Good Grief 248

Alive and f..ing angry
And grinning and delighted
I know I have said before that I would be visiting anger
https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/2070279656308738226
But this is different again
It poses an interesting question, is every feeling and emotion a new feeling and emotion?
We give it a broadly generic name and yet it can 'feel' so different.
Anyway as I headed down the motorway today, listening to Rachmaninov's 3rd piano concerto (how did he manage all that emotion?!) I was feeling anger and incandescent rage....and was delighted...the energy....
After You and Yours yesterday, I was prompted to listen to an interview that I'd missed (Robert Peston and Eddie Mair interviewing Julian Barnes) about their experiences of the deaths of their partners.
I was interested to hear of Barnes's persistent thoughts of suicide and then deciding that he needed to live in order to preserve her memory, and of Peston's view that it had never occurred, partly because he had children and also his wife had always considered it to be the most selfish of acts.
Having been sorting and burning more stuff last week, including stuff from my husband's life before we met, I'm angry at having to sort dead men's remains and feeling so little life myself. Selfishly, or just how it is, angry that they essentially had uninterrupted and very full lives and were well and dearly loved at the very end and didn't have to give a second thought to clearing out all the vestiges of their existences. (I was interested to note that most of the men interviewed on You and Yours had met new partners and I don't think the women had). I don't feel the need to preserve their memories, although have the dearest of memories and their memories are very worthy of preserving- they were both remarkable men in very different ways. But it makes me angry to think that a life's purpose and meaning is to preserve the memory of the dead. I cannot bear the idea of a life as a living, or, in my opinion, living but dead, momento mori.
So, so, so many differences in views, opinions, and experiences....and mine is just one other, and it doesn't matter one jot, but it is mine.
As I drove I missed my husband's huge intelligence... I was thinking of his erudition regarding a Heaney translation and really miss vicariously understanding things that would otherwise pass me by.
So ....... (thank you to Phil, Heaney and Beowulf) ...
It's my anger and I'm bloody delighted.
I'm alive and wonderfully, incandescently, angry.
And I had a good day.
Just think how many thoughts, feelings and emotions have worn down these steps....