....all sorts...

I genuinely had no idea what to call this post. It's just after 1am as I write from my hotel bedroom, and this time 12 hours ago, I was just getting ready to leave this room for Dianne's funeral......even those words together just look wrong.

What to say about yesterday...?  A day full of family, full of love. Old neighbours reconnecting, surreal walks down memory lane....Familiar faces, voices, families..."I know you...did we..?  We met at their wedding..."? A sky blue coffin carried by her husband, brother, father, uncle, friend....the devastation that washed through the room as she passed us all for the last time....the peace instilled by a buddhist chant, and a surreal comfort to be found in their belief that this life is like a hotel, some of us check and stay but a while, whilst others take much longer to check out....her Mother's voice, reading this beautiful piece with her lilting Welsh accent, and managing to get through it from start to finish without breaking down....followed by the heartbreaking strains of sobbing throughout the room as one by one, we all broke down.....heartbreakingly hilarious happy memories from her brother, smiley sisterlike memories from her friend and sincere big sister support from Bri's sis....music played a huge part, a beautiful Welsh lullaby on the violin from her sister-in-law, to an upbeat kids melody that she used to sing to the girls played her violinist niece. Mumford & Son's Sigh No More, with the killer line, "this is not the end.....love will not betray, dismay or enslave you, it will set you free...." Brian's eloquent reading of a poem Dianne had written and read aloud to him for the first time on their wedding day.....and then, the curtains closed to the strains of "The Voyage".....


I am emotionally exhausted, and yet so wide awake. The only thing I can take from today is that, as her brother Scott said, we need to keep the memories we have of Dai, of the good, happy, funny, mad times we had together and keep those memories alive. That way, although she is phyiscally gone, she's never fully gone....

What else to say? It was heartbreaking, hilarious, sincere, surreal,and poignant and perfect.....she is so missed, and always will be....

...lyrically thinking...

"...the real worries in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday....|"

I remember hearing those words as a teenager, and they resonated so deeply with me....they still do now. As I write, my Great-Aunt is in hospital, and doesn't particularly want to hang round anymore. Her son is in the same hospital with a badly broken leg after a fall at home. A man who's like a brother to me is waiting to bury his wife, who was a dear friend of mine. And the best we can hope for with my Aunt and her advanced cancer is that the chemo works....but if it hasn't started working after the second dose, then they give up.

Things that worried me a few short weeks seem so irrelevant, so miniscule at times like these. It's surreal to think that if you'd asked me a few weeks ago what my biggest worries were, I would've said my brother's decision to not start maintenance chemo. Or my knee, and the uncertainty surrounding it. Or work, trying to get weekly episodes edited as well as new ones shot, and teaching transition years several days a week. And yet, over a fortnight, I've come to terms with my brother's decision. I'm gone beyond caring about my knee, given that this is year 18 of problems with it-whatever happens to it will happen. And work...well, work can always be gotten through.

But sudden cancers and deaths....jesus...they take some getting used to. Those 4pm idle Tuesday moments will happen again and again in life, they  are, unfortunately, unavoidable and heartbreaking. But I can't buy into that bull that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. What doesn't kill you can still leave you broken in ways you didn't realise you could break. You don't come back stronger, you come back shook. Like when you get badly injured in a tackle, no matter how strong you get again, there's always that small part of you that holds back the next time you're tackling someone. All I can say for those shit, shit times is that  "It doesn't get better....but you get better at it.."

The only thing getting me through this last fortnight is the little moments in life that we sometimes take for granted. The silly smiles from unexpected sources, a horror movie made at physio, many, many random hugs and texts from friends....a camera-shy squirrel scampering up a tree, a night full of the most broken sleep but with the strangest of reassuring dreams, and the daily, reassuring knowledge that friends are the family we choose for ourselves, and my friends and family are pretty damn fantastic.

Over the last fortnight, I've been amazed at just how lucky I was to have met the people I did when I did, friends from my childhood right through to the last few years, people who know the value of life, of how devastating a loss can be, and how messed up your mind can get after those moments. I was fortunate to be off that week, because I could barely keep it together last week being back at the office. The worst thing about these losses is that they leave you reeling, it's the emotional equivalent to boxing KO...you know nothing of anything else but your own grief, and it's hard to comprehend why the rest of world isn't reeling with you.

