Reblogging this one. Partly because I like it and partly because I was sitting down with Oisín flicking through photographs yesterday. There were ones of him and Dawn playing football in our garden in Streatham. Ones of Sam normal and solid and alive in our sitting room. He was asking who they were and where they went. He of course doesn’t remember them. As the memories recede and then death sweeps forward again and again, I understand even less.
Death! I talk about it a lot, don’t I?
In my defense, there’s been a lot of it about. My last but one entry talked about two peoples’ deaths – David and Lyra. Two different people with two different – and two violent – deaths.
So forgive me, it’s been on my mind. It’s always on my mind, really. I’ve talked at length in this blog about my death anxiety – thanatophobia for the Greeks out there – and its vampiric impact on my life. I’ve been in therapy for it before, but it was the wham-bam-thank-you-mam CBT, which did nothing to address the elephant in the room. Or, in Phillip Larkin-speak, the wardrobe.
The elephant is trauma. It’s terror. It’s checking for breath with a mirror when you’re 6. It’s shameful grief, collective grief, lost grief and grieving. It’s feeling it is shameful to grieve. It’s trying to understand…
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The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive 