The end of 2002. Not the best year of my life as it turned out. Has to go down as one of the worst in fact. I was intending to spend a quiet evening in but it didn’t work out that way and I ended up at Mary Deaneys with my hosts and some of their family. We played pool, we danced, we drank too much and we cheered 2003 into being. I thought only fleetingly of you. I phoned friends from the bar but could not hear them over the noise.

I wonder where life will find me at the end of this New Year. I hope for a positive 12 months and promise myself that I will work hard, look after my cats, try to save, be kind to those around me and never forget to appreciate the people I love, and try to lead a good life. I will make sure that I repay all the kindness that others have shown me in whatever ways I can and concentrate on what is important. I shall try to learn to forgive the wrong that has been done to me and not lose sight of my God, nor truth and honesty. I will cry when I need to but I will also do my best to rebuild and repair and try not to dwell too much on those things I have lost. I will do my best to record 2003 in these pages for I feel that it will be an important year for me and a time for more lessons. Tomorrow signals a new beginning I hope. I will take that new beginning and try to do my best to learn and grow. I will try also to concentrate on humble dreams, read a lot of books and fill my mind with the wealth of words and stories that people are trying to tell me through them. I will go on but I will try to do more than that too. I am grateful to be alive and healthy and must use that life to the full.

It is now 2am. I have been reading ’A Bend in The Road’ and trying to take my mind on a bit of a holiday. Now it is time to sleep again. Tomorrow, if the weather has improved, I may head out to somewhere in Donegal just for the drive and another wander around. It is nice to be able to do these things even though I do them alone.

The beauty surrounding me in this place is something I will always love and will never tire of, and the remoteness of these places in winter is very appealing. I like to go and think, surrounded by empty spaces and natural beauty. Alone with my thoughts I can feel close to those who are far away and my mind brings dreams to vivid life as I wander along empty beaches, cliff top paths and windblown headlands. I like my time alone if I am honest, although I do miss a hand to hold my own, another to share in the wonder of discovery, the miracle of life and the contentment to be found in the embrace of love’s sweet comfort. Perhaps my share in those things is over now but I go on believing in them all the same, even though I no longer seek them for myself. I do at least feel that I am healing and although it is not something I can hurry along it is happening and I am grateful for that. I think a lot about where I will be writing this in a year’s time, but the place is less important than the point at which I find my heart and my character. I hope that by then they will be in a warmer condition.

I find myself at Moville and take a nice long walk along the shore path, the January breeze cold on my face, the sun warming the back of my neck. Across Lough Foyle, Binevenagh stands in stark relief against the crisp azure blue of the winter sky, its steep face rising majestically from the flood plains around McGilligan. You always loved that mountain. I ponder the brightness of the day and hope it is a precursor of my year ahead.

As I stroll along greeting fellow walkers as they pass by, I know why I have come here. I know there are still many ghosts that I have to face and the past is here for me to confront once again. The last time I visited this tranquil place I was in the company of you and two of my close family members. We ate ice creams, ‘pokes’, as we sat and looked out across the Lough and told our visitors why we loved this spot. How could I have known that just one short month later you would be gone from my life forever?

Looking back now it is still so hard to believe. But the more painful memory for me is one from just over a year ago. You had arrived safely back into my arms and we were stepping out together to face the new life that we had dreamed and planned for. We came here and walked this same path and marveled that we had made it to this point. How content I thought we both were as we held each other tight and shared the happiness of that dream I believed we had both dreamed and made come true for one another. But it was all just a lie, an illusion, because only one of us felt that love and happiness, and you allowed me to savor those moments and file them away for my old age, so close to my heart and so powerful in my mind. Why did you come here and taint this place where our dreams resided? Why did you have to damage everything in this way?

I stop and watch a heron as it sits perfectly still on a rock at the water’s edge and marvel at its beauty. Oystercatchers walk jerkily amidst the shallows and are pestered by jackdaws to give up the prizes they pull from the mud with their long orange beaks. The Lough is calm and gentle waves lap against the rocks while the streams, swollen by the recent rains, rush loud and frantic down from the hills in their quest to reach the ocean. The path is still peppered with ice patches from the cold of the previous night and puddles in the fields remain frozen solid despite the warmth of the sun. I am glad to be alive and able to walk through these wonders of creation. It balances the loneliness I feel here too, at least a little.

