The difficult third post

Musicians often talk about the 'difficult second album' - that phenomenon that means that after a stunning debut, they struggle to recapture that same energy and fire in the follow up.  I have always struggled for consistency in my blogging, my ADHD sensibility meaning that I can rarely concentrate on any one thing long enough to maintain something so complex.

The death of my cousin has fundamentally changed something in me though - possibly permanently.  I have been lucky these last 34 years in that death has never really struck too close to home for me.  A couple of years ago my wife's uncle died, which was very sad of course but he was of an age where such things are not expected but are at least reconcilable to a certain degree.  Her niece, aged 33, died last year very suddenly, and that was a much more difficult death to reconcile for her friends and family. coming as it did from nowhere.  But I hadn't really known her all that well, so while it was again sad and tragic, it didn't have the same immediacy of impact for me as it did for my wife, who had grown up alongside her.

I never got the opportunity to know Terry (or indeed much of my extended family) very well growing up, for reasons too long-winded and dull to go into here.  Aged 19 though, I left home and began the journey of gradually exploring this odd notion that there were a large number of people in the world who actually genuinely and unconditionally loved me just because I was there.  It's a notion that I have done my best to come to terms with and accept as normal over the last fifteen years, but still one that I feel I am growing into.  Nonetheless, I had been close enough to Terry and his sisters and parents that his death was a personal thing.  It was a gut punch that took the wind from my sails and made me simply disappear for a few days, logging off from the world in both a real and a digital sense.  I suspended my social media accounts, I didn't do any work which required human interaction, I just wanted the world in general to pause and leave me alone for a while.

Of course, I spoke with my family, being there for them as best I could.  It wasn't an easy thing to make that first phone call, and I'd be lying if I said that it got easier with each subsequent one.  Talking about death is not something that society really adequately provides us for here in the West.  Talking about the sudden death of one so young, when no real sense can be made of it, is something that I don't believe anyone can ever ne REALLY prepared for. But we talked, and we cried.  At the funeral last week, we cried some more, and then we laughed as we recalled happy memories, and looked at the picture of Terry's beaming, guileless smile staring out at us all from a beautiful picture of him on his wedding day.  Undoubtedly the happiest day of his life, for I know that his wife meant the world and more to him.

As I said before, I am very conscious of the fact that Terry, were he here. would be telling us all that though it was all very sad, we needed to get on with it.  So whereas I don't intend to spend every blog post that I write moving forwards talking about him, it is a fact that each post I write forms its own little memorial.  Each one is me remembering that Terry was a man who did things that needed to be done. Who didn't prevaricate or stutter but simply identified the need and then addressed it in the most practical way.

I don't know that I will ever get used to the fact of him not being here.  At his funeral and the party afterwards, I kept expecting him to suddenly appear.  Earlier today, I sat and watched a Touring Car race, and there were incidents in it that I instinctively reached for the phone to text him about before realisation poured all over me again like a cold shower, and the gap inside me left by his passing yawned wide open once again.  All those opportunities never taken.  All those things that we talked about doing but I never got around to arranging.  No more.

I made a start this weekend, going to London on a 45 minute tube journey first thing on Saturday and spending a great day out around the city with a friend.  I even got a filet o fish from McDonalds on the way to my train and ate it on the way home.  It might sound like the most normal thing in the world, but I just described three things that I wouldn't have even contemplated, much less done only a few weeks ago.  But times change.  A death reminds us that we are all equal and all equally fleeting. We can sit and worry about what might or might not be, or we can seize the day and try and live with whatever the result.

So now that's three blog posts done.  It is time for me to try and move forward.  I won't always write about him, but he will be in lockstep with me through each line, pushing me to write as much as he pushes me to do everything else I intend to do.

Thanks Terry.  Thanks for basically being you, and for helping me to see how I can be a better me.