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| miss_kitten |
on Thu 29 Jul 10, 10:14 PM to miss_kitten's blog.
Music has always played a huge part in my memory. Hearing a song or piece of music can take me back to somewhere or someone I didn't even realise I remembered.
And that happened today. I have been messing with an 80's playlist and collecting the saddest and most tragic poptastic anthology of my teenage years, regardless of anything resembling cool. It is taking me days of commuting to get through it, so big it is. So today, I was innocently reading my novel and You Were Always On My Mind (Pet Shop Boys) began and it was like a punch to my stomach. I was right back to being a teenager, watching my aunt doubled over in grief, inconsolable at the loss of her husband. It was a few months after he had died suddenly and she heard the song for the first time and was destroyed by the feeling it gave her and the words it spoke for her that she dare not say herself.
We all lose people. Those who haven't are blessed. But it was my first true experience of grief for someone I loved and whole life was intertwined with me and mine. We all loved him. He was the life of our extended family and the centre of every party and my God we partied as a family. The two sisters and their husbands and their offspring were inseparable to the point that we would confuse people as to which children belonged to whom.
And one night it shifted. The world altered and it was never the same again. The space he left crumbled the foundations of what we had. He died suddenly. A massive, and almost instantly fatal heart attack. I took the call from my screaming cousin. My dad was out of bed and running through the village to get to him before I had hung up. He tried for 30 mins to save him until the ambulance got to him. He was dead already but he wouldn't stop trying, he couldn't stop.
It was the first and only time I saw my dad cry. 6ft 4, gruff, built like a brick shit house and he sobbed because he couldn't do anything to save his best friend.
My aunt was destroyed and never recovered. She couldn't live without him. Her grief crushed her and she became less because of it. She looked less, she acted less, she felt less.
My cousin who was always more like a sister to me lost her place in the family as her mum started to inexplicably reject her, drawing us closer and closer into our little world of surviving. We stuck together like lost soul mates. We shared the same bed for months because she couldn't let go of me.
My other two cousins went off the rails. “She” raged in a confused state and refused to ever consider that her mum would have any happiness after his death. “He” took to beating women; girlfriends and sisters alike.
My parents took them in. Nursed, soothed, counselled, grieved, fed, raised and listened to them all. I saw my dad and my brother battle to keep “him” from turning into the bullying scum that he still is today. They did it through love, through force, through cajoling. Nothing worked. I stayed with his pregnant wife as she came around after he had knocked her down the stairs as I cried because my dad was chasing “him” across a field to bring “him” back to face his actions. My aunt sat by, checked out, lost in her grief and clinging to her son and the few good points he shared with his late father. There wasn't much of that man in him, but she held on to it and broke her daughters' hearts doing it. It broke all of our hearts and degraded his memory.
And nothing ever was the same again. Finally the son destroyed our whole family and my aunt let him because she was too weak to stand up to him. My soul mate joined him because after years of emotional abuse and neglect, they gave her acceptance in return for her lies and deceit. It broke my heart. We cried as we parted and she begged me to forgive her and to stay in contact with her in secret, but she chose them and in doing so helped them rip the family to pieces to a state from which it has never recovered. I still grieve her. I still miss her, but I will never forgive her. I stopped missing my aunt not long before she died. The pain she was complicit in was too much to tolerate as I have watched my parents weighed under their sadness, fear and unhappiness and seen them lose what should have been the best years of their lives.
So yes, you are always on my mind. Even if I don't know it, there is still a place that is empty, a place that is changed and so many things that are destroyed.
| 29 Jul 10, 10:26 PM Sadistia UK(NG), 10 yrs |
Thank you for sharing. I felt so much through your writing. Sx |
| 30 Jul 10, 12:05 PM golfmebackwards UK(SO), 6 yrs |
Hi Miss Kitten,i am sorry that the song provoked such bad memories for you and hope that other songs that you may listen to will bring back memories of happier times.gmb X x X I'm so glad that this has taken me so long, |
