THE LAST BUS

LEARNING HOW TO CRY – IN SMALL STEPS!

I watched a film called The Last Bus tonight. Wendy was away dog sitting for friends and I had the evening with just me and Dash the dog.

Not far into the film I became aware that I was crying; not just blurry eyes but tears trickling down my face. It was a strange sensation and one I am not that used to. Initially I was just curious at the feel of the tears on my face and that when I touched them my finger tips were wet. I wondered if I was just very sentimental as I do love films that move me.

However, I prefer it if people don’t see me in floods of tears so was glad of the privacy of the house and Dash nuzzling into me, seemingly unaware of my sadness.

I have to say I have no idea what makes a good film but I did like this one. At first I thought; quirky, slightly silly film, but it quickly grew more sombre and emotional; for me at least.

I once sort of met Timothy Spall who was the star; he was a guest at one of the few weddings I have been to. I was very impressed and tried my very best not to stare at him as I thought star struck guests might not be ideal at a wedding celebration.

Hamish and Katie were the people getting married at that wedding. I once lived in their house with my ex-wife and this makes me think of my tears.

I can’t remember the last time I cried in real life and not at a film. Three years ago I cried when I first went into Rape Crisis in Oban to talk about the past. My eyes sometimes went blurry and my voice got choky when I was seeing my psychologist last year. The last time before that was, I think when the children were about five, and we were in Denmark in the winter at a campsite and it was their birthday. Being such a snorer I was in a separate room in the caravan and in their excitement the children and Wendy started opening presents without me and somehow it threw me; made me remember so vividly the absence of my son in my life and somehow, I was crying and then Wendy was holding me and that helped.

And before that? Maybe when I was last in hospital and my son was almost in my life and I spoke a little to my wife who put the phone she was holding on the clavinova he was playing. He refused to talk to me but he let me listen to his music and that is maybe the greatest gift I have been given.

Later that night, as I have said in START, I started crying in a way that was grief. My pain spilled into the whole ward amongst the Christmas decorations and other patients own sadness; pain that I stopped being able to control because the tears had taken over and were wrenching me apart. The nursing assistant on the door was someone we all really liked; his gentle words as I let my agony free held me in a way I have rarely felt.

We talk of trauma and I know so many people that have had experiences I cannot even imagine and although I glibly say I need help to come to terms with the trauma of the past, I do not always think I have experienced anything that compares to what so many people have been through.

I am not sure I have a right to cry at the loss or grief, I seem to say I have had in my life. I do not think it counts somehow. Not really.

I can see that, not having seen my son for longer than I once lived with him, can cause me pain but also I have now had seventeen years to get used to it and he is, in the merest glimpse; almost in my life. I can message him; he may almost never reply and I may not know anything about his life but he is not dead and is hopefully having a good life.

Curiously it is Hamish and Katie I would like to cry about just now, not that I am in a crying mood at all at the moment; now that the film is over.

I have vivid memories of Hamish playing the music of his idol, Bruce Springsteen and then John Cooper Clark late at night when he had drunk too much or talking about the football at Hearts or of Katie smoking her cigarettes with me in the snow one Burns night, or talking about what she got up to on the cruise liners she once worked on. They had a lovely light and airy house. I would like to sit in it and catch up on the last couple of decades. I would like to cook them a meal or pour them a glass of wine. I would like to hear Katie talk about how she shrieked out loud when she was on the train and read in the paper that I had got an MBE and yet I know I will never see them again.

I am still bewildered that leaving my wife meant that twenty years of living snapped shut and that I have seen pretty much nothing of anyone I knew in those days since.

Friends I once was close to will be dead now and I will never even know they died.

Memories will never be shared in soppy get togethers. In the core of me I know how awful I am but closer to the surface people see someone awkward, maybe slightly dull but more or less pleasant and so the absence of key people in my life is strange and makes me wonder what I do or did to those I treasure.

Not long before I left Highland to live with Wendy, I was still helping with a friend’s children. This friend who I met at work, who helped me tremendously during my separation from my ex wife (but it is true that friends and work and friendships between people with different degrees of power don’t work well even if we think they do at the time.) Anyway, I suddenly became a terrible enemy of hers because of a work thing, or I think it was a work thing, and, in an instant, I no longer saw her children; not even for a goodbye.

It is maybe something we don’t question or remark on much. But I used to go round to the house to baby sit three times a week. Cora took her first steps in my house; I chased the monsters from her bedroom night after night. I read Cora and Molly bedtime stories. I took Molly for her first trip on a bus. I walked with them and the dogs. I swung Cora on the baby swings. I held her hand on the way to the playground while the parents nattered. I walked Splash the dog and stayed in the house with him when his mum was away. In my own way, I loved them dearly and then with the swiftness of a sword cut they were out of my life, and, for me, that hurt terribly.

