Grief

God knows I’ve lost enough people now and each one has made me feel different. Not only different after the event but also, different to how I expected to feel.

I was a child with my first two grandparents, I don’t recall feeling anything. They were there and then they were not there. Back then we never went to funerals, it wasn’t the done thing for children to go to a relatives funeral unless it was unavoidable so, quite literally, they were just ‘gone’ and it didn’t resonate with me. Likewise, even into early adulthood, older relatives, great aunts and uncles were here then gone and my life didn’t change at all, I felt no different.

At 23 I lost my mum, that was my first experience of grief yet, shared grief was all but denied me. Had I not been married at the time and not had such great inlaws, it was quite clear my grief was dictated by what others felt was appropriate. My own family held the attitude that any outward sign of grief was an unacceptable sign of weakness. They showed none themselves and expected the same from me. For me, bottling up that level of grief was not possible. As time went on I realised that I did have the freedom to grieve my own way. Because no one in my circle knew mum close enough to acknowledge the anniversary or her birthday, I was left to it to grieve my own way. Sadly, with mum, there was no grief at the funeral which got caught up in a family feud I was not party to but got heavily affected by. I was stuck with the wrong side of the family, the side who were not grieving but rather going through the emotions or there to cover their own guilt. Part of me, even to this day, missed that opportunity to really have a day to say goodbye properly.

Now, my nan, mum’s mum and my last grandparent died a few years later and I had been so close to her my entire life and yet, when she died and at her funeral and ever since, I’ve felt nothing. I know when she died but that is only because it was January 1st, an easy date to remember and I know the year or 1988 because it was between Jermaine & Matt’s birth years of ’87 & ’88. I just don’t even think about it at New Years or on her birthday in March which I am not even sure was the 11th or 12th.

The next one to hit me was my friend Tony. I was so close to him, I really loved that man and he went so suddenly and for an age afterwards I would randomly cry but, I couldn’t tell you what month or year he died without working it out and I’d not want to do anything to ‘remember’ him.

Next was Sean’s mum Clare. Again, I cannot tell without working out when she died but I do very often think about her and miss her personality in my life. Again, it’s not me to want to do a remembrance gathering each year. I feel funerals are the time for that and from then on, we grieve our own way.

A couple years ago Dad went. He’d had dementia for a while so effectively went a few years earlier but, in many ways, it was nice to get to know him when he didn’t have the opinions of his past life to cloud his actions. He got to know me a little and, perhaps, even liked me a bit and it is that part of him I do miss not the part before his dementia where, generally speaking, he was quite horrible.

Following that event was my ex mother in law Kay who I always considered since 1985 to be ‘mum’ and she effectively took over when my mum died in 1986. As this happened during Covid restrictions it was a very small funeral. No one from her extended family came, not even her husband. It was just my ex Kris, her daughter and three of our children with just a neighbour. It was, as much as these things can be, a lovely day.

As much as we can do this taken into account the feelings of others, we really need to grieve (or not) our way. If we want to do something special on a birthday or anniversary of death but no one else wants to, that is fine, we should accept it graciously. If we are invited to a memorial and really, don’t feel it, we should politely decline and not feel bad about that.

Grief is too complex to grieve someone else’s way, we’ve got to stay true to ourselves. As I said earlier, there are some events where I’d prefer not to be alone like Mum’s death, hell, I even arranged a civil partnership on her death anniversary to ensure I wasn’t alone that day and then, that relationship didn’t work out so now I dislike the day all the more. I’d prefer not to be alone but, also as I said, no one alive now knew her, certainly no one who ever showed they cared before so, to ask anyone to join me would be pointless. When I can I try to arrange a social event around the time. Only I really know why but I get the comfort all the same, I’d never sell it as what it is to me, I don’t want anyone there being morbid or going over the life of my mum, again, they never knew her anyway.

So, the purpose of this blog entry is to share only my feelings on this, it would be wrong to read anything as an instruction to others, the whole point is to do it personally.

To all those feelings we have of all those who we lost and it hurt, my sympathies and understanding, always.

Mental Health, Disability & Competition

Why Competition?

I say competition because, very often this is how it feels.

One person says: “I’m feeling so bad today”

Next person says:

“Tell me about it, you’ve no idea how bad I am feeling”

The second person has totally dismissed the feelings and honesty of the first.

The second person probably does feel bad but, do they have the right to dismiss the first?

What if, no matter what it is which affects person one, person two always tries to trump it?

I find this in my own life. I know what I have wrong and, because generally speaking it’s invisible, I don’t like to detail it. It has been my experience that it is dismissed with some of those around me treating me like I am looking for an excuse.