Tomorrow night, I fly into Wales, and I'm dreading it. I'm dreading having to really, truly acknowledge that Dai is gone, that Brian is widowed, that those three gorgeous girls won't have their Mum beside them as they grow. At least here, I can pretend it's not really happened, that the phonecall a fortnight ago didn't never happened. I cannot bear to be saying goodbye to such a sweet friend who's barely three years older than me. If we'd had another 20 years, folk would still say she was too young.

3 & 1/2 years ago, I stood, arm in arm with several other friends at my friend Neill's bedside, listening to his gasping staggered breathing just after he'd been given his last rites, the day before what would've been his 30th birthday. I told myself then that I wouldn't let myself get caught up in the bullshit moments in my life, that I would keep my head up and remind myself that nothing in life is important than these moments, when life and death, love and heartbreak are so present. The grief from that room that night is etched onto my soul, but stronger still is the love that emanated toward him from every single one of us present that night, and that day, until he took his final breaths, and that resonates with us all still.

Last night, I walked through a quiet village, my head reeling, my knee aching, and my heart shattered. I cannot believe that if this doesn't work, my Aunt,my Godmother, my friend, could be gone from us soon. I've always joked that I'm a pessimistic optimist...that I constantly believe that bad shit will happen, but that we'll get through it in the end. You always say you'll assume the worst, but you don't really accept it.

When Mum first said a fortnight ago it had spread to her lungs, I thought that it couldn't get more devastating than that. But of course it can. Because while you register that information like that usually means the end, you don't really believe it. You don't really believe it until it's happening. And now, the worst part, the waiting. The waiting for the chemo today, the waiting for the blood markers, the waiting for the pain to kept at bay, the waiting for the news, one way or the other. The wondering, the constant wondering, should we look for a second opinion, have we time for a second opinion? How could this be happening? How have we gone from nausea and stomach pain to something that's possibly terminal in less than three weeks?

There's no doubt about it, this news is hitting hard, and that pain and grief is manifesting itself in all the stupid ways only pain and grief can. I'm getting angry at an edit, frustrated by someone's speech pattern, by the cameraperson's choice of angles, by the outside noise on an interview; in fact, pretty much by everything else in my surroundings-the hum of the computer, the office noises of folks on the phone and the general trivia of office life.

So it's to music I turn, for a few minutes respite....I first heard this song well over a decade ago, and I think this video encapsulates perfectly. As I've gotten older, almost every lyric has resonated at some point. And, to finish a rather depressing post with a smile, even the first time I heard it, at the age of 14/15, I was grinning at the irony of knowing the truth of this line... "be kind to your knees, you'll miss them when they're gone"

....time, is never time at all.....

...you can never ever leave, without leaving a piece of youth..."

Like everyone, my life has been lived to the soundtrack of (mostly) my choice. There are so many songs that throw me back in time, that comfort me, that amuse me, that provide background noise for a busy life, and many, many songs that I forget as the years pass. Depending on my day, music could accompany me for anywhere from 10 minutes to 5/6 hours.

There are so many different quotes about the connection between life and music;  and one of my favourites is "music is the language we use when words don't work". There's a lot of the time I feel like that, that a song, a series of notes, a bunch of word set to music, can far more eloquently express how I'm feeling than my spoken words ever can. This last week, music has been a constant companion to me, from the beautiful works of Gorecki's Sorrowful Symphonies, to songs that I turn to when daily life turns from good to bad.

This last week has been one of the worst in a long time, and it's all I can do to try and make sense of each individual bit of bad news, never mind trying to comprehend them altogether.

As my big brother reminded me this week, the problem with loving too deeply is the deep loss that that love inevitably brings. Ying and yang, life and death, love and loss. But stilll, who wants to live in a world without love? Who wants to live in a world where you can't rejoice in the happiest moments with those who you love, and where you can't seek comfort in the worst moments with those you love? If anything, the outpouring of love and comfort from friends and family this week has reminded me just how lucky I am to have the friends and family I do. My life is all the better for them.

What wrecks my head about times like this last week is that my family, my friends and I, have been here before. I almost have a routine for coping now....but still, the unexpected loss of someone I love suddenly hits like a sledgehammer. My insomnia hits even harder, bed time is anywhere from 1am to dawn, despite lying in blackness for several hours. I have to find something to throw myself into, be it work, drawing, playing music, walking, writing, something, anything, to try and distract the brain. My tolerance of others disappears, and inevitably, somewhere random, whilst stuck in traffic, while in a shop, in a cafe, I get that horrible claustrophobic realisation that while my world will never be the same, everyday life will always carry on oblivious.

Bereavement wise, there is very little that rips you open as much as the sudden death of someone you love, especially at our age. With some of my friends, there's been the long warning, cancer, cystic fibrosis....those are hard and hellish to watch, but at least you have time to prepare your goodbyes....but the suddenness of an accident, of a natural death (at 33?!!)....those are the hardest ones. Throughout random parts of today, I just kept thinking "this time last week, Dai had 12 hours left of her life." "this time last week, Dai had 4 hours left."

Some people take comfort in God, in life's plans....throughout my life, I was always taught that God was a loving entity, that we're all on a path through life guided by God. I can't reconcile those thoughts with the shit the people I love have had to deal with. I just can't. From teenage suicides to tragedies, from child abuse to adult addiction, from miscarriages to sudden deaths like Dai's.....I can't believe that there's someone, some thing, some entity deciding that these are all ok things to throw at people I love.

It was something my Gran struggled with, her trust & faith in a God who took away her husband, son, and baby grandson within a few years, the latter within 6 months of one another. She somehow kept her faith til her final years, and it's slightly ironic that it took her losing her faith for us to realise just how seriously ill she was. My own faith was something that I struggled with until I just decided "fuck it, my life is neither comforted, consoled nor enriched by believing that everything is pre-ordained and is happening because an entity thinks it should". Some people, including those I love dearly, find comfort in that. That in itself brings me comfort. 

That struggle of faith and belief of mine was over half my life ago, and the closest thing to a belief I can deal with is that, no matter how shit things are, love wins out, every time. Love for family, love from family. Love for friends, love from friends. Love in the simple everyday actions in your world, be it letting someone into a queue of traffic ahead of you to having someone randomly pay for some of your shopping because you're short of money. The little things that keep us going from day to day.

It's rare that I totally concur with lyrics of a song from start to finish, and rarer still that I think a pop song gets it totally right, but I think these guys pretty much sum up to me why we get through what we go through during our time of existence...






.

....comfortably numb....

...is probably the best way of describing me this week. My knee is healing slowly, but my heart is in bits. My friend Dai died suddenly on Monday night, in her husband's arms, at the age of 33. Her husband Brian is one of "spare" big brothers. I've always joked that as a kid, I had my 3 blood brothers, and then I had Brian (our then next door neighbour) and Kieran (my cousin) as my spares. They looked out for me as much as my own brothers did, and are two of the sweetest soundest funniest men I know-I love them as deeply as I do my blood big brothers.

Mum rang me on Tuesday to break the news, and since then, my brain and heart have been in bits. I just cannot, cannot comprehend that someone so beautiful, so funny, so full of love and pride in her 3 gorgeous girls, is gone.

The first time I met Dai, Brian had brought her and some friends across to Sligo. We ended up out in Toffs that night, and within a few minutes of meeting her, I felt I'd known her forever. Her Welsh accent made pronunciations of everything Sligonian sound fantastically musical, her grin and laugh were contagious, and I felt like her and Bri were much more than a match, they were soulmates-two people who complimented, who perfected, who were two parts coming together to make a whole....who just....worked. Just talking with her that night was enough to cement her in my mind as Brian's other half, the one that complimented and matched him, the one who felt like she'd been in our lives forever, even if we'd only met a few hours previous. To me, in hollywood/disney/richard curtis movie type visions, she was "the one" for Bri. C'mon, even their names suggested it- Bri & Dai? Dai and Bri? they even rhymed together for godssake!!

