Good Grief 75

I was wondering when disintegration would come and it arrived today.
I know it will sound absurd but each photo on here feels like a small miracle and each deep diaphragm breath can surprise me - each one another breath of life which can feel so tenuous.

Yet again, I inched my way through my working week, crawled home last night and that was it. Door shut. I wasn't at all convinced I would get up today but I did, eventually. I had decided to visit a dear friend, Jim, who had propped me up during my Nimrod collapse moment at the crematorium when my partner died. In the period afterwards he was such a steady constant support. Years on, when I later married, I took my husband through to meet Jim and was so pleased to see them get on. All 3 men had the common threads of a fascination with history and a fiercely left wing socialist politics. I would so love to get them all together now and listen to them having a nightlong political rant. As I lay in bed this morning I was trying to remember how long ago it was since Jim died. It had dawned on me that his was the only funeral I had really cried at properly. It was the one time when it felt ok, genuinely, uncontrollably safe and ok. My husband was with me and it was the only time I have felt so closely and completely supported through loss.

So this afternoon, I went to see Jim. I was sad to see the gravestone had fallen so I set it upright and tried to clean it off a little. As I looked around the cemetery I realised how many people there I had known. At one time it had seemed strange that my partner had not wanted to be buried there - he was a bit of a raconteur and there would be good crack there amongst old friends. But he wanted his ashes scattered and his spirit now runs as free as he did when he was a child growing up in the valley where he was born.