UBelong Glasgow
Loving
Do you remember when you were young and you didn’t know for sure what love was and somehow you were told that you would know it when it happened, that your world would almost catch fire and you would not even doubt; you would just know?
I am not sure if ever that happened to me. I was pretty convinced I had found love. I noticed that I no longer walked, head bowed, looking at the pavement and that instead, I looked around me, wanted to smile at the people passing me and that when I did they tended to smile back. I knew that my world was incomparably better but I didn’t know, not for sure, if this was the true love that surpasses all other feelings.
Many years ago; during that terrible time when the love I thought I felt for another person faded to be replaced by arguments and bitterness, my partner started seeking out websites for carers of people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
When I was told that there was now an answer to the failure of our relationship; that people like me, with schizophrenia, are incapable of love and loving relationships. That it was sad; a matter deserving great pity but an inevitable part of my disability and an explanation of all that had gone wrong; I do not know what I felt. At first some incredulity that someone who said they loved me could be so cruel to me, but it nagged at me and still does.
Maybe it is true, maybe, even though I struggle to believe I have schizophrenia , maybe I really am not quite human, maybe that fond dream I thought I had experienced of the wonder of love was never a part of my life. Maybe my simple certainty that I had loved my partner, my friends, my family was some sort of delusion, that I have lived a life blinkered by a simple belief that just isn’t true?
There is a legacy from those days. I do wonder if I am so faulty that I shouldn’t be in any sort of relationship. I also think I deserved the awful behaviour of that person because I stopped loving or maybe deceived us both by living together for years but never loving; not really.
I hope I have grown away from those terrible years and am putting such doubts behind me. I think there are many, many, forms of love.
I think my best demonstration of that was yesterday, when we were home schooling the twins and wee ten year old Charlotte was faffing around and getting fed up and when asked what would make her day better said;
“I know what, I want a hug from Graham!”
And she came across the room to give me a great big hug and said;
“I love you.”
And I was able to grin as my heart felt like bursting and say;
“Love you too.”
I am pretty sure I do lots of loving. I love my new partner with incredulity and joy. I did not know you could have a relationship, that was passionate and friendly, a relationship where you respect each other and do not score points off each other or feel any need to have, let alone win, arguments. My new life is a liberation; I just wish it hadn’t taken so many years to find out that something like this was possible.
I love the wind and the sea, the cry of curlews and the sheep in a field, the skeins of geese in the autumn.
A few days ago, I walked on the mudflats at Ardmore. The fog was down but the sun was bright above it. We walked into a grey black and white world, where the sunshine made some slight brightness but everything was soft and white and grey and flat and muted. Far off was the muffled sound of children but all we could see was the meeting of the slick of the silver sea with the flat iron of the mud and the mist and the occasional seabird flying low and silent just above the water to disappear into the whiteness. We were in a mystical, quiet, still world and yet if we had walked the opposite direction up the hill a hundred yards, we would have been in the lightness and ease of a world of sunshine and blue skies. I think I felt love at this moment too.
Over a year ago I remember the last night of my stay looking after my dad, while my mum went to have a break with my brother’s family. My dad had one of those turns that his Parkinson’s gave him and got very upset and so I took him upstairs and undressed him and put his jammies on and put him to bed. And he turned to me and held my hands in his, still strong, hands in the slightly strange clasp that came from his missing fingers, he held tight and he said;
“Thank you Graham; thank you for everything.”
And he said;
“I love you.”
And I told him I loved him too. He held tight to my hands with his breathing all ragged. We both had tears in our eyes. I stayed until he was ready to settle and sleep before going downstairs for the rest of the evening.
The next day we went back home to Scotland and a month later; while we were on holiday in Disneyland, I got a call to say he had just had a heart attack and had died almost instantly.
I still haven’t cried over his death but now having gone off sick on the anniversary of his death and now slowly come back to work, I find him in my dreams and sometimes the dreams seem unbearable because the grief I feel is extreme but I wake feeling relief that at least, in my sleep, I can express the love I had for a lovely person with whom I had the most confused relationship.
And do I really not understand or experience love? When you are told you are incapable of love, that you have never known love you can grow anxious and bewildered. You can feel angry at the presence of doubt about your very humanity but nether the less worry that it is true.
Whatever love is and whatever it is I really feel; I now choose to believe that I do know love and that I live a life surrounded by people who also love and who also love me.
Performed at Ubelong Glasgow arts event – loving – 18 02 2021 - https://www.facebook.com/UBelongGlasgow.
(Photo – Wendy at Knockderry Castle Hotel – 2020)
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