your conversations are like a powerplant, for fuck sake
My hand shakes a little, not to be melodramatic – it may just be the over-indulgence in caffeine or the lack of food today. I haven’t reached the level where I can honestly say that I’m grieving. It’s a strong term. I have suffered bereavement, but event that feels too weighty compared to what his family must be feeling. We all expected his death. The worst thing at the moment, as I potter around my room with music on, unpacking my things from work and getting changed, is that it hasn’t hit home yet. Whether losing somebody ever hits home, is another point. You get slowly used to the fact that you well never see that person again, and cry occasionally at the ever fading memories of that person – the smile, the laugh, the embrace, the 100 mile-an-hour conversations, the trumpet playing, the illness. I know that at some point, maybe tonight, drunkenly, maybe at some random point in the future in the middle of some completely unconnected task, tears and distress will come.
That occasional moment of reflection, of picturing your connection with that person, then snipping that little cord, as the scene fades to grey. The mental images of my parents are now only those from photos that I have, happy photos, smiling, hugging and posing. The memories of the bad times float around, intangible and harder to relate with.
It’s a relief, selfishly, that he has passed. He isn’t ill anymore. Every morning waking in the limbo that this may or may not be his last day. These last weeks my thoughts of him have been of his yellow, gaunt, tired frame. I can picture his now smiling, sitting opposite crouched together discussing. He isn’t tired anymore.
A relief for his mother too, a fortnight in a foreign city sleeping at the bedside of her dying son, no one close enough to share her experience or feelings or emotions with. Playing the host to the stream of well-wishers, and now alone here. With only our earnest attempts of consolation.
I feel guilty, I am only one of a thousand people who hold him close to their hearts. I am not emotional, but my threshold has been effected somewhat by the passing of years and certain events. I am just happy I guess that I was lucky enough to have memories of time with the man, however short-lived and unfair. I am glad I knew the man Jerry Hope.
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