Haunting

Haunting

When people write about or depict a haunting in any way it is always visual. A creepy build-up of sounds and events that eventually reveal a malevolent spirit wreaking havoc on all those it haunts. Others depict sad, faint ghosts or apparitions like a sepia photograph that has somehow been left behind in the air. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe in haunting. I always thought that maybe ghosts were a feeling left behind where something tragic had happened or a faint outline of someone who still longs to be here. Yet the haunting is nothing to do with a ghost wanting to stay with us; it’s us who want the person to remain.

In May every year I experience a haunting of sorts. Just as spring is really starting to burst into bloom and there are lilacs and bluebells a grey mood slowly envelops me and leaves me feeling a faint sadness all the time. It lingers behind me like an unwanted tail. Following me from room to room and place to place until it becomes part of me. There are days when I am happy and time with friends is fun and I can enjoy life, but behind it all there is a sense that a part of me is missing and no matter how hard I look I can’t find it.

Jez was my second husband and once we get beyond that Henry VIII statement, I can tell you that he died on 24^th May 2007, which seems like a decade ago but also feels like yesterday. They tell you grief comes in stages but all the books are wrong. Grief comes in waves; small waves that just lap over your toes when you didn’t expect it or great big crashing waves that overwhelm you and knock you off your feet. It doesn’t matter how long ago Jez died, there are times, especially in May, when it still feels like yesterday. The day at 5am when his breathing stopped and an outwardly silent scream ricocheted round my brain obliterating every other thought. I sat on a grass bank outside the hospital and I rang New Zealand to tell his family they had lost an uncle, a son and a brother.

What did I lose? I lost the only thing that had ever kept me upright in this world. My solace, my own stand-up comedian, my cheeky sod with the most charming smile I had ever seen that let him get away with murder. Jez was my dream and my nightmare all rolled into one. As soon as I met him it was a done deal. I probably fell in love with his photograph. He was intrepid, daring, and had some of the most ridiculous impossible ideas I have ever heard – such as skiing on some sort of snowboard/wheelchair hybrid that was never happening on my watch! He was the most romantic man I had ever met in life. Before me he had been ‘a bit of a bugger’ but once he met me he was loyal and the romance never died even after we married (8 weeks after we met).He bought me jewellery, flowers (just because), chocolates, and on one trip to Washington even made his dad take him on a mortifying trip to Victoria’s Secret. The last year we celebrated our wedding anniversary he bought me an engagement ring because I’d never had one and put flowers in every room of the house. I did not know men like this existed.

Jez doing something typically swashbuckling

Yet, even as I had him he was slipping away from me. As the MS worsened its grip and he burned himself trying to make a cup of tea, and lost the use of one of his arms, then needed homecare and then the MS reached his brain stem and he struggled to breathe and couldn’t eat and couldn’t swallow. The last night he spent in our home, my friend and I were eating a take away and his breathing got worse. Even as I rang the ambulance I had no idea that this was it – he was leaving. I walked back into the bedroom and noticed amongst the unravelled wires and equipment a human shaped void where my husband had been. It took more than 3 months for him to die as he stopped being able to eat and infection after infection sapped his strength and he made the decision that enough was enough. I sat and I waited through the night, with my brother sleeping beside me in two chairs and me on the bed trying not to lie on whichever pipe was running in or running out. I wasn’t scared of death. I was scared of who I would be afterwards. With him I made sense. I understood who I was. He had become my purpose and my only reason for breathing and what would be left when he was gone. Nothing it turned out. Nothing but admin and planning and the never-ending silent scream that made me kick things and hurl a phone at the wall and the only thing I could hear in my head over and over again was ‘I want him back, I want him back, I want him back.

In May every year, the scream comes back. It starts with the slow creeping mood and becomes that deep sorrow that accompanies the knowledge that they are gone and you will never see them again. Haunting is not seeing something scary and unexpected. Haunting is hearing something on the radio and knowing Jez would have laughed at that, then turning and remembering he’s not there. Haunting is having a problem that no matter who you talk to you can’t solve because the only person who knows how to solve it and soothe you is not here. Haunting is waking up in the morning alone without that big arm pulling you in for a giant cuddle.  Haunting is not someone you don’t want hanging around you; it is the absence of the one person who could make everything ok with a grin and a little raise of the eyebrow. There is nobody to roll their eyes at me. Nobody to call me the bear of little brain. Nobody to look at me like I was the only woman in the world. Nobody to be my home and the place I return when it’s all gone wrong and I want a good cry or when the most exciting thing ever has happened and you know exactly who to tell first. He is not even in the next room. He is simply not there.

In a book Jez leant to me there was a love letter and it says everything I need to say about living without him and being haunted by him better and more poetically than I ever can:

‘you ask me what I fear most. You know already or you would not ask. It is the loss of the reader, the man for whom I write. My greatest fear is that someday, suddenly, I will lose you. We never see one another and we never speak directly, yet through the writing our intimacy is complete. My relationship with you is intense, because it is addressed every day, through all my working hours. I sit down, wrapped in my blanket, my papers incoherent on the table before me. I clear a space to write, for you, to you, against you. You are the measure of my abilities. I reach for your exactitude and your ambition, your folly. You are the tide mark on the bridge, the level to reach. You are the face who always avoids my glance, the man who is just leaving the bar. I search for you through the spirals of all my sentences. I throw out whole pages of writing because I cannot find you in them. I search for you in all the small details, in the shape of my verbs, in the quality of my phrases[..]I repent nothing but the frustration of being unable to reach you. You are the glove that I find on the floor, the daily challenge I take up. You are the reader for whom I write. You have never asked me who I have loved most. You know already and that is why you have never asked. I have always loved you’.

Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker