Response

I lost my only child - my son K, and my partner F, K's mother.

I find I go rather blank when looking at this question, and I think this is because there's a sense in which it is not a 'good' question in extreme bereavement circumstances. Somewhat as if someone had asked, say, 'How did life itself ending affect you?' (Or as if, say, existence were thought to be a predicate after all.) Now of course, my life didn't end! But my point is that the 'me' who was 'affected' was itself radically ruptured by the massive jolt in the fabric of my existence. 'In what ways did life go on?' - this somehow makes more sense; I remember how perverse it seemed that my organic life coursed on with its own imperative - that I ate and slept and so on. Here are some things I recall. That I didn't feel much by way of sensation for a few months. That I was Job. That my son, with his injuries, so undamaged on the outside yet so wrecked on the inside, had fallen into a crack between the worlds. That I had fallen there with him. That Kali was ruling, and Parvarti had made flight; that we had become death as the worlds were destroyed. That I was especially furious at those who wanted to sentimentalise or normalise or play with my son as if all would be well; furious at those who refused to face the inevitability of his death, who prayed for foolish miracles, who pretended that what had happened was 'thinkable'. Then that I walked only on mountain tops; that - a common observation this - the lives of ordinary people going about their oh-so-contingent lives seemed absurd. That they didn't realise how the scaffolding which was the condition of possibility of ordinary teloi could be wrenched away at any moment; that the peaceable unfolding of life in the warmer valleys depended upon a repression of the glacial machinations which tore and tore apart the landscape. I remember how life outside the hospice walls (it was in an old nunnery) was possible, according to old rules. How I packaged up F's clothes for the charity shops, dealt with the probate, engaged with friends. And how life within the walls was possible, according to new rules. But how when the worlds collided (as when I and a nurse twice took K out of the hospice to see some animals) my mind buckled. How inwardly furious I was for a half hour after crossing between those worlds. How I would walk for two hours through the snow and only then, somehow, the pace of the walking would oil my seized up mind. I recall how for many years, each few months or year I would again think 'And now I have once again emerged from water I didn't realise I was still submerged in'. Grieving F, especially in the first few months, felt to me like falling in love again. The tired taking-for-grantedness of our life together, the inevitable small resentments of life together, were all gone. How those walks by myself reminded me of the coastal walks of our courting. Grief is like this: it's the tearing apart of the flesh of an attachment that runs through the mind, the heart, the trunk of the body. It rises in anguish, and the sobbing exhausts you. Without it you are destined to 'live' disconnected to reality. It is the affective registration of the loss. It is a lightning storm striking deep into the protoplasm of primitive life. The car crash was such a massive jolt, metal and glass, so very loud, throwing us out of existence; grief was like being thrown back into it, a painful rebirth in the body (I guess that I was very dissociated by the trauma, and reality came back in jolts). I wrote ten poem-sketches and an essay which articulated what the sketches meant. I walked around the house every day for months, reading it out loud. This was to help me really believe, and not just know about, what had happened. It helped.
The cat. He was what was left. This sliver of family life. And yet he was an icon of my loneliness, his presence a reminder of what wasn't there. I needed to walk on mountain tops, but he was strangely there in the valley. So unaware of it all.

Family: I have a mother; F had two parents. It was clear that none of them were emotionally equipped to deal with such extreme loss. They moved into the hospice uninvited and after a couple of weeks I had to send them away. They were sometimes hypomanic, couldn't accept reality easily; identified with F rather than mourn her and wanted to try to keep K alive as long as possible despite his terrible injuries and against my wishes. As a psychologist I could understand; as my father's son I was furious.

A friend of F's came every day, or perhaps it was every other day, to the hospice after his work ended. We hadn't been close before. I asked him how he could bear to be there. He said it was easier than not being there. He often just sat quietly with me. He was with me when K died. This all meant, all still means, a lot to me.

An old woman friend who I thought was a wise soul said some fatuous wishfulfilling things; I never went to see her again.