Day 118 of Grief: Lesbian Horror and Imaginary Cousins

So today is Saturday, the 19th of September.

I have got a dreadful back-to-school bug which is living in my throat and chest, and my whole head has just been completely screwed this past week. I have had a severe lack of sleep because the sore throat has kept me awake, no matter what medication I’ve taken, and I pretty much feel dreadful.

Tonight, I am trying to use some wine medicinally to stop me from coughing, in the hope that if my body gets used to not coughing for a period of time, then maybe the coughing will ease down. This is self-research.

One of the worst things about being ill and having such a lack of sleep is that your brain is brilliant at thinking about everything that has happened. One of the only ways, it feels to me, to successfully get through grief is to not think about what happened. That is what gets me through the day, not thinking about what happened.

Unfortunately, when you’re ill and your body won’t sleep, and all you do is cough, you just start thinking about things. You think about what happened. You have dreams where everyone who is dead is alive, and then you’re reminded that they’re not actually alive. Darren’s elbow, for example. I saw Darren’s elbow in a dream and told him to move it, and my mother was there. Then, still in the dream, I thought to myself, That was weird. Why did I think that? Because I know he’s dead. Then, when I woke up, I thought, what a weird dream. The reality of it landed again. Oh, fuck me. Yes, he is.

One of the things that being ill has given me the opportunity to do is replay all the horrible things that happened. It’s a recap of things that I didn’t really want to remember in the first place. It’s like those TV shows that reckon people are so fucking dumb that they’ve forgotten what happened in the last ten minutes, so they have to do a recap every couple of minutes or after every break. I don’t need that, but my brain seems to keep doing things like that. Showing me.

I still can’t believe it. I still cannot believe that Darren’s not here and that all of this happened 118, nearly 120, days ago.

I saw something a few days ago which broke the time into months, weeks, days, hours and minutes. I could do the same, because except when I’m asleep, I have not stopped thinking about Darren and what happened. Because it’s still unreal. It’s still unbelievable.

But time marches on. That’s the unfortunate thing. I’ve still got to help Daniel and carry on.

Before Daniel’s exams started, before Darren died, we had decided that we were both going to help him with his film for his MIA A level and immerse him in the in-depth film knowledge of the Cleary-Pickering gang. Darren was going to help him with the direction of it all, because that was his kind of thing, and I was going to help Daniel with the script and that kind of malarkey. Darren was perfect for that kind of thing. Photography and filmmaking were all second nature to him, and being the script editor would have been perfect for me.

But now I feel like I have to call on an invisible Darren. I have to imagine what he would say. I have to kind of role-play him in my head to help me help Daniel.

I want Daniel to be able to come up with the best thing. It is obviously him doing it and all that, but I think Darren would have given him such great insight into film, shots and photography. I’m aware that’s now going to be missing for him, so I have to imagine what Darren would think, like a mad case.

That’s just me slabbering anyway.

I’m watching Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, which I saw described somewhere as “lesbian horror,” and I can see where that comes from. Sarah Paulson is playing Aileen Wuornos, the woman Charlize Theron played in Monster. It’s random, but at the same time it kind of fits.

She’s brilliant. I love Sarah Paulson. It’s a whole mad sort of story about women who have been badly treated and what comes out of that. So I can see why people think of it as lesbian horror.

It has definitely got the marks of a Ryan Murphy production. I used to joke with Darren that Ryan Murphy was probably related to me because I am related to Murphys. That’s the kind of tenuous rubbish connection I would make to Darren.

It holds no connection to reality. It was just a joke of mine, a pretence at having famous connections because someone might share a connection to my maiden name, like Dominic West’s mother being a Cleary, or because their surname has a Fermanagh connection, like Brian Cox having family connected to Fermanagh when I’m related to the Cox families.

Then there are the ones where my mother actually knew of a real connection. Shaun Williamson, aka Barry from EastEnders, is an actual cousin of mine. I am proud of my connections, both real and imaginary. That’s the thing about all these stupid jokes. Darren was the person I told them to.

Anyway, a show full of angry women is completely up my street, so I’m more than happy to watch this kind of thing.

Let’s hope the wine helps.