A Nameless Pain

Living with Loss

Posted on December 30, 2015 by Aimée Claire

People say grief comes in waves. In shock, especially with sudden loss like with losing my Marky, the world is turned into a nightmare within the split second it took the police who showed up at my door to tell me that the love of my life was found dead in the street that afternoon… and I did not find that grief came in waves. Grief came in debilitating overwhelming pain that would not cease. I could hardly stand up… it was hard to physically breathe for months. Almost a year on and I finally understand that grief does grow into something that crashes over you in waves because it starts to live inside you. A deeper sadness is filling into my bones. One of missing, one of longing, one of aching. One of mourning rather than grief you could say. I carry my grief with me everywhere I go…. Sometimes I can smile, I can function unlike in the first ten months but it is with me all the time as an undercurrent. Other times the waves envelop me and all I can do is lean in and collapse into the wave that leaves me crawling on my hands and knees begging for life to take me too. I let the wave fill my lungs and I try to embrace grief and turn it into an act of love so that my love for him can live on.

Waves often come as bloodied punches to the face. At least once a day I get this sudden hit of ‘he is really gone’ and I feel this sharp pain in my chest and suddenly can’t breathe again… it becomes hard to inhale.

When that sharp pain of reality hits it feels like the memory of when the police were in my living room all over again only there is no fog of shock to disarm it even slightly. I always carry around the ache of grief yet in those moments it feels like the pain hits with more clarity. Some days it feels like my mind is intent on torturing me and replaying that moment in my head. I wonder if this is my brain trying to drill ‘acceptance’ into me… whatever the word acceptance means when it comes to death. I have nightmares where my brain throws up so many scenarios, as if my mind is playing out a puzzle of ‘where did he disappear to’ where my brain can’t process death or how suddenly it came to be. I have so many nightmares where he is missing or lost and I am desperately trying to get in touch with him. They echo the day he died as I hadn’t heard from him in hours and I was starting to panic but trying to reassure myself that he had got back to The Shire and fallen asleep. I kissed him only three hours before. As logically as I understand death, the soul or psyche or mind or whatever we have in our heads… it either does not want to understand or simply does not grasp the sudden disappearance of the most important person in your life.

In Levels of Life Julian Barnes writes… ‘Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any pattern exists’ and the second I read this sentence it struck me. Grief comes in many forms, one of them is a crisis of faith. When someone you love dies you don’t just lose that person, you don’t even just lose your future with that person… you can lose your faith, your core, the pattern of life that you on some level have believed in. I am not talking personally here about religious faith as I do not have one, but of a faith that goes right to the core of your very being and of who you are. Even if you have no belief in an afterlife or even a soul, suddenly the world makes so little sense that everything becomes meaningless. When the best person you know dies young, nothing in this universe makes sense any more.

A friend says to me ‘your existence still means something’ when I tell her that life feels meaningless, but as much as I know she loves me and is trying to help, this isn’t about ego or myself. Existence feels futile in every sense, not my life, not even someone else’s life… but if the universe makes no sense then what meaning is there to derive? What is the point? I never needed a point before. My philosophy on life has always been that none of us know the answers while we are here, so just live life… yet when the most beautiful person is taken from this world so suddenly you need answers in a way you never knew before.

My friend says she can see that I feel betrayed by the universe… I answer that ‘betrayed by the universe’ is a perfect way of putting it. Julian Barnes wrote that many feel an anger not directly at the world but the indifference of it… ‘The indifference of life merely continuing until it merely ends’.

I cannot describe how earth shattering sudden loss is. It is not simply the death of a person who you love and miss. It shakes you so fundamentally that you don’t even know if you believe in the same things anymore. Someone has cracked you open at the centre so that you simply don’t trust anything anymore, you have no plan, you just fight to survive and on some days even that one day you have to get through seems so horrifically awful to survive through. That is what makes attempting ‘normal’ life so hard… you are no longer normal. You don’t see the point in anything, and you don’t want to be around anything that seems even in the slightest bit like a ‘normal’ world, it feels surreal, detached from you, and often insulting that life has just carried on and people live their lives around you while you don’t even know how to stand up anymore and loss is all you care about. The best person died, so why is the world still living?

