The wierdness of grief...

Weeping - what for? Well, for once, it’s not for my dead husband, or for my dead father, or for my recently dead daughter-in-law, or for my long-dead mother, or for the dead father of my child or for my tragically dead little niece… I am weeping for George Harrison. He was – is – so important in my life.

It’s a struggle to articulate how or why he will always be a key figure to me, since I never met him. I did write to his mother for several years, but that’s another story. George was really the first man I ever loved. I was fifteen at the time, and knew nothing about men, but somehow he came into my life representing everything I hadn’t known I wanted until then, and went on to shape who I was to become. He somehow influenced my choices in so many things: music, literature, sex, politics – everything. Years later, in therapy, I seemed to decide that George represented everything to me that my father didn’t: sensitivity, spirituality, a complex depth of feeling I could never access in dear old dad. Whether that’s true or total bunkum, I am who I am in many ways because of that young man I discovered in 1963. And I still miss him and I still grieve for him, even though he was never mine to grieve over. He had a beautiful wife, Olivia, to grieve over the real George. I’m left with the terrible sense of loss I feel about the passing of a fantasy.

Ludicrous, but true. A bit of me knows that all the many griefs I carry, about all the many people who seem to have left this earth and left me, are being distilled into a great big jug of George-shaped grief, but the knowledge doesn’t help. And the feeling is so intense that I decide not to even pretend to watch the rest of this stupid, shallow shit pumping out of the tv. Bobby Davro grins wackily at me from the screen. I turn him off and head for the piano, tears in my eyes.