Happy 42nd Birthday Paul
Every year I wonder whether I should do anything special on Paul’s birthday. I think I’m going to be OK this year, seeing that I’ve had 10 years to come to grips with reality. Usually birthdays are a celebration that centre around a living person to acknowledge another trip around the sun. Now it’s all about memories. These words I found sort of sum it up
“Here’s to the ones that we got
Cheers to the wish you were here, but you’re not“
I’ve never really got my head around the mathematics that seem to underly the physical universe but I’ve got a feeling that there really is something going on with distance, space, numbers, movement and change, some of the things that we associate with time. Needless to say I’m not going to stop “marking time”. For me it is special to have intimate days to remember those who were part of our lives and whom we loved and nurtured.
I think that I knew deep down that Paul wasn’t destined to make it to 40. In actual fact this was one of the monitoring factors of my life. The fear of Paul dying was always there way back from the late 80s when he was first diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. This fear weighed deeply on my life, it was my constant companion and had an overpowering effect on almost every day, especially from the latter part of the 90s when Paul was in his late teenage years until 2012 when he passed away. The fear and trepidation actually monitored the way I lived my life and reacted too others. Let’s call a spade a spade. This weight sat on me for 25 years and took me to many places, it almost crushed me at random times. Some of life’s moments were full of joy and hope while others were dipped in despair and anguish.
Some days I felt like a cement truck had turned up and dumped its load right on top of me. This is a very lonely place to be and I feel so much empathy for all of the parents who are still in this position whether it be due to a loved ones chronic or acute illness, mental travail, drugs and alcohol abuse, inability to communicate with their children or just plain helplessness, fear and frustration. You poor bastards are still out there soldiering on, probably feeling lonely and dismayed about the shit that life splattered on you.
I can’t speak for others but it seems to me that parents in this situation develop some sort of invisible armour around themselves. You have to carry the fear and trepidation in your own heart and head because if you spray it all around you it’s not really going to do yourself or anyone else any good.
Having a child who is suffering from a physical or mental illness or god forbid even both of these is one of those things that our society doesn’t really accomodate, a bit like death. People will feel sorry for you and your hardship or loss for a while, that’s understandable but as time goes on they reasonably and expectedly want to get on with their lives and they want you to as well. Chances are that you will start to sound like a broken record.
I have been one of the lucky ones but it still took me another 7 years after Paul died to free myself from the shackles that I was bound by for all of those preceding decades and finally crawl up the side of the ditch that I had dug to discover that the sky was still blue, the planet was still spinning, people were still celebrating and enjoying their lives, people still needed me and that underlying all of this there was boundless hope and potential for an unlimited future full of all emotions but also with a chance to reach an occasional burst of exhilaration.
I do get carried away at times. My life wasn’t all bad, in actual fact it has been mainly great. There were loads of moments of joy and achievement. I suppose we tend to compartmentalise life into the good shit, the bad shit, the mundane shit. When you are in a thunder storm without shelter it is had to imagine a blue cloudless sky with the sun shining and birds chirping but this doesn’t mean that it’s not impossible that this might happen tomorrow. And this does happen. There is always a blue sky somewhere.
I’m OK now, apart from the very occasional burst of shame, blame or regret or waking from a dream where reality is warped for 60 minutes or so. I have a life that is full of joy and hope, potential for improvement and the freedom to give something to the people around me. When you get to this place it’s easy to see how you can create your own prison and develop crutches that feel essential at the time but later on are viewed for what they were.
I’m in a good place. Maybe the events that led to Paul’s passing made me stronger or maybe not. Maybe how I coped with my life in the ensuing years was necessary to appreciate where I am now. Once again, it doesn’t really matter because as I like to say “Now is all there is”.
I am almost at peace with my memories, my cloudy but sometimes lucid recollections of my past. I think that I have taken some sort of responsibility for both the right and wrong actions that I took. The good and the bad. Life is a precious, magical and wondrous journey. I still don’t know if there is an ultimate destination, probably not. Just lots of pretty interesting stops along the way.
Happy Birthday Paul for what would have been your 42nd birthday. We had some rough times and we also had lots of fun and adventure together, I know that you knew how much I wanted you to prevail and I also know that maybe you knowingly or unknowingly decided to set me free.
If existence is as I believe it to be and if we ever do bump into each other again I’m pretty sure that next time will be better for both of us.
I sometimes fantasize that after Paul left us behind towards the end of his funeral service at Wat Samiennaree in Bangkok in March 2012 that he/his spiritual energy/essence eventually arrived in Kyoto in Japan. We all had the same concept at pretty much the same time “He’s gone, we’ve done our job”. It was one of those “Oh shit” moments. Tbere’s no point clinging onto a being when the body that you identified with doesn’t function anymore. It’s tempting to hold on tight but it’s sure as hell not good for anyone’s peace of mind. “If you love somebody, set them free”. Anyway, in my fantasy Paul is now in an 8 year old Japanese girl’s body, healthy and happy and thoroughly enjoying life pretty much completely consciously unaware of the good and bad times that we spent together. That’s the way it should be. Whether this is true or false or just a flight of fantasy doesn’t really matter anymore, what ever happened “happened” and that’s just the way it is.
There’s a lesson here. We all have to let go of the things we love and cherish. That is inevitable. The trick is being able to let them go without all the associated baggage and regret. That’s just the reality of life on this planet.
