Keeping it together

Spelling errors aside, I feel your pain pal. I really do.

When you break up with someone there are supposedly four stages of recovery: denial, anger, grief and acceptance. After my split in November, I Googled ‘what to expect’ – a callous approach maybe, scientific definitely – but forewarned is forearmed so they say.

Bollocks. What a load of rubbish. First of all how can anyone quantify or qualify the pain of another person? Those basic categories aren’t adequate to cover what the person – whether dumper or dumpee – is feeling. They can’t hope to cover the bone grinding confusion of a person’s emotions when they have ripped themselves apart from their ‘other half’.

But at that point I was still blissfully hopeful that I’d pass through these phases in no time and be free and clear. I even – having found out what to expect from the grieving process – tried to cheat mine. My plan was to take away the fear of nostalgia by listening to all of ‘our’ songs; all those happy and sad songs that made me feel something. Then – clever reasoning I thought – I would take away their power.

If I listened to them, loud and all at once with the lights on, then they wouldn’t be able to creep up and take me by surprise. I sometimes do the same thing with scary films, reading the biogs online or asking people the end before I watch them. I especially hate those bits when someone jumps out at you (I call them ‘pop ups’). There’s nothing like a shock to rattle you to make you feel momentarily unhinged. Enough of these little shocks and that’s what makes the emotional wrecks of this world scared of their own shadow.

Anyway, a couple of nights of do-it-yourself karaoke (singing into a bottle of mosquito repellent) and I thought I’d covered all those songs that might jump out and have me weeping. The good (Romeo and Juliet – Dire Straights), the bad (Cutting Crew – Died in your arms) and the downright embarrassing (Elaine Paige – I know him so well). I felt powerful…having disarmed all those audio bombs waiting to explode and disrupt my sanctity, security and sanity.

I was ok with the fact that all the experts say you have to ‘allow yourself time to cry’. I just wanted this to happen on my schedule, with dignity and privacy. I didn’t stop with the music, I put up all sorts of barricades: setting up a mental air raid shelter; if grief had declared war on me then I was going to keep it out, or only deal with it on my terms.

In my modern answer to Appeasement, I contacted all my close friends straight away so no one would be able to provide a stomach-bottoming jolt with the words ‘love to Jamie’. Changed my status on Facebook, which in this day and age makes the whole thing scarily real. Made a mental note to stay away from Transformers, Arnie films, The Shield – anything he loved. Outside the UK this wasn’t too hard.

But.

Just like Chamberlain before me, I learnt that Appeasement doesn’t work, especially when your enemy is stronger than yourself.

At first, there were yellow days, red days and blue days. Yellow days I could handle. Those were the positive thinking, plenty-more-fish-in-the-sea, too-good-for-him, get-on-with-my-life days. Red days…days when I wanted to rave and scream with rage (and sometimes did)…were manageable too, after a few primal screams. But then there were blue days, when anything from a cup of tea to a kind word could set me off. And I thought my eyes would fall out. I lost weight just from the water loss.

As time went on, all these colours faded to gray and days began to return to a kind of drab normality. I understood then what they meant, those experts, by the word grief. Part three. There was suddenly a heaviness there, a physicality, a certainty of loss.

Your mind can’t get used to the idea that they’re not there and you keep expecting them to wander back into your life nonchalantly, like they’d just popped to the loo. About 50 times a day you suddenly want to ask them something, or to tell them something funny and they’re not there. Those are the moments when you realize you’re alone.

And then the pop ups begin. In moments alone my memory would flash up a smile or a word and I’d dissolve. Or I’d be in a shop and suddenly have to leave because I’d seen a carton of his favourite soya milk. A McDonald’s chip choked me with nostalgia for trips to motorway service stations, for God’s sake.

Despite my best-laid plans, songs were still taking me by surprise too. The worst was a Friday night in a bar in Hanoi when I completely dissolved to the Spice Girls Viva Forever [God help me]. And there were others. ABC’s Broken Arrow; Maroon Five’s This Love; Phil Collins, Against all Odds. Bad taste stuff all, mostly because these are the songs of very public places. The songs they play in airport lounges, on the radio, at work; which leave you in a flurry to turn it off, leave the room, and leave the country so the waterworks don’t start.

I want to scream: “When will I stop being the victim of my emotions?”

Ironically, it’s only after you surrender that you start to heal. Bowed over by the sleeplessness, the raw emotion, you finally start to deal with things one moment at a time. Walking before you try to run.

You might not be able to trick or appease your grief away but there are things that help you get over it, or make you feel better for a little while. Hot baths are always my mum’s solution to everything and I’m pleased to report success from this quarter (although backpacking it’s tiny showers a-go-go). A bottle of wine and a girly chat, a slap up dinner and generally treating yourself to whatever you want (see my dress blog) – unsurprisingly that works too. And reading. One day spent on buses in Thailand I read Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity three times from front to back. Talk about self-help books.

And I am much better. At least these days I manage to confine my crying to private times and places. The pop ups are under control too, even though that hot prickly feeling up the nose and in the eyelids still happens a dozen times a week. Maybe I’m coming out of phase three and into acceptance. I do hope so. Even if just for pride’s sake it’s time to be healed now.

But I suppose it depends what you mean by acceptance. For me I guess it’s taking on board three things:
1. He’s never coming home again.
2. He’s nothing to do with me anymore.
3. There’s no reason to think about him every day.

I’ll let you know when I get there.

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