There was a nice piece about Wilko Johnson in Louder than War last week, but I had to laugh at the way it got promoted on Twitter. “Wilko Johnson who sadly recently passed away,” it said.
“Sadly passed away” isn’t very rock’n’roll, is it?
There is a perfectly good four-letter word they could have used instead. D.I.E.D. Wilko always seemed pretty down to earth so I think he would have preferred that. Also, he was a former English teacher so on that basis I also think he would have preferred that.
We are not Victorians. We don’t need euphemisms.
Anyway, I lost one of my best friends last month. And “lost” is not a euphemism. Yes, my friend died. And now I have a loss in my life. Another one.
I’ve lost people before, and I was young enough (and so were some of them) for it to seem unusual. It’s not any more. I was talking to a friend recently and she used the phrase “four funerals and a wedding”. I think this year was literally like that for her. When you get to a certain age, you realise that people dying is something you have to get used to. I’m still young enough to wonder if that’s actually possible.
Knowing it’s normal doesn’t make it easier: every new layer of loss still hurts. Words don’t make it easier. And here I am using words, because it’s all I’ve got. But there are so many words that really don’t help.
I think my friend’s death was the first one where I saw the public response played out on Facebook. Well, he was on Facebook all the time and so were many of his many friends.
People said nice things. One person said “May his journey be peaceful and his memory a blessing.” Ah, I thought, that’s nice. A few weeks later I posted something on Twitter, and someone said “May his memory be a blessing”. Ah, I thought, it’s just something that people say, like “Sorry for your loss.” It doesn’t actually mean anything. (I don’t actually mind “Sorry for your loss.” Formulas are OK if you know they are formulas, and they say what they need to.)
I also keep hearing variations on the notion that “grief is the price of love.” That doesn’t help either. Yes, I did love my friend and that’s why I’m grieving. Yes, his memory will be a blessing once I’ve got used to him not being there. But you can’t philosophise your way out of missing someone. Inspirational quotes don’t cut it as comfort.
(To be fair, this might just be my autism sending me into Mr Spock mode: “illogical”. Maybe some people find that stuff helpful.)
My friend and I didn’t talk much about feelings. (I didn’t think I did that stuff until, later in adulthood, I learnt how to be friends with women.) Our friendship was based on simple, solid companionship: shared interests and having a laugh. In our twenties and thirties, we hung out so much that our respective mothers thought something was amiss, because I was a married woman at the time. Later, when I stopped being married, we hung out so much that people thought we were an item. We weren’t; we were just mates. And being mates matters. That companionship was precious, because it was what I needed at the time. (And vice versa, at other times.)
In later years, we both married people who made us happy, and needed each other less. I moved away. But whenever I went back to the city where we met, he was the first person I would contact. Back home, I would never phone him, because I don’t really do phones, but whenever he rang me I’d drop everything to chat. He’d ask me what I was listening to, and I’d nag him about his health.
In between, he was always on Facebook. He was one of the people who made it feel like a real place. I spent a lot of time there in the weeks after he died, because I wanted to be with other people who knew him. Now we’ve had his memorial, and his friends said things about him that were true and authentic. Those words made me cry, because they made it real, but they were also comforting because they told me that other people felt the same.
So actually, words do help. They just have to be the right ones.
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