…and this is what carrying grief with you feels like. We survive, we fight on… every minute that passes can be a battle. We carry with us infinite love and gratitude, a survival instinct that will make you cower, a love for life that can often surpass life itself but a pain that grounds us daily and makes our minds dig underground and want nothing more than to be with the dead. Our love lives on.

I have not written about grief in months because of this. I have even found it very hard to reach out to my support groups… because living with this grief is so exhausting but we carry on. In many ways we are the living dead, carrying the weight of death, loss and infinite love within us.

On Fear

Posted on August 13, 2015 by Aimée Claire

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
– C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I am terrified of the outside world. My senses are heightened… I have formed a fragility towards the world. I feel completely cut off from the living world and when it comes too near I panic. Death permeates all I can feel… grief is my home, grief is my only comfort and I want to cocoon myself in it and never leave this place where time does not move forward. The pain kills my brain cells, renders me unable to move, removes my ability to feel anything other than the all-consuming nature of this. Yet the opposite is so unimaginable that I would rather stay in the darkness where my grief connects me to my love. It is impossible to explain the terror of a world that so suddenly became so unstable, so lost, so opposite of everything I ever held in my heart and soul as truth. Suddenly my life line is missing. I am missing. The ground crumbled beneath me, leaving me unable to breathe, leaving me bare. I have no fear of death because I want to die… I have a fear of the living world around me, constantly buzzing with a pulse that wants to devour everything I ever trusted and wants to rush this new existence into formation. I reject it. Grief is love, I caress the pain and call it my home.

I have never been someone who sought peaceful places… I like noise, hearing trains and busy city centres. I always have music playing. It is only since this happened that I have wanted peace and quiet. I finally felt some sort of sense of relief when I wondered round my home cemetery. I will go to my loves grave whenever I am in the country, but I found it could be any cemetery that allows me to breathe. I need peace, a place away from the outside world… a place that understands death and where the whole ground is made for mourning.

“I see what grief does, how it strips you bare, shows you all the things you don’t want to know. That loss doesn’t end, that there isn’t a moment where you are done, when you can neatly put it away and move on.”
– Elizabeth Scott, Heartbeat

The Stages of Grief

Posted on July 16, 2015July 17, 2015 by Aimée Claire

The theories on stages of grief are not going to come and hold your hand tightly. The theories of grief are not going to be there for you at 4am when you wake up and feel like smashing everything in your sight to bits. The theories of grief are not going to hold you while you cry so much your body shakes, you sweat and tremble and your eyelids swell to twice their size and your breathing constricts. The theories will not tell you that anger does not feel as logical as the word sounds, that one day your fist will clench around your trolley in the supermarket and you will feel this negative energy course through you that you do not understand. The theories will not be able to help your brain stop the invasive thoughts of taking your own life. The theories will not stop you drinking despite every one including a small disclaimer that you should not drink to get through it. The theories will not let you sleep or block nightmares or night terrors which wake you with a pounding heart and drenched in cold sweat. The theories will not help you understand why this has happened to you and they will not be of any comfort when you’re reading stages of grief, trying to work out if you’re in denial or anger when you flit between every stage ever written about and feel like you are losing your grip on reality.

Pain takes you by the throat and holds you up against the wall. There are days where I cannot walk, where my legs feel like they are made of lead. I am so drained and exhausted all the time, I never knew this level of exhaustion existed. I felt like I almost collapsed coming back from the cemetery the other day. Other times I just feel so tense, muscles clench up within me and I shake while this negative energy courses through my veins and I have no way to dispel it. Other days I would rather rip off my skin than feel this blackness. It feels like your senses are heightened in many ways as you feel the outside world is too much and you’re too fragile to be in it, yet at once your mind is clouded and foggy and cannot string a sentence together or remember your own name.

