I don't know if blogging helps but it's still night and I'm awake and I don't know how to fill the hours till dawn. I am still reeling, still everyday in tears, still not decided if I want to live still. Maybe that seems melodramatic, overblown, crazy, but there's a significant part of me that just wants to die too. It's not a suicidal feeling, I've been there, just a not wanting to live. I have to keep pointing my face towards my children and my grandchildren to remind myself why I am here and that I have people here to whom my heart belongs. But Jon has taken a significant part with him into the land of the dead. 
You might ask why I loved Jon so much, why when he was surely and often emotionally abusive. There is a reason. There is a reason why. When I was 18 I was seriously sexually violated by my then-boyfriend, the act left me damaged both physically and emotionally. Jon was the only man, the only person, to ever respond, without a pause, with kindness and care when I told him very early in our knowing each other, just weeks in. It was at that point that I gave him my heart. Always when he did me wrong I would remember that he was that action. He lit a candle in a darkness that had kept me trapped for over twenty years. 
Jon and I held each other from 2007-2013. We broke up in 2012, but continued to see each other and sleep with each other until the summer of 2013 just after I graduated. When he first spoke to me of moving to Gozo he said it would be a new start for us but it wasn't to be. Whether he meant it when he said it or if it was a lie to soften the blow that he was leaving me I'll never know. He left. I was devastated and poured myself into making a go of being a working artist (what does that mean). I do not know if I have done that. I love what I do but his absence made, and makes, everything a little less, makes all my wins feel empty.
When he left we mailed a bit, me more than him, he was gone. I gather he was happy at first but started to drink again during the time we lost touch. He talked a bit about his drinking when we were together. Drinkers drink.  
In 2015 we got back in touch. I was working on the piece Bigod's Way 2 which was a celebration of our early days, our two year honeymoon period. And simultaneously I was acting as a volunteer arts facilitator with a  recovery group in Thetford. One day while I was in Thetford I was broken into and burgled. Oddly he was one of the first people I texted, and then later emailed. I didn't expect a response. But he got back to me with the words "I care, I read your email and I care" .. to understand the meaning of those words you need to understand that Jon was not an effusive man, he was not prone to showing his feelings, so a declaration of care was pretty momentous. 
From there we began a two year email correspondence. We'd chit chat and pass songs and quotes and news-stories to each other, and books and birds and beaches, pretty much every day. Sometimes we would have a spat and lay off for a week or so but always we'd come back, growling, but later declaring our affection. I was pretty sure that people would think I shouldn't be emailing but I followed my heart and I'm glad I did. Those two years are some balm to the pain I am feeling now. 
But what now. He is buried already. Nearly two weeks dead* and I am one week on from being told of his death. 
I am alone with my memories. I did not know his family and our relationship was essentially him and I so I've no-one to say "do you remember?" to verify our communion, or to celebrate his life with. Maybe that is how it is. That deep and heavy, dark and painful loneliness that is the counterbalance to all the joy that life brings. No one understands any one else, people make an attempt to a greater or lesser extent but in the end we are not that other and can not know that other. Stripped to the bone now as I am by Jon's death. I am more aware than ever of my flawed being, my unimportance and irrelevance and the unimportance and irrelevance of all our lives in the grand scheme of things. 
Apologies for speaking to my page. I long for witness in my sadness as the witness to my once-upon-a-time joy is dead.

Correction *nearly 3 weeks dead