease. Perhaps that’s just selfish. In fact, yes, it probably is. As a child I used to complain things weren’t fair and my mother would retort, “Life isn’t fair.” And neither is death. At 37, I always assumed – hoped — we would have 20 or 30 years together. How wrong was I?

So more than anger or denial or acceptance or any of the other stages those of us grieving are supposed to go through, I just feel cheated. It’s true he had a wonderful life – we had a wonderful life together and absolutely no regrets – but it was just too short, for me at least. For him? I don’t know. I can’t imagine what he was going through that night when he did it.

I can’t bring myself to think about it. The mental image terrifies me. Whenever those thoughts creep up on me, I just imagine a book being slammed shut and I move on. Yes, that’s probably selfish too, I realise.

The search for healing goes on. Do I really believe there will be an acceptance of what has happened, a making sense of everything?

Would it feel as though I was letting him, his memory, down if I somehow managed to let go. I don’t know. But those waves of pain are more intermittent. That is not nothing. But that tension between my private sadness and the busy old world around me does fascinate me.

The everyday is impermanent. A lot of supposedly important things don’t actually matter very much.

But I do have enough self-awareness to appreciate that grief is common. Many of us are going through it at any one time. We all lose those closest to us.

It’s just that as a society we don’t have the rituals any more to remind us of that fact.