I have had a little time to take in the news of your illness and have thought of little else of course. I go on receiving scraps of news third or fourth hand and people tell me that you don’t seem to want support from any of us right now. I think I can understand that and am sure you are dealing with this in the best way for you.

I have felt guilty of course. However, I also know that I could have changed none of this and have been assured that you knew nothing of your condition until after you had left me. I fear for you. I have questioned all my thoughts and actions of course but I am as powerless to change anything as anyone else. I have recorded a lot of raw emotion in the past months, as it happened, as I felt the things I felt. I would be a coward if I was to destroy this letter or to edit out the bitterness and anger that I felt towards you on occasion because of what I know now. I can see how hard it has been for friends who you bound by promises and could not tell me. They carried such a burden and maybe the promise was too great a thing to ask of them, I don’t know. It’s one more thing I don’t understand. They still had to listen to all my problems and try to console me, they tried to get me to move on and leave you in the past where they told me you surely only existed now. How they managed to do it I’ll never know. I don’t think any of this demeans my grief in any way although it may put a different perspective on things for me from now on. My hurt and pain was and is still real and as powerful as I have recorded it.

I will be praying for your recovery as I can do little else it seems. I wish even more that things between us could have been different but the turns of the past are taken and I can only go on believing that the things that happen to us all in this life are for a reason even if they may make no sense to us at all.

The heart has gone out of my writing at the moment. I look at all the self-pity in my notes and wonder if I am really just whining about nothing. I don’t really believe that but it’s just another thing to ponder. I hope that if nothing else it is honest and regardless of your ill-health it makes no difference to the events as they were, the days as they dragged and the lonely hours I have had to get through alone. I know that you do not want me in your life anymore. I am so very sorry how things have turned out for you and wish of course that I could have been there for you, that you still wanted that from me but that’s not the way it has gone and that was your choice, not mine.

I have been tempted to destroy my words but I won’t. I have no reason to be ashamed of my life or my heart. There are lessons for me here and I know that this is a record of so much more too. It’s an honest piece of writing, a warts an’ all record that has to stand. Sure I look back at some of my comments and they bring stabs of guilt, feelings of stupidity and even a bitter laugh sometimes. But that’s life, that’s how it works, for us all and against us all. I never pretended to be a wise man and I guess most of this proves that I have no right to that claim just yet. Bits of the puzzle are always missing and we cannot know it all. As we are given another little piece day by day it’s easy to pretend you felt a certain way, easy to lie to yourself, simple to kid yourself and embellish your feelings rather than admit you are ever wrong just so that they sit comfortably with you. It doesn’t work that way if you have done what I have done here – there is no refuge in selective memory. It’s here in all its glory and I have to confront it, look it right in the eye and accept it as the truth, or at least my version of it. If that’s uncomfortable at times then that’s a big lesson for anyone and maybe if it’s hard that’s probably because it should be.

I have found myself going through a strange evolution. With the news of your illness having sunk in I seem to have found acceptance within myself remarkably quickly. I don’t know how. To think back a month, had you not left me, I would have been facing the news that you were possibly terminally ill and my world would have turned upside down in a stroke. The tragedy would have seemed so cruel and I would have been cursing the world, God, anyone or anything I could think of to blame. Is what has happened instead more cruel for either or both of us? Is it harder, is it fairer? It’s just life I guess, no matter how terribly sad and harsh. I don’t know if I should feel the way I do now but it’s almost as if I don’t know the person involved and in many ways I suppose I don’t. If it sounds dreadful to be thinking that way let’s look at it like this:-

Two months ago you left my life, disappeared from my world so suddenly and so completely it was almost as if you had died. No exaggeration. No matter what I did, what I said, I could not bring you back to me. The closest I got was a handful of one way conversations, which left me feeling that although I recognized the voice on the other end of the line I was talking to a person I had never met. I felt bereaved and I mourned your passing for you were lost to me forever and made it quite clear that that was what you wanted. I couldn’t accept it of course, that took a great deal of soul searching and time and tears. Those around me told me that I had to realize that my life as I had known it was over, that I had no choice but to accept the fact and to move on. I had to learn to live all over again and I began to do that, step by step, day by day.

So now, where else can I go and what else can I do? I cannot know if you will recover from your cancer, I can only pray that you do. It is not that I no longer care, God I do so much in a lot of ways but there is no denying that my feelings for you have changed; they have had to for me to be able to cope alone. You have left me standing in a place so far away from you, the tides of change you brought between us have cut me off from you so completely and I can only stand now on a foreign shore and reach out to you across a vast distance which I can never hope to cross. I don’t know how or why we came to be so far away from where I dreamed we would but we have and I can do nothing about that. The tragedy seems almost contrived but acceptance is my only real option, all that is left to me if I am to carry on and continue to recover from all this.

