Where I Publish a Book About Death and Name it After a Sex
Act
I have been quiet for a few days because I have been busy
trying to format my book for Kindle. This is not as easy a process as I
imagined and I’m sure there are plenty of terrible mistakes here, there and
everywhere. Finally though, it became more important to get it out there and
finished than it was for it to be perfect. I have been writing the book on and
off for the past two years and just felt, as part of recovering, that now was
the time to let it go into the world. It was a difficult story to tell and I
still have some misgivings about some of the things revealed, but now it is out
there and I can’t get it back. It is a strange feeling – almost a physical
relief to actually let it go. One of the things I discovered during the writing
of the book is how hard it can be to let things go.
My second husband (yes, I am aware I sound like Elizabeth
Taylor) died back in 2007. He had a very aggressive form of primary progressive
multiple sclerosis – not like my airy fairy benign kind. I read afterwards in an
MS handbook that people do not die of MS but there is a very small minority,
about 2%, that can develop lesions in the brain stem leading to issues with
swallowing and even breathing. This was Jez, he always did want to be one of
the elite. His breathing and swallowing became so bad he was constantly
aspirating fluids. In 2005 he had to have a PEG feed inserted so we could give
him liquids, food and medication directly into his stomach. We also had to
learn as a family to provide suction – putting a tube down his throat and
suctioning secretions and saliva he had been unable to swallow. Eventually
after a nasty bout of pneumonia and peritonitis he decided not to continue with
feeding or treatment for infection and he died within a few days.
Every year around the anniversary of his death I would find
myself getting stressed, introverted and a great wave of sadness would roll in
and threaten to drown me. Of course time improves these things, but every so
often, after weeks of not thinking about it, I am still shocked by the sudden
wave of grief that arrives unannounced and unwanted. Sometimes, it lasts a few
days and other times it is momentary but it is always a deep well that obliterates
all other thoughts.
In films about grief there is always a rite of passage –
something our main character does to achieve what the Americans call ‘closure’.
I kept waiting for this closure to occur and for me to be ready to get on with
life. I realised, as with most things in life, there are no set steps or
patterns to follow. Many people do feel they are on a pre-ordained path or that
they are walking their walk in a certain way but I have never felt like that.
Life has always been a puzzle to make sense of, a muddle that needs untangling,
only for another muddle to appear in its place. When I was young I thought
there was a definite path, that one day I would wake up and be a grown up and
know how to live life. I am in my late thirties and now know that everyone is
just muddling on in the best way they know how. It seemed like this with grief.
I know, as a counsellor, that there are stages of grief but going through them
is not a tidy, chronological or linear process. I could easily have whipped
through denial, anger and acceptance all in the space of an afternoon in
various orders. I scattered Jez’s ashes and felt no different, I had holidays
and formed new memories, I moved house twice and still had nothing near what I
would call closure. I figured that one day it would all fall into place and
thought that in the meantime I might as well just get on and try to live life.
In films all of these experiences would have elicited a breakthrough or
highlighted a way forward. I even watched one film with Jennifer Aniston and
Aaron Eckhart where he was a motivational speaker – making money out of grief
and closure without sorting his own head out. It turned out he had to release a
parrot into the wild? Why doesn’t Jennifer Aniston make better films?
So I have been getting on with life – finding a path of
sorts and walking or wobbling down it on crutches. It was suggested to me that
I might like to write a book about it but I wasn’t sure. I love writing but
didn’t know what difference it would make to get it all down on paper. Who
would want to read it? Also, if people I knew did read it what on earth would
they think? I started tentatively but then really enjoyed it, spending whole
days tucked away into my reading room, tapping away at my laptop. Sometimes I
cried, sometimes I laughed, but the process of writing did a few things. It
helped me identify how I was feeling and how I’d been feeling at the time, when
I’d been using sheer determination and gallows’ humour just to get through the
day without letting Jez see how scared I was. He was scared enough, without me
adding to the problem. I wanted him to feel that someone had it in hand. So it’s
been an experience, not always a comfortable one and this week I finally
self-published on Kindle.
However, Jez had to have the last laugh. When I used to say
something particularly stupid, or had a blonde moment, Jez would roll his eyes
and call me a bear of little brain. It turns out he was right. I was deep into
formatting on Friday and I had to make a final decision about what to call the
book. I wanted to call it ‘Tide Mark on the Bridge’ after a quote from a letter
in Patricia Duncker’s book ‘Hallucinating Foucault’. It seemed to represent a
lasting mark on the soul; where the waters have receded but it is clear that
something has been survived. Yet I was scared of copyright issues. I had tried
to gain permission but received no reply and didn’t want to run the risk. I had
been struggling for days to think of a name and in re-reading the book at the
last minute I realised I’d written a lot about the idea of happy endings and
fairy tales. So completely unwittingly I chose the title Happy Endings. For me
it represented a lot of things: that death was a happy ending for Jez who was
suffering, that we expect marriage to be a happy ending when in fact it is only
the start of the story, and whether there could be a happy ending for me after
what had happened. Hours later, after publication, I did an Amazon search for
the book and then realised what a mistake I’d made. Pages and pages of erotic
fiction appeared – with interesting graphic covers. It was only then that I
realised I’d missed the euphemistic meaning of ‘Happy Endings’. So that is how
I named a book about death after a sex act. It’s amazing how many books have
been writing about erotic massage, who’d have thought?? I desperately wanted to
get the book back and change it back, but the more people I’d told about the
stupid mistake the funnier it became. Everyone who had known Jez was quick to
point out how hilarious he’d find it. So, ‘Happy Endings’ it is – who knows I
might even sell a few extra copies! There are going to be some very disappointed
people out there.
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