Their wedding, a year and a bit later was beautiful, a day where the happy tears flowed, from the moment she walked down the aisle, to the grin on Brian's face. The happiness of that day, of the familial fun, kind, caring, loving vibe is one that will always stay with me-from the kids running around in Halloween costumes to the sky lanterns, to Dai's Uncle's kilt dancing and the feeling that two families were becoming one, that old friends and new friends came together to see two best friends becoming one. I can honestly say that my face hurt from grinning so much that day!
As time passed, Mr & Mrs Fitz became Family Fitz, with Molly Mai, then Olwyn and Peggy. Each new arrival was anticipated with eager love and joy, and facebook was regularly updated with pictures of the newest little sister, and big sisters taking up big sisterly duties. That's both the good and bad thing about Facebook-you can see how people are doing without physically checking in with them....Dianne's posts ranged from the heartfelt to the hilarious, from Molly Mai's doodles and quotes (her recent berating the Xbox when it wouldn't do what Daddy said comes to mind!) to Dai's ever changing hair colour, her love for Family Fitz shone through every sentence.

Her most recent platinum blonde was stunning and it's incomprehensible to me that she's gone, that I won't log in to facebook to see a new hair colour, or a random quote from her about the girls or Bri. The best thing about those updates was that I could hear her voice saying those words everytime. The Welsh accent is rather fantastic, and I say that knowing full well that half the world loves the Irish accent....but for me, the melody that a Welsh accent can somehow muster in two syllables is both beautiful and heart-warming.

The only consolation I can take from Dai's sudden departure is that she was happy with her life, with her soulmate Bri, with her gorgeous daughters. She was the most natural of mothers, the most caring of people to family, to friends, and the outpouring of grief, even from those who only met her once, shows just how much of an impact she made on people in life.

In a world so full of negativity, so full of talk of recession and depression and global warming with no happiness in sight, Dai's positivity, her natural beauty and happiness that she exuded in her everyday chat, her facebook post, in her texts, and most importantly, her happiness and love that oozed through her family, simply in her everyday existence....that positivity was a gift to us all, and it's something I know I will try and take forward with me everyday from now on.

Brothers in Arms...

I've finally caught up with Bands of Brothers, well over a decade after i had first intended. The words of Churchill spring to mind- "Never was so much owed by so many to so few"

As you get older, you learn the value of life. You realise how devastating loss can be, how traumatic injuries, both physical and mental, can be for those who suffer them; and those who bear witness to them. Watching a series like Band of Brothers really reminds me just how lucky I am to live in (my) conflict free zone. I've had the misfortune to see someone being shot and while it was traumatic, it's something that i (hopefully!) don't expect to see ever again. I didn't know the guy who was shot, other than to know him as a face about town, and so, the loss of his life; whilst devastating for his family, meant very little in the grand scheme of my life. 

Yet i've known soldiers my age who have had to watch their "brothers", their friends, their colleagues, lose their lives or be wounded and still have to carry on each day. I know a man who lives with the memory of shooting a child suicide bomber. War has fewer rules nowadays, some enemies don't do uniforms, and it's innocents who suffer for it. The difference now is the lack of support for them when they're out of uniform, when they're on civvie street, either on leave, or permanently. It's not a life i could comprehend leading, ever.

Obviously, in WWII, young men didn't have much of a choice to go into action-some flourished, some faltered, muchlike mankind itself. And that to me, is what makes their sacrifice all the greater. To know that you have no choice but to go out and kill or be killed as a matter of war is something i (luckily) will never have to do. 

It's surreal to think that just a few countries away, war is waging....in the Ukraine, in Syria...and i'm ashamed to say that the news of the murders, the car bombings, and the suicide bombings in the Middle East are all things that only briefly catch my attention on the news, much in the same jaded way the bombings and punishment beatings in NI used to when i was younger. Yet now again, something hits home, and makes the concept of what others are going through that bit clearer. For me, it was the news that to date (31/01/14) almost 2000 people have been killed since the start of the Syrian peace talks on Jan 22nd. That's a regular attendance at The Showgrounds to me. The thoughts of the physical space required by that amount of people, the thoughts of looking around that stadium to see almost 2000 dead bodies did, and still does, bring such sadness on me....and that's only the death toll over a week. Over the last decade, thousands have died-all in the name of a "civil" war.

Later this year, the world will begin to commemorate WW I "The Great War".... a war to end all wars....how little we've learnt over a century...

...covered....