Most understand grief as a linear process, as if you go through stages one by one and at the end of it you reach acceptance and you are ‘recovered’. Most bereaved people will tell you this is not true; that your grief will be with you for life. The process is not linear, for months on end you will be a chaotic mess of every emotion you ever thought it was possible to feel. I am still there. Others who are bereaved in the same way tell me that one day it will feel less intense. They never use the words recovered or better, they simply say the pain will be less intense… and all I can do right now is put my faith in their words and hope.

Something about being a student of psychology meant it was the theory I first turned to. I started reading everything I could lay my hands on about the stages of grief because I desperately needed something solid to hold onto, for something to make sense in a world that had crashed around me. I have never thought of myself as a logical brained person yet suddenly it is all I sought. I read about the stages of grief and the words were meaningless to me. They were not what I felt.

No one tells you that the so called ‘anger stage’ isn’t as simple as being directly angry at the world or unfairness of it all, although of course you are… one day you will just notice this negative energy coursing through your veins and you will feel your body tense up and your fist might clench unexpectedly and your body will not know how to react. No one tells you that it hits you time and time again that your loved one is gone. It hits you on every level so many times. Acceptance is not as simple as the logical knowledge that he is gone. In your nightmares you will search for him as though he is simply lost, or as if he died but came back and you will scream at him in your dream that he died once already, he cannot go running because you lost him once already and you will do not it again. You will wait for him to come back in some form. Some days you will tuck knowledge away in your brain as if you can tell him about it a later date.

Every minute of every day something could come along and unexpectantly stab you in the heart with this fresh pain. It hits over and over and over. Six months on and it can still hit me that this has really happened.

I had no knowledge at all of how physical grief would be, I suppose this is why I have written this.

“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.”

― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

The Pain of Grief

Posted on June 22, 2015June 22, 2015 by Aimée Claire

It has been five months since my life changed completely, since the foundation of everything I knew and believed crumbled, since my life was stolen the day the love of my life’s was.

There is no name for this pain. I cannot describe it. Language betrays me when I attempt to form the words to share it. It feels both overwhelming and hollow like the world stopped being a good place. I feel my sense of hope, belief and strength or sense of the universe has deserted me. I can’t put this pain into anything. There’s no song to scream it into or film that depicts it or book that understands it.

It is a nameless pain.

A pain which takes on so many forms and yet is so formless and all consuming. A pain which people try to tidy into a neat grieving process. There are words which make you realise how much we have failed to understand this suffering… Bereavement, grief, widow. These words do not do justice to this pain. The all-consuming nature of this and severity of the ever changing emotions that hit you like someone has punched you in the gut cannot be summarised. The world feels completely meaningless.

It is hard to tell you how much I am grieving for. I am not only grieving for the love of my life, my best friend… but my whole life. My life was stolen. I am grieving for the life that I had my heart set on, that I loved and I was so completely over the moon happy with. My future has gone missing. I am grieving for my partner, for his life and all the experiences that he should have and he deserved. I know of the things he dreamt of. I am grieving for the marriage we wanted and for the children that were meant to be. We had already named our first girl. I am grieving for every hope and dream for the future that we shared. I am grieving myself. I will never again be that happy person I was, something has fundamentally changed within me. I am grieving for my present, for my past and for my future. I am grieving for the axis of my whole world. I am grieving my belief system. I have lost my grip on what I even believe in in terms of life after death, the core of me has been shattered.

My life vanished. I try to see a future and all I see is emptiness.

Experiencing a close death as someone who is not religious is much harder than I could have imagined. I used to feel comfortable not knowing any of the answers of the universe, yet now I find myself begging for answers and having none. It is hard to talk about death when your own beliefs are an abstract idea. I always described myself as a ‘not religious but spiritual person’ and I found it hard to really say what that meant… to me it meant believing in the power of the universe, believing that there was no way we could tell if there was anything to life beyond our existence but believing that there could and might well be… believing in something, or hoping for something. It meant being open to possibility. I am scared now that maybe it meant attaching meaning to things that weren’t ever meaningful.