I have no more news of you or your progress. I haven’t heard your voice for so long and you seem to be becoming less and less a part of me and my life as the weeks roll by. I still think of you, I still miss the days of our lives together but I don’t know if I love you anymore and I find that so sad. What a waste it has all been and how I wish I had found a love as true as my own. Join the club of millions I suppose.

Tonight is quiet as I wait outside the church in Lisnagelvin. I duck into a store and buy a couple of Dolly Parton CD’s, just to pass some time really. It’s raining and windy this evening and the evening shoppers scurry to and fro like frightened rabbits caught in the glare of a car’s headlights. As ever, I am an observer, sitting on the periphery of life and watching the minutes tick relentlessly ever onward as I wonder what life may hold now.

I recall going into that same store after my return to Derry and wondering if I might bump into you. In the early aftermath I did that everywhere but now I know it is not going to happen and am left feeling unsure if that is good or bad. I turn away from my thoughts of you and the pull of home, never before in my thoughts, nags at my conscience. But home is here and also where the heart is and as surely where the heart was. I feel as though home is broken and scattered into many pieces that I cannot hope to fit together. I have to make peace with my drifting soul but cannot yet find the beginning to a way let alone a solution. I feel like getting very drunk.

Another day on the road, another rest in another cafe. I am the only customer and as I sit alone in the coffee shop I am conscious of just how these moments bring home the fact that you are no longer with me. No-one to talk to, no hand to reach for across the table, no request for a light, no offer of more tea from the pot. My own ‘pot of tea for one’ looking so small and ensuring that I cannot forget that I am by myself. With nothing to do I take out my keys and I realize that after all this time the key ring still holds two keys I have not used for so long. Two keys that I will never have need of again. They are the keys to our very first home and a place where I once believed that even the walls and floors absorbed and reflected back the strength of the love we had nurtured and shared. Now I am no longer even sure if that love existed except in my mind and the cold and lifeless metal of those two Yale keys stares back at me mocking and daring me to dwell on those past years. I do not wish to be reminded. I remove them from my key ring but strangely cannot bear to throw them outside into the snow. Instead I wander back to the parking lot. It is cold and I turn on the engine of the coach and the heaters too. I listen to Dolly sing ‘Not For Me’ and stare at nothing as the day turns grey outside......

I was kept pretty busy all day, taking a group to Rathmullan in between school runs. I always used to enjoy the drive – it was a place like so many others that I first visited with you and the memories flooded back throughout the day. I recall stopping at a bar called The Water’s Edge one time. We sat looking out across Lough Swilly to Inch Island, ate a light lunch and talked of our dream of moving to Derry one day. After our meal we wandered outside and poked around on the shoreline, something you always enjoyed doing at every opportunity it seemed. I remember that the bungalow just across the road was up for sale at the time and how we dreamed of living there ourselves, painting watercolours with our thoughts. As I passed by today it was a melancholy sight for me and as each mile went by I felt only that so much of our past lives was still suspended in the mist that cloaked the edge of the Lough. I have to wonder once more if any of those old and worn out dreams ever give you any pause for thought at all but something tells me you spend no time at all in the past, a past that means nothing to you.

Lessons, lessons lessons....

I have learned that my story is nothing out of the ordinary – hell, it happens to people every day. I knew that a long time ago but until it happens to you it’s just one of those things you don’t think too much about. It happens in a lot of different ways for a lot of different reasons. It has nothing to do with gender, age, money, sex, or so many of the other things so often cited as the reasons for the collapse of relationships. It’s universal; it’s the human condition in all its imperfect glory. In my case it’s like the words of yet another song – “same old story that everybody knows, one heart holding on and one letting go”. I know that there was nothing I could have done to change it.

Forgiveness comes hard to us all on occasion. You may have to dig real deep to find it. Sometimes, with some things, it may never arrive but if you can’t find it it’s just one more burden, one more load, that you will have to carry around with you for the rest of your days. That is the choice you have with forgiveness. I’m still making that choice and hoping that one day soon I can be man enough to be able to say I’ve made the right one.

