Hey, beautiful friends.
This is an essay in three parts, based on an edited, amended & updated extract from my book, The Year Of Miracles, which you can buy from everywhere.
I’m putting it up here because it’s taken me a long time to get to grips with this book: I couldn’t touch it for a long time, it made me feel very sick even to see it on a shelf. But I was trying to think about what today, 6th December, means to me; and I couldn’t make myself do it even though I did want to explain, a bit, I wanted to leave a way-marker for other people going through it but writing it made me so sad; and then I thought, I have written about this before. I have written about all of this before.
There is a sturdy trigger warning on this piece: cancer, brain injury, grief, loss, all of it.
Comments are closed, because I can’t be the person to moderate them, and I want to keep this place as safe as possible for everyone.
6th December 2016 is my personal horror: it was, probably, the worst day of my life. I still don’t really want to write about the specifics, but I would like to tell you that the doctors had not listened to me about the person I knew and loved best in the world, and that something was incredibly and ultimately fatally wrong with him, and if I close my eyes I can physically feel every single sensation of that morning on my body as if it is happening to me still and has never stopped happening. Christmas 2017, when J was also in the ICU, was very bad too.
As usual, I don’t really recognise being the girl in these essays. I am going through them and editing them and changing names back to their real names; and I am so sad for the person writing. It was a p*nd*m*c; she was grieving; she felt a deep pressure to get a book out and for that book to mean everything. Poor baby. I’m sad she was there; I’m glad I’m here. I’m glad to have left this way-marker for myself, that in this darkness I can see that it used to be so much darker: that here and there, that everywhere in fact in this December, is light and air and joy. It’s nice to be me! It’s nice for it not to be 2020! It’s nice for it not to be 2016! It’s nice for it not to be 2017! It’s nice to exist in a time where this is not just in the past, but in the past of my writing. I am not writing about this any more. I did it; and here it is.
I’m really proud of The Year Of Miracles, and I hope you’ll buy it if you haven’t already. This part below is about grief, but there’s lots in there about friendship and love and family and funniness and queerness and joy too.
1. Fried Jam Sandwiches
There are a lot of things people get wrong about ghosts.
The first thing– or maybe just the most pertinent thing, here and now– is that Hallowe’en has nothing on Christmas for genuine hauntings. Birthdays are bad; and weddings; and christenings; and other people’s funerals- but Christmas, if you celebrate Christmas, is a minefield of ectoplasm and sudden, unexpected jolts.
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