Ten Eight

I recently watched After Life. Like all things by Ricky Gervais, it's a little uneven, but it was in parts touching. One thing Gervais is good at is pointing at things and saying, Look what this is. Not really insightful but he does evoke recognition.

The main character's grief was not real -- didn't ever really feel real -- but what Gervais got right was the way grief can rob you of something intangible. I have felt it and that was why the show had meaning for me.

It doesn't make any difference that what you grieve isn't real. In the same way that my sisters make up versions of my mum that never really existed, I grieve for a wife I never really had. I have grieved for how she felt rather than how she was.

Sometimes I think about how we should be watching our child grow together, and how much giving that up ought to have hurt. But it didn't hurt her. It broke me in two but left her unmoved.  I don't know how you decide that. I still can't reconcile any of it; cannot really accept who she is.

It feels so important to me to love people that I cannot undersand someone who doesn't. Can't. Never will. I remember vividly her telling me that she had never felt love, and I didn't take that as a warning.

I was vain enough to think I was different. Now I know I'm not.

And when I say I'm not, it's like something in me has been extinguished. My belief in my own worth went out like a pilot light in a hurricane. I feel like my whole self drained away, down the plughole, and I wasn't able to find anything to rebuild it with.

I hoped that given time, I would recover. But maybe that would have needed stability that I just don't have. Maybe I have to accept that the stability is not just a thing others give me -- not just a product of a good job and a girlfriend or whatever I imagined it might have been. It's a thing inside yourself.

***

The worst thing is that it made me feel hollowed out and I couldn't refill myself. So I feel I have nothing to offer. I feel I deserve it. Where once I would have believed I was a stained glass window and pieces of a particular colour were broken and then another and then another, now I just think I'm the same grimy uncared-for glass it seems everyone sees.

In After Life, Ricky Gervais' character is perceived by everyone around him as special. But he isn't. He's not kind, not witty, not willing to be a good talker. There's no reason that people should see him that way but Gervais writes it like that. He responds to other people in the end, proving their belief in him well founded. Or well founded ish, let's say. There is no twist. It ends happily. Gervais is not a particularly good storyteller so it's ultimately predictable that he'll have a happy ending.

Maybe I will. Maybe I need to recover and stop lying to myself that I have recovered first. But I don't know how I can. I don't know how you fill yourself if you've been drained away like so much dirty dishwater.

posted by Dr Zen @ 3:36 pm