Incomprehensible

Time passes¹. Life is fleeting.

I know this, I’ve experienced my fair share of familial death, and close calls too for friends on several occasions. I see myself when others experience grief as the stoic dependable one. Yet this time, I feel lost. Fair warning, this is going to be a little pitiful.

Time goes so slowly when you’re young
Time hangs so heavy
Don’t wish time away now before your life has begun
You’re still young…

‘Time’ by Fascinating Aïda

So, Hamish, I’m not afraid to say I miss you now, and will probably forever. I’ve missed you, among everyone I love as my family, in the last year of isolation. Dependable, fascinating, wonderful, and clever. Life, the universe, and everything really, will be worse without you in it, but a person lives at least as long as they are remembered, and you shall be remembered with love, for as long as I am able. As with all of my wind band children, my strongest memories from university are the ones with you in it, and I hope I managed to live up to the level of friendship you deserved. Yet I’m realising that I never got to know you to be able to say why I miss you, and now it’s too late.

Attending a funeral virtually is every bit as heartbreakingly disconnected as I expected it to be. It was a lovely service, but pixels on a screen can’t really help to truly start to say goodbye. I found myself getting jealous of our friends who could be there in person. I found myself getting upset at all the things I never knew you did. I found myself worrying that I was being conceited, relating every thought back to how I was feeling.

The last two years have been fragmentary for our friendship groups, as university either ended or got in the way and we all firmly stuck to rules. I kept thinking “I need to reach out”, but something stayed my hand. My brain’s like that. Wallowing in self pity, instead of doing what I could to rectify it.

Thank you for being there, and I promise to keep you in my memories for as long as I am able.

O ye’ll tak’ the high road and I’ll tak’ the low road,
And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye.
But me and my true love will never meet again,
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomond.

‘The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond’ but to the tune of ‘Copacabana’, because as much as I hated it, it still makes me smile

I’m sitting in the garden outside my childhood home to write this, as a heatwave meanders into a storm. So my façade of emotional stability is about to break into a flood of mixed feelings, fears and despair. My family, not the one here but the one which has seen me through much of the pain I’ve talked about previously, is hundreds of miles away from me, and I from them. I can only hope they know I’m here for them, because my anxieties about what’s appropriate and time and distance and schedules and work are preventing me from truly feeling like I’m doing my duties to my friends.

Grief is a very personal process, and one at which I’m fairly well practised. I just have to allow myself to start.