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You are always hovering in the background of my thoughts as I wake in the morning and go to sleep at night, but I’m writing this now as I realise that your 21st birthday is coming up and I don’t know what I’m going to do on that day.
Since that awful moment we found you dead nearly 18 months ago, I have realised I had been grieving for the handsome, happy and exuberant boy that I lost to mental illness for much longer. I know you’ll agree that your teenage years were hard on us all, most especially you, but you never recognised the devastating extent of the heartache you caused me. On that day the worst happened, I was able to stop worrying about what would happen to you, and among the terrible pain and sadness there was also relief. After all, it could have been much worse, and had been many times in my imagination. Once, you said that if I chose to worry it was my problem, not yours. Your selfishness greatly frustrated me.
You didn’t often realise anything was wrong with your life, but it was hard to be close to you and watch the rapid deterioration in your personality, and intellect, and the complete lack of purpose and ambition left within you.
You were diagnosed with disorganised schizophrenia, which manifested in your inability to function in daily life, and your inability to stay focused on anything. It was really scary the day you forgot how to form the letter “R”. You also had classic symptoms of both absent and inappropriate emotional expression which caused you trouble in public at times. When you were arrested for shoplifting, you couldn’t stop smirking and giggling, even though you explained that you didn’t think it was funny. You became convinced that random people wanted to hurt you, and turned into a social recluse; the reality was that you were quite a forbidding figure whom others would cross the street to avoid. Occasionally you would voice suicidal thoughts. Most distressingly, what was most important to you was where your next drink was coming from. You stopped taking care of yourself and washing or brushing your teeth. All that stopped you from becoming homeless when you were thrown out of the residential psychiatric ward for excessive drinking, was that I arranged a flat for you. I feared that you would soon be asked to leave that too.
My aspirations for you dwindled until my only aim was that you were reasonably content and did no harm. You were so big (whatever they say, your massive weight increase was caused by the anti-psychotic medication you depended on) and difficult to love unconditionally near the end, that I failed to realise – or wouldn’t admit – just how vulnerable you were.
So the main reason I wanted to write was to say sorry. I did the best I could with you and for you at the time, but it wasn’t good enough and I ultimately failed to protect you and keep you safe. I wish I could go back in time and do things differently.
I also wanted to ask you about what happened at the end. It’s still not clear, despite an inquest. It seems as if you fell and banged your head, and then your heart just gave up, your body weakened by alcohol and the medication you took faithfully, and which I now wish you hadn’t. I hope with all my heart that you slipped away quietly and with some clarity and relief. I’m both glad your life as it was has ended and for ever full of sorrow that you are gone. All my love, Mum
The legal stuff is done. Immediately I am reminded of you telling me, many times before we were married, that it wasn’t just about a wedding, but about the legalities of marriage. And it strikes me that there isn’t a correlate of a wedding for the legalities of divorce.
But I think there ought to be. A ritual untying of a frayed knot.
Today, I drove out to the High Rocks, in Groombridge, East Sussex, and walked around that peaceful and beautiful place, where we had once been so full of hope, when we made eloquent wedding vows, brimming with rude ambition for a union that had the odds stacked against it from the start.
Our wedding day still ranks up there among the best days of my life. We may not have been Romeo and Juliet, but there are compensations: nobody died young.
One of the most touching surprises of coming home after things didn’t work out (there have been many beautiful surprises), has been the sadness of friends and family that our marriage didn’t go the distance. It has been good and healing to be reminded that once upon a time, we loved each other. I also remain resolute that we had more adventures in our decade and a bit than many people fit into a lifetime.
Yet you and I also know that individually, and collectively, we failed. There are words we cannot take back, actions we can’t undo, stains and blemishes that won’t rub out or fade, or look good in any light.
Then again, so much of who I am now, especially the parts I really like, I am because of you, because you loved and nurtured those aspects, and because of our marriage. Almost every time I see a film, watch plays, read certain books and listen to new music, I often wonder what you would make of it, what we would have discussed.
I know, too, that you spent many years hoping I would slow down, when I just seemed to get faster and faster, and ever more frazzled and exhausted. It’s likely I will always be ambitious, but my life has a slower rhythm now. There’s perhaps a barely conscious realisation that speed kills love.
It has been a little over two years since we legally separated. I am enormously proud that we have gone our own ways without acrimony or bitterness, but with kindness and respect. At one time we joked that we were more amicable than our respective lawyers.
Having reneged on our High Rocks promises, I’d like to make three wishes on untying the knot.
My first wish is that we both come out of this not just wiser and stronger, but nicer people too. The second is that we both learn some life-changing lessons from what went wrong, and make sure we don’t repeat avoidable errors. That would be the real tragedy. And my last wish is that we both find that elusive “happy-ever-after”, with someone else.
Love to you, and the best of British on this next leg of your journey.
Anonymous
this one is definitely fiction :D
Yeh i was thinking it seemed to good to be true :)
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