How Writing Saved My Life

We visited the lavender fields of the Cotswolds in 2022

On the 26 April 2023 my wife died of ovarian cancer. I always get that out of the way first because to be honest everything else I have to say makes SO much more sense when you know that. We had been married for exactly 31 Years (26 April was our wedding anniversary) and I can honestly say that we had a fairy tale romance from the moment we realised we had to be together to that cold April morning. Something I had to deal with straight away was the realisation that "Happily ever after" had an expiration date. People don't tell you that, I Mean you kind of know and there is a clue in the traditional wedding vows (till death us do part and all that) but still it caught me off guard.

I had three children at home but at 20, 28 and 30 they were only really children in my head they do all have there own issues but they work together as a good team so that made things much easier. It also helped that they had been essentially looking after themselves for the last 6 months as my wife had got sicker and all my time was taken up with her and the hospital. Looking back as soon as we had the funeral, paperwork and all that stuff (and oh my there is so much stuff!) sorted, I ran. I needed to be up and doing from the moment I woke up, I wasn't back at work for 3 months by the time I'd had sick and annual leave for the year and I cannot begin to describe what a difference that made. I simply can't imagine how I would have been able to function if I'd been back at work, I imagine I would have been as gently as possible 'removed from post' as my work capability tanked. But, I wasn't living in that world and I found a safety valve that let the feelings flow in a way that meant I could begin to at least acknowledge them 'dealing with them' was completely impossible at this stage I just had to let them burst out and try to stay afloat.

That safety valve was poetry, 3days after Najma died I wrote a poem and posted it on Facebook - that was as much about making sure everyone had heard the news as anything else, I simply couldn't face anything more complicated in terms of a post or message and I hate talking on the phone at the best of times, and these were not the best of times. After posting that first poem I felt a strange calmness descend over me, almost like the universe or Najma, approved. People said nice things about the poem so a few days later I posted another one and began writing more often. I'm a very old fashioned gen-x-er so I write with a pen and a notebook and I suddenly realised that I'd written stuff, actually ever since I was a child I just hadn't thought about it. I even had a beautiful Moleskine notebook that my brother had bought me years ago with a few stories and prose poems and bits and pieces in it. The first Dated entry was 2010 so I think he must have bought it around 2000, and I'd used maybe 30 pages so I can't claim I was writing much in that time! That book became my security blanket - I took it everywhere with me and kept on adding to it at every opportunity. Mostly those opportunities were in coffee shops and cafes, at the time I just knew I needed to be out of the house, looking back coffee shops and cafes were 'our places' Najma and I would sneak out of the house whenever we could and just spend time together there usually on the pretext of planning or sorting something out but in reality we just cherished the time together.

As I wasn't back at work yet, and my youngest daughters A-Levels were done, we decided to book a holiday where we always went as a family - it felt like a nice thing to do, we could be together and away from everybody else for a few days. We had a lovely break, there were tears of course from all of us, but that was ok because we all knew why and we visited lots of the places we'd been with Najma so that we could remember and get that "First

Najma and I 1991...

Time" over with. We went for a walk from the back of the house one day and after about 45

minutes I suddenly recognised the place, we'd stumbled onto the 'Panorama Walk' above Barmouth. The kids had only been there once or twice before, they thought it was lovely

and Mommy would have loved it, but that was it. It took me a little time to tell them because I didn't want to be offloading onto them but also wanted them to understand. The first time Najma and I came to Barmouth (Whisper it... before we were married!) We did the Panorama Walk from the other end. I took a panoramic photo of the view and it became one of our special places in the world.

This is the view from the Panorama Walk at Barmouth as lovely today as it was in 1991 when Najma and I first saw it.

The evening after our walk I took myself for a drive down the estuary, found a lovely beach and wrote 'Sitting at Low Tide' . That was the first poem that was not directly addressing grief and I liked it enough that I felt I could maybe write the odd good poem.

This is the spot I found to write "Sitting at Low Tide"

Then we came back home and weirdly life just carried on. On bad days I would just get into the car and drive, somewhere, pretty much anywhere it didn't matter (although looking back I was definitely being drawn west - more on this in a later post...) I just had to be moving or I'd be a useless heap on the floor. Which of course is not to say I wasn't still a useless heap on the floor off and on the feelings were so big that I would often be completely overwhelmed by them and just have to sob them out. Fortunately this never happened in a place where I couldn't stop but to be honest I'm not sure I was altogether safe driving...

I took pictures of flowers everywhere I went, Najma loved flowers...

I did find lots of lovely new places and enjoyed them for what they were because 'Najma would have loved this...'. It was during this time that I started writing "Surviving The Ocean of Grief" the words carried some of the pain with them as they flew from my pen and I was gradually realising that this was a bona-fide coping strategy that had a lot of power for good in me.

Then my mother became ill while on holiday in Cornwall - like can't get off the bed in the caravan ill. Having spent the last year nursing my wife I knew I had the skill set required, the kids were ok with the idea so I drove down to Cornwall (once again surprised, it's a long way!). Najma and I had only been to Cornwall once to see the Eden Project and the Lost Gardens of Heligan (both of which are awesome and if you get the chance highly recommended!), so I was connecting more with my childhood than with Najma as I drove down, The last few family holidays I had as a child had been in Cornwall so I knew some of the places nearby. As it turned out mom's problem was skeletal and it just needed painkillers and a few days rest to get her to the point where she could travel. That meant I wasn't actually needed that much, so more exploring ! Especially by the sea.