Family. Well, it’s all been said before and maybe you believe it or maybe you don’t but there’s not much I can add other than to say I believe now, more than I ever have done before, that those of us lucky enough to have a solid family around us are blessed with one of life’s great gifts and will never be left to deal with life alone. Only families themselves can break families. Not having a family of my own may prove to be one of the greatest regrets of my life.

Friends, I was once told, are the family you pick for yourself and I think that’s a pretty fair summation. I understand now that real friends are far more important and rarer than I have ever fully realized. I have said it before but it is only now, after 39 years that I can say it with conviction. Pick wisely. I can add that I now regret some of the very good friends who I have let slip from my life without any good reason.

Love. In all its shapes and forms love is the power above all others that we carry inside us. It is something that we can give and if we are lucky something that we can receive. We can choose to give it or we can choose not to but we can only receive it through the choice of others. We can feel it but we cannot choose to feel it, only to recognize it within us when it comes along and if we are wise, to embrace it wholeheartedly for it is the greatest gift of all.

The love of children, the love of family, the love of friends, the love of lovers and the love of life itself are just some of the forms it takes. Learn how to show it for all you are worth because no regrets will come greater if you fail to do so when you are given the chance. Love is so often, pure chance. Learning to receive it will never come easy unless you first learn to recognize it – in yourself and in others.

Understand that by its very nature love is a risk. It can cure and it can kill, it can fill you with unbridled and incomparable joy and it can burn you so far down inside that the brand will be carried on your soul for as long as you live, and maybe beyond. The pain it can give can be the most searing you will ever feel and you cannot choose to turn that off any more than you can choose to lessen the beauty it can release into your heart and your spirit. From others and from within ourselves it comes uninvited. When it comes from others and you choose to let it in, know that you are powerless to make it stay, powerless to make it any different or longer lasting than it is destined to be and understand too that your own love may go on long after it has blown away in another like a leaf in the autumn breeze.

Yet in all its guises and with all its failings, life without love is no life at all.

Standing side by side with love is hope, without which the days that drag and the dreams that make us what we are, have no meaning. Hope is good and if you believe as I do that good things never die, you will forever carry hope within your heart.

Hope and love can never be stolen from you by anyone; unless you allow them to take it, or you allow yourself to lose one or both of them from your makeup. Share them with others who have lost sight of them. You don’t need to be wise, intelligent, rich, successful or anything other than willing.

I will never be able to explain most things – I have at least learned that much.

Author's Notes:

This is a rather compressed version of many months of writing and I think it is as good a place as any to let this story lie. As a way to fill in some of the blanks, I have added these footnotes.

During this period of my life I lost much but gained more without even realizing it was happening. I offered my love to someone else but it was never to be and on reflection I know now that it was for the best.

My first wife died in a hospice. I don't know if she was alone, if anyone held her hand, or the last words she spoke or those that were spoken to her. This is not an expression of regret, just fact.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003 and despite prompt treatment, aggressive surgery and therapy, her time in remission was brief. I never knew much about her short life after she left me and perhaps even less about her in the years we spent together.

The news of her passing was relayed to me by a member of her family over the telephone. By this time I had returned to England and was rebuilding my life. I had "met" my current wife and she dealt with the news and my feelings much as she has always done - with a grace and generosity of spirit like none I have ever encountered.

I was notified of the funeral, but it was a farewell that went off without my presence. It was hard to make that decision but I decided that my attendance would probably only taint the memories some would wish to hold onto. It was never cowardice or bitterness on my part. I hope that she would respect me for that at least. I felt that she had chosen her time to say goodbye to me and it was her wish to draw that very certain line all those months ago.

She took with her all the answers to those things many people  will never understand and which I once believed were so important. They are not. I learned that as I learned so many other things. The memories no longer haunt me. I was sent my life's greatest blessings after this remembered life became a part of my past.

There is much to this story that I will never make public. I feel that to do so would seem spiteful and mean spirited, no matter the truths those stories contain and this was not written for revenge. With forgiveness comes peace, with peace comes the ability to move on and open your eyes to endless possibilities and hopefully, to see those young green shoots of new life and love in others.

Before writing this I discussed it with my wife and she smiled and told me it was OK without having to say a word. That is my reward. I still find it hard to believe I earned it, but to question it is not my place.

I hope for any who read this letter, in whatever place you find yourself at the time, it will ignite or rekindle all that is good and great in your heart. If it does that, or even makes you believe in magic once again, it has done more than I could ever have wished for when I wrote that first line of so many, what seems like so long ago.

Summer 2009

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