Struggling for words
‘Write something’.
.
I don’t know.
.
Before
this felt like it was about you.
Because it was for you.
Of you.
To you.
.
I would never have called it this
but on reflection
it was a kind of tribute
a real-time eulogy.
.
A testimony to the specific
moment by moment
reality
of what you faced.
The grace with which you lived
and the dignity you brought
to dying.
.
I called it a survival guide to living on the sidelines of cancer.
.
And maybe
that’s also what it was.
My way of surviving
on the fringes
of your slow
decline.
.
But I’m not anymore.
I’m not living on the sidelines of cancer.
.
I’m just a sad man
thinking about
how on earth
I’m going to bear
the
unbearable
loneliness
of your
absence.
.
And I don’t know if I have the words
for that.
.
I’m not the only one.
.
Our friends message me.
There are no words.
I didn’t know what to write.
I don’t know what to say.
.
Language fails us all.
.
I always imagined
we’d live to old age together.
.
That you would go first.
.
And when you did
that I would die almost immediately afterwards
of a broken heart.
.
I suppose I’m a bit surprised
and a bit disappointed
that it hasn’t happened yet.
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On Coping is my story of surviving on the sidelines of cancer. It begins in 2022 with On Coping #1, written the day after my 41st birthday. The day my wife Imogen, the mother of my three children, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. It’s the story of what happened next. Read from the start.
George, my fingers also rest still on the keyboard while words fail me. I don't want to say "I'm sorry for your loss", although I am, achingly sorry - the type of sorry that would take your pain away, not pity it.
Instead, I will say "I see you."
You see, my Dad also died last week. Grief is a strange coat on me - not warm enough to stop me shivering, too heavy and suffocating to be borne. I don't come here to say ingratiatingly "I know how you feel" because I don't - everything in our griefs is individual.
But I do come here to say that while you feel alone now, threads of connection and feeling and humanity are reaching out to you for when you need them. The time and need for comfort ebbs and flows, but the expression of it is always here for you. And while you walk the unimaginable over the next days, weeks, whatever, I will be pacing a path too, and I will think of you, and your strength, and your softness, and I will send mine invisibly towards you too.
Hi George, I can only imagine how absolutely surrounded by people and love you must be at the moment yet feel so very alone. There are no words i guess, because it is all so much bigger than language. Yet I do find myself checking in here every other day since she passed to see if you have written again. Because how you write is so very human and I think that is missing a lot in this world. I hope you continue to find the strength daily to do whatever you need to do to just get through that day. X