Death, Grief, Mourning and Everything: I just lost my partner...

There’s this thing about organising funerals that you ought to know. Never invite someone with suspected Swine Flu. They might be sobbing or they might be coughing. Either way, the rest of the people there don’t like it.

Initially there’s just a it of polite pushing and shoving as the crowd distance themselves from the person who’s pale, sweating and explosively coughing and sneezing. But etiquette goes out the window when the ’flu victim rushes out the chapel, pukes just by the door and then comes back in.

The pew gets really crushed as everyone scrunches up to the other end. Also, never let a person with suspected swine ’flu get into a pew where there are women with big hats. The haberdashery collision as four of them try to fit into a place for one is funny, but they really don’t appreciate the humour of the situation.

Oh, and never have them play The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald as the coffin goes down into the crematorium’s hot spot. I know Gordon Lightfoot’s song is a classic of Canadian music and it was appropriate – but it’s so sodding long. I should have handed out joints to everyone as they came in so they could have enjoyed it properly.

Instead, I was reduced to trying to make discreet cut-across-the-throat gestures to the funeral director after the 15th chorus. I think he thought I was trying to massage my throat so I didn’t cry loudly and he continued playing the song to its 87th verse. At least the swine-flu guy was able to get in a short nap.

I’ve just lost my partner for the last ten years. We met 14 years ago on the internet and there’s a weird, but proper circularity about losing him and talking about it on the internet. For four years we chatted on an internet writers’ group, and then when he decided to come over to Britain, I told him he could stay at my place for my place for a couple of weeks until he established his own home.

Ten years later, he was still here. Then in the last year, he went from the strongest person I ever knew into someone who had unexpected health problems and then suddenly someone with cancer who died within a month of the diagnosis. And he was strong. He was a big man physically, and if you’d asked him to move an elephant from the living room, he’d have looked at it slowly from three sides before suddenly picking it up and moving it to the kitchen - where he’d expect me to cook it.

But he was also strong as a man in all other aspects. If you wanted a fight, you had to be intellectually rigorous, because he was no fool and would take no prisoners. The only way you could win a fight against him when your arguments weren’t strong was to make him laugh. He loved laughing above and beyond anything else.

But it wasn’t just that. He was strong emotionally, too. When I had an accident that could have paralysed me, he spent 18 months nursing me back to mobility and when I had financial problems, he just took on extra work to meet the bills and never suggested that it was an imposition or that I was somehow failing as a human being or partner. He just stuck by me to a higher level than I thought I ever deserved as a human being. So now he’s gone. I know it’s a cliché to say there’s a hole in my life – but there is.

It’s physical, financial, emotional, intellectual and (surprisingly for an atheist) spiritual. I also know that other cliché about time healing all ills. It’s not without its wisdom. But time doesn’t actually heal the pain. Instead it’s like the debris of the rest of your life slowly fills up that hole. Think of it as emotional Tetris.

Memories, emotions, keepsakes, favourite phrases, snatches of music and suddenly heard voices drift through that space until the hole fills up. But it’s not a healing, basically it’s scar tissue. I’m not at that point – there’s not even a scab to pick off at the moment. I was trying to explain this to someone on AfterElton and he suggested that I should ask people here for support. But I don’t think there is support to be given. For me, there is no support.

Mourning is the most corrosive of all human emotions for me. It’s acidic. It just burns down the nerves straight into the brain and you lose any concept of the ‘normal’ world. You hold on to rationality with the barest grasp and it seems entirely natural that if you feel pain, then anyone who shakes your hand should feel that pain as well. Instead, if you’ve been hurt like this, please add your memories of someone you’ve loved. Love is imperfect. I’ve not reached that level – the moment – at which I can disentangle all my emotions about my partner.

Rationally, I know he was imperfect, but all I can feel at the moment is that raw, burning loss. I’m horrifically imperfect, but I was loved. In fact, I think the greatest thing my partner ever did was loving me – and I don’t care how that looks or sounds. It’s the truth.

But it’s not just my truth. There are people here who must have their own truths. This is a strange, weird and bizarre forum in which to talk about love. But it’s a forum. I loved Bob. Without him, my life is horrifically bleak. I couldn’t afford a headstone to Bob. Instead we scattered his ashes in the Thames (and that’s one hell of a story!) and this post is his cybernetic memorial stone.

I’m not the only person to have ever gone through this. If you have, too, please add your tribute to someone you loved despite everything society told you about who could be your soul mate. We all need a place to be remembered.