And all those years with my ex-wife, all twenty of them.

It is a not a good image for us men but like many of the men I know; the vast majority of the friends I made when I was married were actually made by my wife. I was the slightly awkward addition, but we did get on, most of us, and then we didn’t. They just vanished from my life; like my possessions did too.

I think what I miss most now is not just the loss of the friends I did have even if they were second hand friends but also the loss of the memories; not just people to share memories with, but the happy memories.

There was a huge amount that was awful about that marriage, but I did have some utterly wonderful times and, maybe it is the way of things, but those years are now clouded, and I remember only the sadness of it all.

It has become a film with every single lovely, beautiful clip edited out and I am the one who has done the editing. Recently I have been trying to write something of some of the lovely times I did have. You can see it in stories of snow in the Cairngorms or tea in the glow of the evening sun in Skerray elsewhere on my page.

I worry I have betrayed my past with the story I make of it. I have sealed my heart; refused my tears and now remember that if I had been able to have friends when I was married, I would maybe now have someone to share the memories and giggles of when whatever it was, happened.

Life seems to have always been like that. I do have three childhood friends, the Geoghegan’s children but not really. I have seen them at my parent’s events; maybe once every fifteen years and we sometimes like each other’s posts on Facebook. But there is not a soul from the schools I went to that I am in contact with and not really a soul from all the places we lived in as children.

We are a tiny family; we don’t really have relatives anymore outside of us ‘children’ and my mum or none that we know and so somehow it does feel that my life might have been very lonely, marked by the absence of meaningful connection to the past.

No connection to a community or a place; as we moved all the time.

I do have Karen (and sometimes Reg) who I met in my twenties and who I cannot stop speaking with whenever she phones or we meet up.

However, since I left my wife, I have learnt at last how to make friends.

Up in Highland I remember my amazement that people wanted and valued my company as I created a new life for myself. It was very confusing, finding out that I wasn’t as unpleasant and boring as I thought I was.

It was then that I regained my connection with my own family, my brother and sister and parents and nephews and nieces and realised how wonderful they were and it was also here that some of my wife’s sisters got in touch via their children and we became close in a way we never did when I was married. I am so, so, grateful for those connections.

And here in Argyll and the Central Belt the whole web of Wendy’s community is open to me and welcoming. They are wonderful and here too I have my own friends or at least people I am beginning to dare to call friends. It is a rare day that I will walk round Helensburgh without seeing someone I know; to be greeted with kindness.

But the fifty years before hand? They seem grey and they seem lost and cloudy. It is tempting to blame others for that but lately I wonder at this.

People like Be or Shona or Colin or Jeff? Was I ever close to them really all those years ago? And if so how did I lose those connections until after I left my marriage?

It is not something with a simple explanation.

It could be me; maybe I am cold and leave people aside when I move on or change addresses. It could be the simple fact that my ex-wife discouraged me from making any friends at all, especially friends through work but it may also be that it was easier for me to tag along with her life and not make an effort.

It may also be a part of the story of my latest memoir where moving all the time meant we became used to the ripping out of our lives of those we loved each time we moved and that sense of self preservation when we were sent away to school; where, despite the closeness we sometimes had; we needed to preserve ourselves and seal out emotion and vulnerability and that makes connection difficult, almost impossible sometimes.

Places where love and kindness were not even part of the language; places where emotion was forbidden and joy or pleasure seen as something sissy and effeminate.

It is tempting to blame but that rarely does any good, however I remember in the introduction to the as yet unnamed memoir, I try to explain the realisation I came to that loving walking in the countryside with bird song and flowers was something you had to hide from your peers; much better to be believed to be out there taking drugs because that is what young boys do to keep respect alive.

I officially haven’t been traumatised; I saw a psychologist and she said I had no signs of PTSD or CPTSD but despite that I would love to learn to cry outside of made up films.

I would like to cry for my son. I would like to cry for my mum who has cancer.

I would like to cry for the fact that I tend to rely on Wendy to tell me what I am feeling and rely on her noticing that I am not coping. That is something to cry about.

I have wanted to cry about the fact that once an ex partner hated me so much while saying she loved me; that she said my schizophrenia meant it was impossible for me to love like other people do; that in her opinion I really was sub-human.

And yet at the same time I need to cry because in some ways she was right. I know without a doubt that I do love, and I do feel but often I need those I love to guide me in this alien territory that somehow, I was once taught to leave well alone.

Despite all the ridicule I want to be like that supposedly hunky man on Friends who disgusted everyone by crying and crying and crying and who was delighted by the liberation of it.

I want the joy of finally realising I live in a world where it is safe to feel. It is taking me some time but everyday with every hug and every silly joke from my wonderful family, I feel a step closer to that.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.