And I Only

Annie Jones Hattie

Description

Saturday, 7th October, 2017 was the Day of the Shattering. Sixteen months on from the death of my only child by his own hand, and as my husband of 34 years lay gravely ill in hospital, my life as I knew it was revealed as a sham. Everything I knew about my husband, our marriage, our lives disintegrated into unreality and illusion. My identity as an intelligent, perceptive woman became fragmented - so who was I?And I Only is a combination of memoir, fantasy, personal essay and self-help, with an accent on mindfulness in daily life. It explores the nature of experience and truth, knowledge and belief, reality and illusion and forgiveness and revenge, using humour to punctuate the darkness and disintegration of Hattie's life. She draws upon her knowledge of history, folklore, mythology and archetypal imagery as she navigates the aftermath of the death of her only child by his own hand and the unmasking of her dying husband's secret life. We all tell ourselves stories about our lives, and different people may have competing and conflicting versions of reality. Whose reality is real? How do we know who we are? And I Only charts Hattie's struggles with these questions as she remembers that the only choice she has lies in how she responds to all that has happened. Moment by moment, she must find the resilience to rebuild her shattered life.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Brown Dog Books
• Date de parution: 07 juillet 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839523205
• Langue: English

Extrait

And I Only

First published 2021
Copyright © Hattie Annie Jones 2021
The right of Hattie Annie Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Published under licence by Brown Dog Books and
The Self-Publishing Partnership Ltd, 10b Greenway Farm, Bath Rd,
Wick, nr. Bath BS30 5RL

