One of my pleasures is listening to
music (CDs) while driving. My choice at the moment is ‘Across The Borderline’, an
album by the great Willie Nelson, on which is a gorgeous version of
‘Graceland’ by Paul Simon. Three of the lines always make me cry:
Losing love is like a
window in your heart.
Everybody sees you’re
blown apart.
Everybody sees the
window.
They move me because when I first lost Frog everyone was
so kind to me, even complete strangers like supermarket checkout people.
It was as if they sensed what was going on, and Paul Simon has obviously had
the same experience.
At least, that’s what I thought the words were. But when I came to check
them for this post I discovered that I’d misheard the last one. It's not ‘sees the window’ but ‘feels the wind blow’, and that doesn’t work for me at all. Never mind. It’s still a beautiful version of the song and I
can sing my own words loudly over the top of the official ones.
In Miriam Margolyes’s scurrilous autobiography
‘This Much is True’, which I’m currently laughing my way through, she mentions a Dutch word ‘drempelvrees’ which means ‘threshold
fear’. She says that the Indonesians (who were once colonised by the Dutch, as you probably know) use the word more specifically to mean the moment we gather ourselves up to appear in public. They do consciously, she says, what most of us do unconsciously before going out - putting on a persona, an exaggerated version of ourselves, ourselves as we’d like to be.
I’m doing a lot of that at the moment. Or maybe what I’m
doing is pretending to be what I hope I’m becoming. Dawn French, in her memoir
‘Dear Fatty’, first alerted me to this phenomenon. Before becoming a new
person, she writes, we have to imagine that new person and play the part for a
while. I found that very helpful. It’s such a good way of getting out of a rut
and taking the step forward that we need to take.
However, both techniques have their drawbacks. They can mean that we’re not
being true to our whole self, perhaps hiding or protecting something, and in my case it means
that I’m glossing over the vulnerable grief-stricken part of myself, which is
still there and may always be there.
When Frog first died, I didn’t have a persona. I couldn’t
present an idealised version of myself. I couldn’t protect myself. I didn’t
have the energy. It was as much as I could do to get up in the morning. And I think that honesty was one of the things people responded to. That was why they were kind to
me.
Unfortunately that unexpected kindness doesn't happen any more in quite the same way, even though I’m
probably just as fragile inside. Yesterday was a case in point, when I tried
to engage the woman at the Sainsbury’s till in conversation and she looked at
me as if I was mad. It threw me for the whole day.
I’ve a lot to learn still about this ‘being myself’
business, about how to face the world as me - new or otherwise, how to combine strength and vulnerability. Frog was much better than me at it. He never pretended. All
his failings and weaknesses were on show. He knew he was an idiot (as we all are really). And I loved
him for that.
