Janey,… Jane Spears, Jane Kirk Spears, who lived with me in this house, who spent that nice evening with me in this room, before I changed it all about, whose books are on the bookshelf, getting a little dusty (i’m sorry) and whose photos still leap with life, and whose words still ring clear in my ears, who (correction) lives with me in this house, … Jane? What am I going to do with you?
Fact is, that for practical purposes, you are useless to me as a partner. You don’t (nodding to Jack Lasenby) do a hands turn around the place, you don’t answer when I talk to you and you are no fun in bed.
Oh, yeah, no-one said that this whole business had any practical purpose but I’m back at “whatever the purpose of this is, it better be good”. And could somebody please enlighten me as to what that is?? Oh hang on, I had something… Jane came into my life to teach me that I could love and could be loved. That I could, after being scared nearly out of going ahead with it, let myself get close to someone, to be vulnerable with them, to let myself feel the love flowing all around and let myself be seen like that with the actual person. OK, I’m getting that, and then she left to… for me to learn…. ? Oh, hang on. There was something about feeling all this and not dieing myself. Kind of “what doesn’t kill you…” but really, there’s a pretty liberal dose of benefit of the doubt, there.
So I had a reasonable string of good months, Feb and March, evidenced by the lack of woe posts here (that pain muse). Ha! Such fun at the ANZPA conference, returning with such zest for life. Thought it was acceptance. Turned out it was denial. Merest provocation and I was right back in despair, peppered excessively with anger.
I know this isn’t a linear process. It’s navigating once more the thin film between holding on and letting go, with a new clarity on the impossibility of them both.
You might, you could easily say that all this “Jane, you…” is textbook “holding on”; acting exactly if Jane isn’t gone at all, because that’s what it feels like. That’s what I want! But, the inner-home-shrink in me knows that the misery concomitant with this drills the psyche closer to the seat of the pain, inexplicably but inexorably cleaning out the pus and grit from the seat of the wound and allowing it to knit gradually with tender tissue. Holding on, I am unwittingly letting go.
And I attempted letting go. Carried on a little as if nothing had happened. Ah right. I found where that gets me, even when, damn, it was acceptance, I had done dastardly yards of dankness. I was enjoying deserved enjoyment. And yet, slam in my face. Smack at the beginning of the grieving process. First day all over again, and again.
It’s eleven months and one day since that day, Jane Spears. Since I half woke while you gasped your last. And then whole woke with your body dead but you still alive inside me, as you are now. Sure, you are a little faded, and you haven’t aged. How could you, would you have. Oh, ok. How our lives together would be today. How you could walk in the door right now.
I really don’t know whether or how to say this, Jane but at some point, I’m going to be, you know, moving on a little in my life. I’ve already pretty much written off my own lame-arsed-ness or worse, deprivation assumption as the cause of this (Lloyd, tho I loved your email and yes I will definitely do that luck-cursing, raging at the world drinking session with you!), so it’s kind of, Jane, somehow would you, could I let you, want you to, just a little bit move on out of my life, perhaps die properly, like you were actually dead and not just pretending?