Portloe Cornwall

The sea has always held an intense fascination for me, I remember on one memorable holiday to Minehead, when I was about 13, I found a place where I could sit and watch the waves roll in and out over the rocks, I was mesmerised ending up spending whole days just sitting and staring at the swirling crashing water. An uncharitable person would say I was lazing the day away doing nothing but looking back I can now see something else was going on.

As I pondered life with Najma dead I was beginning to realise that actually something else was desperately trying to poke it's way into my consciousness. I'd felt it before, usually around water, either one of the gorgeous Welsh slate streams I had explored on field trips and with the scouts or hand in hand with Najma gazing at the long slow sunset from Barmouth Beach. It was a strange urgency I couldn't identify but I knew that when I wrote it calmed down. A friend of ours, that I was messaging a lot, suggested that I should read "The Artists Way" by Julia Cameron and suddenly my view of the world underwent its first upheaval.

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To explain what happened I have to explain that I have always considered myself lazy. Catastrophically, irredeemably and hopelessly lazy. This was a source of such deep shame to me that I never even shared the label with Najma. After getting back from Cornwall I was talking to my youngest daughter about something and just casually mentioned how lazy I was not to have got something done. To my astonishment she laughed so hard she practically fell off her chair! "Lazy, you! I've never met anyone who stops less!" and I realised she was right. As I carried on with the book and began to use meditation to examine what it was actually like inside my head I realised that his had been a label that I'd actually clung onto - if I was lazy i was able to do stuff, I just couldn't be bothered right? It was letting me hide from the actual fear that was driving me which was the fear of being inadequate. So where had that come from? It was fair to say that most things I try I can do a passable job of so it wasn't a rational fear of actual incompetence it was something much deeper. My mind felt like grief was a huge bubble building inside that every so often had to be emptied but in the meantime the rest of me was pushed outwards into the light I continued with the meditation practice and one day realised where my fear had come from.

It was infant school. You see my birthday is in July so I was one of the youngest in my group when I started. At 4yrs 8 months more development has a big impact. I remember school being very boring because it was either really easy or completely incomprehensible. So I was either lazy or lost in class, and the label stuck that was why I was so insecure about the

Me aged about 4...

whole lazy/incompetent thing. This was genuinely massive, I realised I'd been putting myself down for my whole life - literally, this started when I was 4 and I was now 55 and still thinking the same way! I carried on with the book and that was when the second great revelation hit me, that kid who was staring out of the classroom window making stories with the clouds wasn't lazy, he was creative! Our school system is still not great at nurturing creativity in our children (there have been loads of reports on this over the years so I'm definitely not saying anything new) but back in the 70's and 80's when I was at school it was positively discouraged. So for a slightly dreamy boy who seemed to know the answers in class but had terrible trouble actually writing anything down and to be honest could barely read school was not a happy place. I remember being singled out a lot for not having finished (or sometimes started!) and hated the reading to the class lessons because I knew I couldn't do it. To be fair most of my teachers realised what was going on and did their best not to humiliate me - I was usually the last one to read so was often saved by the break or lunch bell. Looking back I realise I was creating stories, playing with the sound and rhythm of words, sometimes repeating a sentence over and over to myself because I liked the way it felt. But I would be doing all that in silence so all the world could see was a lazy boy staring out of the window and daydreaming.

At the age of 11 I suddenly learned to read, I remember it being as dramatic as that statement sounds . My grandma bought me one of those "Me Books" that you could get a childs name in and all their friends and pets - I loved it! and I was put into 'Remedial reading' with Mrs Carr which was a small group of students getting extra help with reading. I loved that too! I was part of a tiny group so got loads of attention and wanted to impress. Something happened in my brain, maybe a few new connections were made or pruned but within the space of 2 months (Sept to November) I could read. I began to read everything I could get my hands on from adventure stories like the famous five to encyclopedias and reference books. Suddenly the problem was I was reading too much - I would hide under the duvet with a torch and read into the small hours so that I was permanently sleep deprived (and therefore lazy...).

All of which brings me back to Julia Cameron's book, I realised that I had a creative side that had never really been allowed to see the light of day before and that was the vague urge that was picking at me. Writing wasn't just allowing me to release the pressure build up from the grief of losing Najma. It was also letting out a side of my personality that I had pinned down and resolutely ignored for decades (30 pages in 20 yrs...). One of the things that she advocates in the book is a practice called "The Morning Pages" essentially this is 3 sides of completely free writing done every day preferably first thing. it allows you to empty the noise from your head and just lay it all down on the page, lots of the understanding I described above came from the morning pages but they don't have to be about anything she actually says if you need to write 3 pages of "Bla Blah Blah" just do that because it's what's in your head right now.

I had realised I was a creative person who needed an outlet for his creativity and it looked like my poetry was going to be that outlet. I made a point of writing regularly and by July I'd got another 40 or so pages written on. I thought of writing as therapy and really went hard on that idea it worked usually expressing the grief in words made it feel calmer, more navigable and then the second upheaval happened Taran Eco Designs....