The Thread

'At the Edge of the Forest' by August Heinrich, c.1820

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I must admit, I recoil inside when I hear or read about a grieving person who has moved on with someone new. (Normally a celebrity of some description because, of course, who else would make it into the headlines.) I always scroll down, frantically checking for how long it’s been, so I can measure it in my mind somehow and decide whether I can imagine or tolerate the timeframe — which is never.

I especially wince when I hear people say things like, “She told the kids to make sure Daddy has lots of girlfriends,” and "He wanted me to find love again."

When I try to imagine the possibility of being with someone else, I cry.

And then I feel sick.

But I’m also not naïve enough (enough being the imperative word) to think I can predict the future, and know how I will feel in five, ten, twenty years’ time.

Then there was the psychic.

Not the one that left me speechless.

The one that robbed me blind.

“You’ll meet someone else,” she said. “And he’ll engineer it. It will be with his approval.”

I stared at her wondering if she was smoking crack, ruminating on the seventy pounds I’d paid and wondering if she was hiding it anywhere in her two-up-two-down kitchen diner.

I tried to reach for "He’d never say that", but I wasn’t confident enough in my conviction to deliver the reprimand.

And I might have still been focused on the seventy quid.

The thing is, how could I reliably say that?

Now that everything had changed.

Now that he had changed.

That we had both changed.

I feel like I don’t want anyone to touch me the way he did ever again. And yet I know how desperately grief can make you need to feel something — anything — or nothing at all.

Grief is like having a Death Eater move into your house.

It follows you everywhere you go.

It sleeps in your bed.

It slides its cold arm around you at night.

It never lets go.

Where grief is concerned, I find no haste to judge, no pocket of reproach to sit in.

Other people’s choices are none of my business.

I have no right to judge how they have survived.

But there are other times that (secretly) I do judge other people.

And sometimes, not so secretly.

Like the time I looked a twenty-something woman up and down — let's say 'delicately, but purposefully'.

I clocked her as soon as we arrived, because I heard her shout, “You fucking bastard!” followed by a rambunctious laugh. (A phrase, it would appear, she leans on a lot. In fact, I feel like it was the only thing I heard for an hour.)

I followed the invasion of life to her tennis skirt — which quite literally just covered her backside — and disappeared entirely when she repeatedly bent to pick up the ball with pencil-straight legs. It remained unclear whether she was wearing any underwear.

It was like a car crash I couldn't look away from.

My look of quiet stern disapproval, when she walked past us, caused her momentary mutism and, for a moment, I felt like I had given her a gift.

Then I just thought: what a bitch.

She was just too familiar an echo of someone I was once.

If you’ve been forced to have grief occupy the essence of your being and you’re still alive then whatever you did was the right thing at the time, even if it was complicated, or a messy way to get there.

Everyone unravels differently.

Grief makes you want to quit.

I've discovered that I often don't really want to die.

I've just got nothing left.

Grief is too big of a competitor.

You simply run out of steam.

You run out of fight.

Then there comes a point when you realise that if you don’t get back out there and live, then you’re dead anyway — entombed with a Death Eater who makes your soul cry every minute of every day.

Love is only beautiful because it has to end.

In this world at least.

And when you realise that, you understand there is no grand, goal-filled, sparkly future.

There’s now.

Just now.

And maybe tomorrow, if you’re lucky.

When I heard people say "the love lives on inside of you" I used to think that it was some greeting card mantra. It isn't. The love really does stay alive. It belongs to who you were together, this thread of magic between you both, that is always there.

Sometimes you grasp at it, pulling you closer to them, like a magical golden thread that leads back to them, and a time when everything was okay.

All you can do is accept that the thread is enough.

It's all that's left.

But it never is.

One day you realise you have to tie the magical thread around your waist.

Dare to venture into the forest.

Dare to live again.

Dare to trust that you will survive.

You worry at first that the thread will break if you venture too far.

But it never does.

It just keeps stretching and stretching,

to wherever you are.

I don’t know who Kelsey Parker is and (without intending her any disrespect) don’t need to.

All I know is that her husband died.

And she has dared to love again.

Which is why I was shocked when I read comments about her online:

“She’s been shagging around since he died.”

“Slag.”

Grief teaches you many things.

One of them is how loudly strangers speak about lives they’ve never lived.