Grief Ascending

By Gaby Langbridge

I don't remember our first meeting. There was simply a time before I knew you and then suddenly you were there. This tall, loud, funny, crazy beautiful friend who called me 'Ginge!' very loudly across the floor of the pub my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend owned.

 I moved in with you shortly afterwards and although I needed time to deal with that break-up we had the most fun I have ever had in my adult life at that point. Together we were absolutely ruthless in our mutual ability to tease ourselves and  anyone else in range without mercy, laughing until my throat felt constricted and my belly ached. Climbing out my window into the dark garden just so I could give you a fright after we had watched a horror film. We brought out the best in each other more often than not.  We both had our issues, both with depressive episodes but it soon became apparent that you were dealing with yours at fewer intervals and with greater ferocity than I could have imagined. We would always be in each others lives, even when marriage and children interrupted the flow, I knew I could call on you and vice versa, if you went quiet on social media I would check in with you as I knew what it meant - a downward slope to the inevitable crash but somehow I knew you would always bounce back, and you always did. Except one day you didn't.  I can remember with absolute clarity the phone call that changed my life, changed me, forever. I remember knowing instantly when I heard our mutual friend sobbing that you were in some kind of trouble but I never imagined it would mean grief enveloping me like a cloak made of lead and colouring my every sensation from that moment on. 

Every time I read about grief previously, whether in novels or articles, every time I saw it on tv or film, I thought "I know grief, I know what grief does" but that is the feeling of someone who had never known grief like this,  the complacency of never knowing the sudden drop in atmospheric pressure every time I remembered you were gone forever, no going forward. Aside from the grief there was bewilderment - who would tease me with those one word texts that needed no explanation?  When you died you left me the sole custodian of those shared memories and private jokes, who could I remember them with when no-one else was there?  Our history was mine alone. I felt robbed of a future we would never have, memories we could never make, and those were the thoughts that kept me awake in the night, hand in hand with the solid feeling of heaviness, down to my very bones, I missed you, I miss you. 

Although I don't dream of you often, I crave those dreams like an addict, because in those dreams we are fortunate in the very mundanity of our existence, things are normal; you are moving, laughing, breathing, living and when I wake there are always a glorious few moments of smiling and wanting to tell you I dreamt of you and then it is gone and reality peels off my grief like a layer of skin.  

You are still gone.  

Sometimes, I think about the courage it must have taken for you to end your life, there is a macabre sense of pride for you - you stopped the pain, you really did it. But you left us with another kind of pain that cannot, will not stop. Sometimes I feel a strange kind of elation that you everywhere , all around me, in everything- but then I remember that means you are in fact nowhere and the permanence of that crushes me all over again.  I am the lucky one, I am here, still pushing, still feeling, still breathing, still laughing, still sad, still crying, still missing you. I'm still here. Can you hear me talking to you?