Sometimes in life, there are songs that can never be covered satisfactorily. There's always something about the newer version that lacks something of the original, be it the heart, the essence, the message of a piece....or something simpler, like a tambourine missing from a beat.

It's rare that I hear a cover that hits me almost as hard as the original did (Mr. Cash being one exception that proves that rule.) But tonight (this morning?!) I watched and heard this video for the first time. I'm currently listening to it for the fifth time in a row. It's amazing. It. Is. Amazing.






Singer-nails it. Musicians-nail it. Choir-nails it. And despite their obvious talent, at the same time, you can almost feel the reverence they feel for the song, for it's creators who are watching their every note....it's something else.


That's what I love about music. It has that ability to take you away, deep inside, to transport you somewhere special, to take you away from where-ever you are to somewhere else entirely. I have said many times over the years that without music, I'd be a very different person. My life, like many other people's has it's own soundtrack, it's own important (and unimportant!) moments scored by a melody, a lyric that, when I hear them, transports me back to a time in place. Lost in You will always remind me of a soulmate, The Lonesome Boatman of a teenage funeral, The Scientist will remind me of hearing my first niece use full sentences (singing along bless her!) and the song above was one I first heard in the wee small hours on a show called Maloney After Midnight over 15 years ago around the time that I realised insomnia was a friend that was here to stay.

Even on my first listen, it blew me away. From it's soft stringed gentle opening, to the beauty of it's lyrics ("there's a feeling I get, when I look to the west....and my spirit is crying for leaving...") to it's pulsating rocked out ending, it captivated me. I have listened to it many many times now for over half my life, growing almost slightly jaded with it as the years pass by. Yet the version I'm listening to tonight has brought it back to life for me. Honestly, everytime it gets to 3.25 in the song, a giant grin starts to spread across my face, and by 3.45, my head starts nodding along to the solo, barely stopping short of headbanging along- bringing to life some of the latter lyrics of the song.."and if you listen very hard...the tune will come to you at last."
Music is something more powerful than any drug I've ever taken (including the ones I'm currently on for my knee!) and it's ability to change a mood, a situation, a memory, is one I constantly seem to under-estimate. Last week, I purchased an album from a new Irish group called The Gloaming. Ethereally beautifully brilliant doesn't come close to doing the album justice. There are several tracks on the album that I almost feel I shouldn't be breathing when I listen to them, such is their beauty. It's an album full of songs that, prior to last week, I didn't know. And yet, within a week, they feel like they've been in my life forever, bringing comfort to cold days, bringing back long-lost memories without any connection to those days when those memories were being created, and just being an example of how music has the ability to move feelings and emotions that had nothing to do with the music originally.

That, to me, is one of the most amazing things in life- the power and beauty of music. It's ability to gift you the impossible, to create a new emotion within you, the ability to feel like you're time-traveling just by closing your eyes and listening to a song, the ability to change a mood instantly, the ability to re-invent something you've heard a thousand times before, and, without changing it, re-create it for you so it feels like it did the first time you heard it.

I've lost track of the amount of conversations I've had about music, about songs, about covers, about new tracks, about old....just this evening I was getting more recomendations from a friend about new & old music that I had (prior to discovering that Zep cover!) been listening to and enjoying. It's surreal now that, despite all the music out there, I'm still hungry for more, be it old, be it new. What I find even more surreal is that sometimes, a melody that I may have heard many times before will speak to me strangely someday, and suddenly it becomes an important track, an important piece of music to have in my life.

This post may not make much sense to you...tbh, I'm finding it hard to put into (eloquent) words myself just how important it is to me. Suffice to say that, in all times of my life, good and bad, music is something that has helped me, and to finish on something that might make a little sense.... Music is something that I can never *ever* imagine my life without and to paraphrase a little...

Music is nothing without life, and life is nothing without music.

Randomness from a hospital bed...

So yet again in my life, i find myself wide awake in a hospital bed in the wee small hours, with a swollen, bruised and bloodied knee after my 7th bit of surgery. The new kneecap is behaving but, alas,the scar tissue and ligaments in the knee aren't. What was to be a day procedure has turned into an overnight stay.

But, this made me smile....a bunch of towels at the end of my bed. Douglas Adams would be pleased...