I have spent my new existence wondering around bookshops trying to find the one book that would explain and make sense of a world that would take someone so magical. The same way I have been staring up at the sky as if the stars could tell me something, as if anything had any meaning anymore. All I do every day is fight myself on the idea of an afterlife and if it exists and what it could possibly look like. I cannot imagine one if it exists…. not a kind one or one that makes any sense to me. I cry in the shower every day and wonder if my baby knows I am suffering and then think if he does that’s a unkind afterlife but what kind of afterlife is it if they can’t see the ones they loved that they left on earth? I constantly question and forever have no answers. I try to imagine somewhere where he is happy. The one that kills me the most is imagining that he is just… gone. No afterlife, nothing. I cannot even handle that. I hope for an afterlife and it kills me that I cannot imagine one.

I have always been a person of hope. No matter how hard life has felt, I have had a fire burning in me. I can no longer feel the fire. Now all I see is a world that is cruel and pointless, heartless… emotionless.

People say the funeral is the hardest part but that’s not true. I was still in a state of shock and in a kind of unreal bubble through the funeral which helped me survive. Now five months down the line, the pain has really begun. I not sure whether it is reality kicking the door down but the pain feels so raw, much deeper and never-ending. It feels suffocating and anchoring. I would rather rip my skin off than experience another moment of this blackness. I cannot imagine an end to this nameless formless pain. Five months down the line and the idea of returning ‘back to normal’ seems to be in the air, people expecting you to somehow pick yourself up and dust yourself off and yet I feel more so now than ever that I have no future. There is no magical light at the end of the tunnel, the phrases surrounding normal and moving forward feel like acid to my skin. There is nothingness.

I have tried many ways of coping… I am in counselling, I have tried painting, I have tried collaging, I have thrown out a large amount of my belongings in a frenzy to clear my mind, I have drunk admittedly far too much, I have relied on sleeping pills to just please for the love of god, knock me out… there are some days where I find it hard to breathe and all I can do is give in, sink further into my mattress and stay curled up in a bed all day in bed. I have tried forcing myself out of the house only to find that I have developed anxiety issues and panic in crowds and feel very fragile to be around the normal outside world. When your mind is overwhelmed with sudden loss, it cannot take the sensory overload. Every day is a battle for survival which truthfully I don’t even want to win.

Writing has been my only solace… which is why this blog has been born. Truthfully this is mostly self-indulgent. I have poured my words and heart out over my social networking websites since the 4^th January, scribbling on my laptop at 4am when the world feels abandoned and I feel I can say how utterly despairing I find this new existence. I now find I want to order my thoughts, somehow.

I hope maybe writing them down somewhere formally will organise them in my mind and will help my closest friends be able to understand my pain by reading. I also hope that my words, no matter how despairing at times, might find someone else who has had their life ripped apart. I have found it comforting to read others words and know I am not alone in all these terrifying feelings. If you’ve just lost someone, you are not alone, and these overwhelming emotions are normal. I promise.

The Story

Posted on June 22, 2015 by Aimée Claire

On the 4th January 2015, the love of my life died suddenly and unexpectedly from a heart attack.

Mark will always be love of my life. I cannot even begin to describe him as a person and how much joy and wonder he brought into my life.

