SWINGS AND ROUNDABOUTS: Commemorations and Celebrations. It’s 19 of one and 50 of another. It’s 19 years today since I gave up drinking and taking drugs. A massive milestone that I’m incredibly proud of. It’s also 50 years today since my mum died. Which is insane.
It’s hard to convey the feeling of having lived for half a century without a mother in your life. The seventies seem like a thousand billion lifetimes ago, and they really are. But nonetheless this is where my brother and sisters are. I was only 13 when we lost her and having been in that position for so long, it just seems normal. The sense of loss intermittently rebounds back and forth in my emotions, sometimes it leaves for huge periods of time, but it has never disappeared forever.
If I’m honest, I can only barely remember her now. I have no photos of her, her image is sketchy and with every passing year she fades further into the background. But her place in my life never dissipates for a second. She has become a distant figure in my life. Light years in the past there’s a dim light that refuses to be extinguished. It’s all I have of this once great, remarkable woman. All the memories I have of her are from photographs. I think I can remember the sound of her voice, but that might not be true. Just a version of her voice, I guess, and sometimes I feel I’ve just invented that as a device to keep me close to her memory.
It shaped all of my teenage years, that feeling of dread mixed with periodic nothingness. As anyone who really knew me back then will surely attest, I was a fragile and lost little boy. And, rightly or wrongly, it left me with a sense of abandonment that neither time nor people have been able to fix. It’s something I’ve never shrugged off and carry around with me to this day.
Which brings me to the events of February 2006: The mindless drug hoover, drinking, going out and getting smashed, not really thinking. Just doing. It culminated in a weekend where I found myself slugging’ it like a thirsty poisson and quite literally on everything except roller-skates. This unintentionally coincided with my the anniversary of my mother’s passing. Through one thing and another I was in a pretty sore state and I felt like I was disintegrating, yet being held together by Guinness, Cocaine and other psychotropic love drugs. I think it all started off rather well and evenly paced. On the Sunday I had adopted the epithet of the great Magnus Magnusson “I’ve started, so I’ll finish.” By the Monday I couldn’t get out of bed and all I could do was lay there and cry. Those binds that held me together had begun to unravel and there was no way I could put them back together at that time. I dug myself a massive trench, I was at the bottom and I couldn’t clamber my way out this time. I was fucked. And getting fuckeder.
I went to see the good doctor Martin Smith, ostensibly to get a sicknote as I wasn’t well enough to go to work. During a tearful conversation during which Martin suggested doing something for myself that would make me feel better, I just blurted out that I wanted to stop drinking and taking drugs. Dr Smith started me on a journey the very next day. I did what he suggested.
Bingo!
And that was 19 years ago. I’ve never regretted a single moment. And the older I’ve got and the greater the feeling of being alive, everything now seems vindicated, validated, victorious. Alliteration gone mad. My life has changed a lot in the meantime, but like I said, being alive is a beautiful feeling. Everyone should try it once in their lives.
I miss me mum every bit as much today as I did when I was 14, 15. It never goes away. I can’t even begin to imagine what life would have been like had she not died.
I drink a toast of coffee to her and my brothers and sisters, all remarkable human beings who kept each other sane this past half century. I love you all. Love really is what it’s all about, and very little else.
And For All Those Other People….. Without Whom…You Know Who You Are.
Thanks.
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bernie@happening-things.com 