Messages in Bottles

Stephen Sutton, the teenager who has made such an incredible difference to the Teenage Cancer Trust with his social media fundraising campaign, has died. There is a picture of him on Facebook with a quote that says ‘I don’t see the point in measuring life in terms of time anymore, I’d rather measure life in terms of making a difference’. In his last weeks he most certainly made a difference, by dropping little messages in bottles and letting them set sail on the web. I had been looking for a way to write about time as it always seems more pertinent at this time of year and to hear those words from a young man, who was struggling to pack as much life as possible into as little time as possible feels very poignant and I was moved. In the same way that there are earth timelines which show how long the earth has been here and how relatively short our tenure has been so far, there is a strange thing that happens to time when it becomes precious. My husband Jez and I were only together for 7 years and this year it will be 7 years since he died. I have now been without him as long as I was with him, but if there was a timeline of my life showing nothing but how long we were together it would not tell the full story. Our relationship may have taken up a relatively small amount of my life, but its influence and endurance are immeasurable.

Grief has a strange way of messing with time and as I am, yet again, coming up to the anniversary of this great loss, I feel sometimes as if it happened yesterday and others times as if it happened to another girl a very long time ago. Grief is a concertina – it is sometimes squeezed so hard the loss feels as bad as if it just happened, whereas other times it is stretched out so far away I can barely feel him anymore. One moment I can be recounting a funny story about him and it’s far enough away to laugh and enjoy the moment even if it is bittersweet. Yet tomorrow I could have a bad day and the loss seems too much to bear. I am left floating again, without my anchor.

In the aftermath of my more recent marriage one of the hardest things to bear was this feeling that I had let Jez down. It seemed to me if I should move on at all with another relationship it should be a great success. When I met my ex-husband, just over a year after Jez died, I thought I was okay. I had spent a year working through my grief, I’d had counselling and I was getting on with my life. One of the last things Jez had said to me was ‘don’t get stuck’ and I knew he meant to move on with life and not mourn him forever. I thought I was doing that. After the split I just felt like I’d let everyone down. I’d had this big wedding and within a year I could see it had all been a sham. My ex’s eventual admittance that he didn’t love me made me feel humiliated. After Jez died my family and friends rallied round and looked after me, and then they’d had to get used to a new person in my life. It was hard for them to accept and it took a lot of work for friends and family to be happy for me in my new relationship. My ex had wanted a huge wedding and I didn’t; he felt that after everything that had happened to me I should want to celebrate, but I felt it should be low key. Eventually he talked me round by telling me I deserved to have a fuss made of me because I’d had a really hard time – he later admitted that really he wanted to show off his new, young wife to his friends and family. He was the one who liked being centre of attention.

So, once the split happened, I had to admit to people that the marriage was not what it had seemed and it was one of the hardest things I had ever done. These people had seen me through Jez’s death, helped me get back on my feet again, to see me get married and have it all blow up in my face only 3 years later. I was embarrassed to get on the phone and tell my friends, never mind his friends and his family who were so gracious about the whole thing. I had to face these hard conversations because I had to take responsibility for my part in the mess. Yes, my ex had ended the relationship and in a horrible way, but I had to take responsibility for not giving myself enough time to grieve, for not thinking clearly about the way I wanted my life to be, for not appreciating the comfortable position Jez had left me in and finally for becoming involved with someone else when I was still too vulnerable to make good choices. I had made a bad choice. Looking back there were warning signs, but I did not act on them; it is this that tells me I was in a vulnerable place because normally I would have stood up for myself. I was left with feelings of rejection, humiliation, shame, sadness and the lowest confidence I think I have ever had. I felt rejected for my illness and the sadness of having a life limiting condition took centre stage and hit me all over again. On top of all these feelings, the grief for Jez came back in a huge tsunami size wave. Just when I needed to hear Jez’s voice the most the fact that he was not here became overwhelming and I missed him with a deep physical ache that nothing soothed. I kept mulling over the thought that if I’d not lost Jez I would never have ended up in an abusive relationship. I was angry that someone, who professed to love me, would see that vulnerability and exploit it so cruelly. There is a line in the Paul Simon song ‘Graceland’ that goes ‘losing love is like a window in your heart/everybody sees you’re blown apart’ and that’s how it felt. I was broken and exposed.

Yet, I found people were so generous. They were more forgiving of me then I ever will be of myself. People mostly accepted my vulnerability and helped me get back on my feet again. In the last eighteen months I have been concentrating on healing myself physically and mentally, and the house move has helped enormously. This May, as it becomes seven years since I lost Jez I finally feel as if I am living out the life he wanted for me. I have the roof over my head that no one can take away, but is also ‘future proof’ just in case the MS does deteriorate. I know I can live here for life. I have listened more to my creative side and have the quiet and inspiration enough where I live to write every day. I have also taken one of my many ideas and decided to run with it and start my own business; it doesn’t matter if it becomes a big success, just that I have regained enough confidence in my own ideas to try. Confidence is something that is slowly coming back and I know that I do have worth, no matter that I don’t look perfect or my body doesn’t always behave. I am not fully healed yet, but I am getting there.

In a strange way, Jez saved me from a lifetime in a bad marriage. Even though my confidence and self-esteem were dropping through the floor and I was being told I was selfish, crazy, lazy and ugly, there was always some part of me that was able to resist. In my marriage to Jez I felt respected, secure, confident, desired and loved. So, when my ex-husband was telling me ‘all marriages are like this’ as an excuse for his behaviour I was able to say ‘no, they’re not’. It was this knowledge of a loving, equal and successful partnership that finally made me go to someone and say ‘this is happening in my marriage and I don’t think it’s normal’. Without that knowledge I may have stayed there for years becoming ever more broken. With this realisation in mind this year I am going to do something to mark the anniversary of Jez’s death with my family around me. On the evening before we are going to a place he loved most and light a candle, then after we’ve sat and thought a while we are going to leave the candle burning so that the light will burn through the night and then fade out in the early hours of the morning just like Jez did. Then I will carry on moving forwards, like the incredible Stephen Sutton, measuring my life not in time, but in the difference I can make.

‘the love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated. It can never be proved to exist. But he was the man I loved most. He was the reader for whom I wrote. That’s what my writing was. Messages in bottles’.

Patricia Duncker ‘Hallucinating Foucault’.