Diagnosis

Another issue is that I do not really have a diagnosis. I’ve a broad idea of what it is wrong but there is no acceptable label. It is much like when the kids were young and I was trying to get services for the disabled ones. Their lack of labels slammed so many doors in my face. I’d be confronted by parents of ‘Downs’ kids or ‘autistic kids’ and they’d be quite matter of fact over the amount of support they got. This charity did this for them, that charity bought them this and then there was me with two very difficult to manage kids having to fight for every tiny little bit of help.

This is where I am now. 

I’ve suffered with mental health issues since 1992. It was a crazy trigger, more of that straw on the back of a camel I think. A simple road accident, a potentially very serious one but, long term damage was minimal, let’s explore what the other knows straws were

History

As long as I can remember I felt different. I could never quite understand how or why I just knew that I had zero confidence, was scared of my own shadow and felt unsafe, like I wasn’t really wanted much. I think mum was probably OK, nan and auntie Jessie (neighbour) but the men of the family, tolerated me at best.

I was totally disinterested in any form of sport and completely non competitive. All the ‘men’ in the family were captains of teams and watched sport on TV, went straight to the back pages of the newspaper. 

I, on the other hand, just wanted to play with my model cars.

In puberty I had one friend, ironically, also mad keen on sport but he was also a bit bonkers and into other things which interested me so, we got along. 

There are significant memories I have which stick with me and make me feel uncomfortable. Being made to play games with my sister and her friends before puberty, on one occasion being made to get my penis out to show her friends on the doorstep. During puberty I had no privacy at all, zero. My sister used to walk through my bedroom to get to her room. If I spent what was considered to be ‘too long’ in the bathroom I’d be told to get out so, a very repressed puberty.

I tried especially hard to conform to what was normal by chatting to girls but, I didn’t have a clue or, really, any feelings to want to.

By around age 15 I was very aware I was attracted to my own gender with no opportunity to explore it.

Inevitably I got married in 1986 at 23.

Just before that and I do mean just … mum died suddenly. Apparently, I was the only one who didn’t know she was going to die, the implication being, I was too stupid to understand such things. The year before that, I worked out my dad was having an affair with his sister in law and he told me to keep it secret, a promise I refused to keep. I said if mum asked I’d answer the questions she asked honestly, she asked.

They put mum through some emotional torture in what I still consider to be a way of easing their own guilt. I got caught up in the mess. Wanting to stay loyal to my mum, wanting nothing to do with my dad and moving on but, mum insisted I maintain contact. I always considered this the wrong thing to do but didn’t want to argue with mum. It was the wrong thing to do because, when this happened the story in the family was that I was rubbing my mums face in it by visiting my dad! Mum, I know, tried to correct it but, once an opinion has been reached in a family or anywhere else, the damage is done.

This still happens to this day. Someone will tell someone else their opinion of me, just venting but, never update who they told so I now have people all over the place who only ever hear negatives about me. I cannot put it right and those who could don’t want to lose face by admitting the stories were, being generous, not entirely factual.

More Recently

Someone in the household got themselves involved with the king of bull, he’d say anything to get what he was after or, to isolate people from each other he didn’t want speaking in order that very few knew the whole picture he was getting up to. There are a great many lies about me out there now did all manner of damage one of which being how I sexually assaulted him. There was no shortage of gossipers all too ready to share that lie!

I tried to do the right thing and support vulnerable men from 1995 onwards and then made a dumb decision in 2001 to make a documentary. What followed was years of abuse locally, no one in the family was safe and the police actively assisted the abusers with their homophobia either because they were homophobic themselves or because it was just easier. Eventually, we had to move.

None of this has helped me with the mental health issues. It’s always there and i have to work incredibly hard to control it. Many times I have prayed to God not to let me wake up the next morning as I have had enough,

Couple years back, before lockdown, I got scammed by cowboys, travellers who charged me over £3000 to do the garden who trashed it. I won in court which cost me even more but, likely I’ll not see the money back.

So many things in life have left me feeling like a victim. One form of abuse after another. Every lie, every exaggeration of a truth is abuse. Every well meaning person getting involved with half of a story telling me I am wrong, is abuse.

Each time my own health is ignored or glossed over, it’s abuse. When I am told to rest and others insist I carry on as usual, that’s abuse.

All this is emotional abuse and I have had it for over half a century. 

So many promises to me get easily broken by those who would seek out support when it happened to them. I am, seemingly, the least important, the bottom of any list the one needed when I am needed but, not if I am not.

I imagined that I’d get to a certain age, an age I can recall grandparents getting, when the respect would be there, when the love would be shown by others wanting to make my life just a little easier but, it’s really not happening. I still feel like I have to pay for everything and still then, it’s not enough. I either have to pay in praise for a job well done, compensate some other way for the effort or just wait an indefinite period until nothing, nothing at all gets in the way which they will consider more important than me.

To see how others treat me I’d excuse anyone for believing I’d been an absolute dick my entire life but, though some have been told that has been me, in truth, I have not been.