www.selfpublishingpartnership.co.uk
ISBN printed book: 978-1-83952-319-9
ISBN e-book: 978-1-83952-320-5
Cover design by Kevin Rylands
Internal design by Andrew Easton
Printed and bound in the UK
This book is printed on FSC certified paper
For Matthew
1984 to 2016
with love
and for The Helpers
‘And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.’
Job 1:15
‘O my son Absalom, my son, my son! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.’
2 Samuel: 18:33
‘The grief we carry is part of the grief of the world. Hold it gently. Let it be honoured. You do not have to keep it in any more. You can let it go into the heart of compassion. You can weep.’
Jack Kornfield: A Meditation on Compassion www.jackkornfield.com/meditation.grief
Contents
Introduction: Beware and Be Aware!
1:   My Life is as I Know it to Be
2:   Hic Sunt Dracones: ‘Here Be Dragons’
3:   The Key to Control
4:   ‘There’s No Smoke…’
5:   Am I a Real Polar Bear?
6:   The Sinking of the Titanic (1)
Intermission
7:   Thoughts and Feelings Are Thoughts and Feelings…
8:   On the Importance of Names
Hiatus
9:   Send Out the Clowns?
10: The Sinking of the Titanic (2)
11: Beam Me Up, Scotty…
12: ‘She Must Have Known SOMETHING…’
13: Help!
14: Why Didn’t I Notice? Life Gets in the Way
15: ‘There’s No Smoke Without Fire…’ (2)
16: ‘There’s No Smoke Without Fire…’ (3)
17: Don’t Shoot the Messenger…
18: It’s Life, Jim, but Not as We Know It…
Hiatus (2)
19: ‘I Have a Dark Side…’
20: Don’t You Mamaguy Me…!
Note to Reader
21: ‘I Have a Dark Side…’ (continued)
22: The Dragons are Coming…
23: ‘I Have a Dark Side’ (Revisited)
A Full Stop…
24: September: Memories
25: Back To the Dark Side – Finally!
26: I’ll Get it Right This Time – I’m Going to Meet the Dragons
Hiatus: How Am I?
27: Maybe We aren’t Completely Finished with My Dark Side…
28: Pause; Rewind
29: Double, Double…
30: Lollipop Linda and Friend Dick
31: Friend Dick
Interlude
32: Where’s the Rice Pudding?
33: Conversations with Lovely Donald
34: Hoodwinked Hattie
35: Sitting with Dragons
36: Coda: And I Only am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee…
Acknowledgements
Introduction:
BEWARE AND BE AWARE
This is a weird book, rooted in strangeness. It isn’t fiction – but it isn’t quite non-fiction, either. It isn’t fantasy, despite the elements of fantasy you will find if you read on. It isn’t a romance or a history, or a tale of comedy or tragedy – though both comedy and tragedy are present within it. It might be a sort of, kind of memoir – but it isn’t a conventional memoir and it lacks a clear chronology. It isn’t ‘chick lit’ or ‘misery lit’, and it most definitely isn’t a tale of triumph over adversity. I talk about adversity, I suppose, but there isn’t any triumph. At best it is a story of survival.
When I was sixty-six, and already chronically ill with a neurological disorder, everything I knew about myself, my husband, our marriage, our family and our life was suddenly shattered. This happened some sixteen months after our son, my only child, had ended his own life. The worst that can happen had already happened. And here I meet the inadequacy of words. Alongside my grief for my son, I saw all that I knew of my life disappear over an event horizon and into a black hole. It all disappeared into non-reality, nothingness, along with most of my memories of my husband and our life together. Nothing was as it had seemed. People were transformed from people I’d known into something unrecognisable and dark. I was not who I’d believed myself to be. So who am I?
I belong to a reading group that meets monthly to discuss our chosen books. I remember a fellow member saying to me that she’d enjoyed a particular book we’d read because it had a beginning, a middle and an end, and a clear narrative arc. She probably won’t like my book, then, because it has none of these things.
I begin where I begin because I have to begin somewhere, and the moment a few minutes before the Shattering feels to me like the beginning.
I end where I end, in a moment of resolution, because that seems like a good place to end. And I do experience those moments of resolution, of acceptance, but, of course, I don’t live there all the time. Grief, for me, is tidal, though it flows in and out less predictably than the ocean. A wave of grief and loss and even despair can overwhelm me at any moment, and I have learned not to struggle. I surrender to the wave when it engulfs me, and trust that it will ultimately carry me back to the shore and back to a feeling of acceptance.
This is a cycle that will end only with my own death, and, since I don’t think I’ll be doing much communicating after that (though who knows?), I want to communicate what can be communicated of my experience whilst I’m still here to do it.
The middle of my weird book jumps in time and space from here to there and back again in ways that might leave you feeling confused, perhaps unrooted or untethered, unclear about what exactly happened and the sequence of events. It might leave you wondering about the nature of reality and how we know what is real and what isn’t. I know this isn’t a comfortable feeling – trust me, I really do know – but I hope that you do feel untethered, because that feeling is what I am trying to communicate, to show you. I became untethered. Reality, for me, became unreality, ceased to exist, went out. It became unknowable beyond my own moment-by-moment experience. Memories shimmered and disappeared into the black hole. I lost the threads that connected me to my life. Even now, two years on, I feel myself shimmering in and out of existence. And I had no maps or road signs or beacons or guide ropes to help me navigate my way towards a new reality. I had to make a path through for myself, with many missteps, falls, injuries and wrong turnings along the way. I have had to remind myself to breathe many times, to feel the sensation of my foot on the ground, connecting me to this moment – which is, in fact, all there is to hold on to. I move forward slowly and with caution, step by step, second by second.
And why is any of this of interest to you? Well, maybe it isn’t, and so you can return the book to the library or take it to the charity shop. Maybe it’s arrogant to think that anyone will be interested in the events and emotions of my life – I’ve thought about this a lot. But as everyone experiences loss, grief, betrayal and suffering at some point, perhaps there is some value in sharing my experiences and what has helped me to survive?
I offer this weird book because I found strength and encouragement in stories and poems and in the understanding that I am not alone. Everything that happens to me has happened to other people, in life and in fiction, and will happen again in the future. I am part of a web of connectedness. Loss, and grief, and betrayal are common human experiences, and I hope that my weird book might have within it something that could be of use to someone else. I hope it has something to offer, even if you are not facing those issues right at this moment. Writing the weird book has helped guide me through the recent past in relative safety – at least I am not whimpering in the corner, as I might have been. Perhaps that makes it an interesting story despite its weirdness? But you, not I, must be the judge of that.
My colleague in the reading group – the one who likes a clear narrative arc – used to become quite impatient and dismissive when the book we were reading contained elements of fantasy or dreams or flashbacks. She would probably really hate my book, I think, because it contains all of these. Why use imagery to express emotional states when I could just say ‘I feel sad’ or angry or whatever? But I prefer to try to show you the feeling, rather than tell you about it. Telling rather than showing can create a distance from the feeling rather than giving you the immediacy of it. The untethered space traveller floating to his death evokes, for me at least, my feelings in the aftermath of the Shattering far more powerfully than any description. I was lost in the deepest darkness and being drawn further and further from safety and from everything I knew. I thought I might be dying. Perhaps I hoped I might be dying?
Although my book lacks a clear chronology and leaves unanswered questions, although it is told largely through metaphor rather than being straightforwardly factual, although the imagery may seem strange at times, and although the book may leave you feeling a little lost and untethered, I hope that as you read on, it will make its own kind of sense for you.
I am not going to explain everything – there is much I don’t know and life does not always make sense. There are parts of the book where I want you to find your own meaning, though I will explain a little as we go along about what the various images have meant to me.
If we travel together for a few miles, then I am grateful for your company. If, like the woman from my reading group, you prefer to take a different path, then take it with my best wishes for your journey. May you find your own dragons in your own way and in your own time. They will be there when you need them.
Love, Hattie x
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MY LIFE IS AS I KNOW IT TO BE.
My life is as