Wisteria in Grief Sold.

The grief that came was a flooding, sinking, aching pain filling up the gruelling emptiness. I was glad to have it.  And a wish, quite misguided, that it could all have been different despite knowing  that it never can be.  It may always have been an inevitability but the desperate sadness insists on being bound to the fact.

The weight that we all carried, in loving each other despite a damaged and trapped existence, always had priced into it a semi-conscious kernel of hope.  Your death crushed this with such a blow.  So hard that at first I think I was concussed from my life.

For the first month I couldn’t even remember your face but song after song that you had loved played, utterly unbidden, in a continual flow through my brain.  I can’t begin to explain how much I miss the longest lifeline to directly join with mine, from the moment of my beating heart.

I had been puzzling for some months about a painting that would speak to all of you. Maybe the sea because you once told me that if I stared too long, it would drive me insane.  But not long ago, on a very windy beach walk, I realised that one image wouldn’t cut the mustard.  You are a blend of too much to be summed up only once.

I don’t yet understand why you were so seduced by the material world when you had such a brain in you. Your ability to see the the beauty in what was largely ephemeral was a gift.   I do intend to work this out to the best my reason.  I can only wonder what could have been if your bedrock hadn’t been so eroded by the sea of alcohol and anxiety.  If you had had more faith in the golden strand of bravery, imagination, curiosity and fairness running through you.  You showed us all how to be human to the greatest heights and lowest depths.  It feels like the world sees less and less these treasures of kindness, forgiveness and listening.  None of them are finite and can live endlessly if we let them.

But of forgiveness, you never allowed it for yourself. An utter beauty of a person bogged down by such suffocating darkness and snared by the fleeting present moment.  You forgot that presence is simply the moving join between a past and it’s future. The whole thing is past and future, there is hardly any presence at all.

So I have decided to make a body of work for you and I’m going to call it A Space to Think to try and stretch that present moment. The painting and writing will all be for you.  This is my first letter.