Bear Faced Bloggery

 ...and just like that, another year draws to its close.  I can scarcely believe that in just a couple of months I will have completed my second year as a widower... a year which, though slightly less emotionally fragile than the last, has nonetheless been jagged with grief. I feel my loss as acutely as ever, though life has expanded around it, subsuming it into the warp and weft of everyday existence. I am working more, I am writing again, I am filling my time with the minutiae of daily life to such an extent that, to the casual observer, I would seem to be little different from the person I was prior to the terrible events of Easter 2023.  But the casual observer would be wrong.  If they were only to look a little more closely they would see the continuing sadness behind my eyes, feel the pain of loss that hangs heavy on my heart, and perhaps begin to get some inkling of my daily struggle to keep going. Reading back my blog from this time last year, I can see that ...

  So, the little book on grief that I spoke about in my last blog post is all but finished (as far as these things ever can be...). It's been an incredibly tough 18 months since my devastating bereavement, during which time I have taken part in 2 bereavement courses, had two rounds of counselling/therapy, read countless books on the subject, have been supported throughout by a wonderful peer support worker, and am booked onto a grief 'retreat' this coming November... so no one can say I haven't grabbed hold of every bit of help and support that I've been offered. And yes, things have improved, but I am no nearer being able to function as I used to, am still floundering through what passes for my life, and still searching for answers that I will probably never find. I'm afraid that I'm having to come to terms with the fact that I am no longer the same person as I was pre-bereavement, and that life, to use a well-worn cliché, will never be the same. However, d...

  As those who have read my previous posts will know, since suffering a devastating personal loss last year, I have not been able to write - having neither the motivation nor the concentration required to create a story, much less to hone and edit until it is fit for human consumption. But I have been recording snippets of how I have been feeling on my phone, and once Christmas was over I listened to them back.  They are, as you might imagine, quite soul-wrenching and I wept many new tears as I listened, but it also occurred to me that perhaps they should be transcribed into a form which might pass for a book. I have read several books on grief over this last year, but because grief is such a personal thing, and everyone reacts to it differently and in their own way, in any one book there tends to be only a few passages that chime with you. So while you can appreciate and empathise with the writer's own experience of loss, it does not necessarily mirror what you are personall...

 The year is turning... 2023 becomes 2024 in a single tick of the clock... yet nothing changes, for all our drunken resolutions and best intentions. Everything that occupies our hearts and minds on December 31st will still be foremost in our thoughts on January 1st. The same wars will rage, the same injustices perpetrated. Joy and sorrow, violence and frustration, love and loss, depression and anguish... they will all run on from one day into the next, across the dateline that separates the old year from the new.  Jolly little soul aren't I? January is, of course, named for the two-faced god Janus - not two-faced in our modern sense, but able to see simultaneously forward and backward, and so it is natural that New Year's Eve should be a time of both reflection and anticipation. For those that know me, or follow this intermittent blog, you will understand that 2023 has been a year that I am all too happy to put behind me, and any reflection that I may be engaged in as the worl...

  My last post on this blog was in March, and was pretty optimistic and upbeat in tone. Well, what a difference a month makes... for in April my world crashed and burned. Before I continue, I want to say that I have not written what follows out of any sense of self-pity, neither do I seek to elicit pity from others, nor to justify these words by hoping that others in a similar position may find comfort in them (though should that prove to be the case, I wish you well, fellow traveller along this darkest of roads - you are not alone). Rather I am writing as nothing more than a form of therapy for myself, to try to express a little of what I have been holding inside over these last few months. Nothing more, nothing less. So what's it all about?  For those that don't know, April was when I lost my best friend, my soulmate, and the love of my life... and the darkness closed in. Since then, I have been struggling to make sense of a life which seems directionless and empty. One of t...

  "We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener." Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot. The last time I visited this blog, I was dwelling  (perhaps a little overmuch?) on the speed with which life was hurtling by. Well, it will come as no surprise that it hasn't slowed down any. If anything, it seems to be accelerating, like my foot is to the floor and there's no way of lifting it off.  I can't believe that it has been ten years since I made the decision to 'take my writing more seriously'... ten years since I won a writing competition which led to the publication of my first short story, and which gave me the confidence to try to establish myself as an author. Over that time I have, like most writers, been trying to fit my writing around work and family commitments, meaning that there have been whole swathes of time when I haven't managed to put any words down on paper at all. I have also, over this period, got ma...