I have tried writing how our love felt. I have tried to pour the overwhelming perfection of two people who fit so well together into words and I find I cannot. I am reminded of the book ‘Guess how much I love you’… Marky used to say he loved me to Gallifrey and back. It was the kind of love that made you feel in harmony and at peace. True love changes you. You learn to love differently, to think differently… to give in a way that is selfless because all you want in the world is for this person to be happy. I walked around in the world in my own little impenetrable bubble of happiness. I am not sure how he did it but he managed to make every day feel magical. It was the most love, the most happiness, and most fun I could ever imagine having. I cannot even imagine having that much in common with another human being again. We used to practically shout “SAME BRAINS!” at each other for how much we thought alike. It was with Marky that I came to know what love was supposed to feel like… warm, close, secure, nurturing, happy and magical and adventurous all at the same time. I couldn’t imagine in my wildest dreams I could have been lucky enough to meet someone so fun, so magical, so geeky, so weird, so intelligent, so hyper in the mornings and so well connected to me. His life was taken only three hours since we kissed last. He was far too young. We had our whole lives to live yet. He was 39, myself 26.

We met through the group to get Jeff Buckley’s cover of Hallelujah to number one in 2008. Pretty soon we had the oddest in-jokes and he was sending me huge boxes of quavers and wotsits from Amazon… but I won’t tell the joke behind it! I sent him dinosaurs and a duck teapot. Our friendship evolved till we were spending day and night messaging each other, having not even met in person yet. When we finally met we were inseparable from that day.

He sneakily let on in November that he knew how he was going to propose. He joked that we were “engaged to be engaged to be engaged” because he would ask me so many times during morning cuddles if I would spend the rest of my life with him. We talked about our wedding a lot… it would have been in the forest. There would have been a TARDIS somewhere hidden in the woods for people to discover. Chandeliers would have hung from the trees, tents would have sprung up with carnival type treats for people to enjoy. We were both neither conservative nor traditional and our wedding would have reflected the magic that was true love.

We planned so much because we knew we were for eternity. We knew our first daughters name. We were going to paint our children’s bedrooms like the universe and teach them about science and the wondrous nature of the universe.

In our time together we had so many adventures. We travelled to Paris, Edinburgh, London and Cardiff… and we had so much fun… so many gigs, so many hotel parties giggling like idiots, fancy hotel rooms and awful hotel rooms… he got the whole of Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club to sing along to Fairy Tale of New York. He was that amazing. I was always so in love with how passionately he would talk about music. The gigs we shared together were the best of my life. We were always at the front, getting shoved and bruised in the crowd and clinging to each other and kissing when our favourite songs were played. It felt like us against the world and it felt so alive. We did long distance (Marky in Wales, myself in London) so we went over the top on our adventures. However when he moved to a new home in Wales he would call it “ours”… if I ever called it his, he would correct me… and he moved all of heaven and earth to make me feel like it was ours. It was my weekend home. I did not need anything other than him… just me and him, our little part of the universe which was my part time home at The Shire… our shared youtube playlists and dancing. I would usually arrive at The Shire a few hours before he finished work and he would leave me lush post-it notes all over the apartment to welcome me home. Marky said it was our own little part of the universe.

I wanted my whole life to be with him. I felt I could face anything if he was beside me.

I want to shout from rooftops how amazing Marky was. I want to tell the world of his ridiculous jokes, his creative ways with words, his soulfulness, his intelligence and fiercely political nature, his humour and eccentricities, how utterly completely weird he could be, how hyper he was in the mornings, his stories of imaginary made up animals, his passion for music, how beautiful his intense geekiness was, how I could listen to his musings on our favourite shared geek (Doctor Who) for hours. I want to tell you that this amazing human being existed… the kindest person you could imagine, the most giving and sweetest. I want the world to know that someone this beautiful and majestic existed. My best friend was all of this and so much more. Nothing I could ever say about him could be big or bright enough for someone so beautiful.

You start to realise how little language conveys with this experience… ‘I miss him’ says so little. The ache of missing him turns into physical pain and language does not convey the measure of that ache in my soul to be able to speak to him and touch his face and hear his voice and I miss him alone says utterly nothing. I miss him so much that my bones ache and I feel like I cannot walk and the sheer horror of never being able to speak to him feels as if someone punched me and then I feel numb and I feel trapped in human constraints and I just need him. I love him to Gallifrey and back and I will never stop.