Some Words on Grief

Rather than write a great big missive about what grief is and its effects I'm just going to list some thoughts. Listing this is easier than writing a big post as too much reflection on this is very saddening.

Its not much fun and continues not to be much fun.

I went to a wedding with my mother on Saturday, which was the first time we'd been to a summer event like this without my father. When I saw the groom and his father embrace before the service I had a pang of envy.

I was crushingly depressed on Sunday evening when I got back to London, and on Monday I lay in bed all afternoon staring blankly at the wall.

Grief has this effect. One moment you're fine and then it smashes into you and I become completely incapacitated. It is like depression lasts for a day or two rather than weeks/months on end.

I had a funny thought. I may be getting better (ish) but my father never will. He remained in that awful place we were all in October. He never recovered. Its obvious but such has been the effect on me that I have to rebuild emotional responses to it all.

Every now and again he'll flash into my mind and it stops me from what I was doing.

At the wedding I suddenly thought about him on his bed once he'd died. That's not right but these are memories that have to be processed. I can't pretend it didn't happen. Its quite peculiar really. There you are doing something and then the worst thing you've ever seen is there for a split second. It completely throws you. Him dying wasn't the worst part of it. I mean, it was bad but there had been worse moments when he had been ill.

Yesterday was a year ago to the day when I was told that he would probably die within four months. I only know that because it was the same day that Felippe Massa headbutted a shock absorber at 160mph.

Home is painfully quiet.

I find it difficult to discuss certain aspects with my mother as I know it will upset her. 

I haven't cried since October. Strange really. I think aspects of his final decline were so horrendous that I had expended all that emotion by the time we got to the funeral.

Two things I thought after he had died:

1) I'm glad I don't have to watch my father die again
2) What a terrible shame that everyone's father dies

Things I don't do now:

1) Watch anything to do with hospitals.
2) Go into hospitals

The thing that I hold on to and refuse to subject to any thought regarding its existence:

The afterlife

The thing I definitely believe in

Ghosts

Things I'm even more ambivalent about than before:


God

Books I’ve Read

At the end of 2008 I decided to start keeping a list of books that I had read in the past month. I read a lot but I tend to forget when I last read a book. This means that every now again I reread a book too soon after finishing it last time. And the really annoying thing about this is that because its longer ago since you started the book as opposed to finishing it you can get halfway through a book and suddenly remember what’s going to happen, or, everything starts to feel a little familiar in a déjà vu on the tip of my tongue kind of way. This happened recently with Paul Auster’s Leviathan, which I was about to read for the 4^th time but stopped after 30 pages.

I tend to buy a lot of books, and I and my family have thousands of the things so every now and again I impose a moratorium on book buying. I’ve only bought 2 of the 14 books I’ve read this year, an idea of the backlog I face. Its in the region of 30 books right now. I’ll never read them all. I spent a year trying to listen to all the music on my ipod, and I could listen at work, and it was impossible. The result: tinnitus in my right ear. At least books don’t damage me.

So here’s my list.

World War Z	Max Brooks	The Zombie war - Very silly but gripping nonetheless - Fiction	2008
High-Rise	JG Ballard	Dated but curious take on tribalism	2008
Glamorama	Bret Easton Ellis	Gripping thriller. Very black comedy but a favourite	2008
Flood	Richard Doyle	Completely stupid disaster novel	2008
Underground London	Stephen Smith	Historical journey through London	2008
Fierce People	Dick Wittenburn	1980s New Yorker Coming of age	2008
Moondust	Andrew Smith	What was it like to be on the Moon?	2008
Doomsday Men	PD Smith	History of the atom bomb and all things radioactive.	2009
Brave New World	Aldous Huxley	Nightmarish to us, but is it really that bad?	2009
Brighton Rock	Graham Greene	The seamy side of 1930s Brighton	2009
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas	John Boyne	An 8 year old's view of the Final Solution	2009
The Welsh Girl	Peter Ho Davies	German POWs in Wales during WW2	2009
Far North	Marcel Theroux	Post-apocalyptic view of Canada	2009
A Rumor of War	Phil Caputo	Personal account of Vietnam War	2009
The Naked and the Dead	Norman Mailer	Fictionalised personal account of the Pacific War	2009
The Day of the Triffids	John Wyndham	Plants take over the world	2009
The Chrysalids	John Wyndham	Post-apocalptic view of mutation and religion	2009
The Kraken Awakes	John Wyndham	Sea-borne monsters from Mars rule the world	2009
Neutral Buoyancy	Tim Ecott	All about Scuba diving	2009
Beyond the Blue Horizon	Alexander Frater	Flying the  to the Far East along the old Imperial Airways Route	2009
A Hoxton Childhood	A.S. Jasper	A personal account of poverty from 1900-30	2009
In Cold Blood	Truman Capote	Account of homicide in 1950s Kansas	2009
Atomised	Michel Houllebecque	French lech and his hateful life	2009
The Wasp Factory	Iain Banks	Mentalist at work on Scottish island	2010
D-Day: The Battle for Normandy	Anthony Beevor		2010
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali	Gil Courtemanche	Romantic novel in Heart of Darkness setting preceding genocide	2010
Regeneration	Pat Barker	Based on psychiatric notes on Siegfried Sassoon in 1917	2010
Every Man For Himself	Beryl Bainbridge	Fictional take on 1st class passengers on Titanic	2010
Alone in Berlin	Hans Falada	Life under the Nazis in 1942 Berlin	2010
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo	Steig Larsson	Overlong whodunnit	2010
London at War	Philip Zeigler	Suprisingly uninteresting - skim read most of it	2010
Run Silent Run Deep	Edward Beach	WW2 submarine warfare in the Pacific. Cracking stuff.	2010
Bad Science	Ben Goldacre	Dismissing scientific 'facts' as reported by newspapers. More a dipper than a full read.	2010
Imperial Ambitions	Noam Chomsky	Outdated critiques of 21st C US Foreign Policy.	2010
Empire of the Sun	JG Ballard	Thinly fictionalised account of internment in Shanghai. Very good book.	2010
The Reader	Bernhard Schlink	Post-war love in Germany in a time of hidden histories. Superb.	2010
Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea	Barbara Demick	Fascinating account of life stories of North Koreans	2010
The Forgotten Soldier	Guy Sajer	Brilliant German first person view of the Eastern Front	2010