It's time for a rambling blog, i mean rambling words, a walk through my mind rather than a walk through scenic landscapes, tho' i suppose a walk in a mind is not so dissimilar. I'm not quite sure how this blog will go tho' because the weather has not been good in my head of late, there've been heavy storms, torrential rain, thunderbolts and lightening, lots of grim grit-your-teeth grey and only occasional glimpses of sunshine. Is this a new stage of grief i wonder ? Is this how it goes ? Or is this not grief and just how my life is from now on ? Is this where i am stuck forever ? I hope not. 
So where do i start ? How do i manage this story ? Here i am, in a couple of weeks my daughter and grandchildren and i are going to visit the island of Gozo off Malta which is where Jon chose to move to about 5 years ago, he moved in the autumn of 2013. I booked this trip when i was deep in grief just before christmas, his family had still not told me the name of the cemetery he had been buried in and i was looking for something to hold on to, some concrete grasp on the reality of his death. They did tell me somewhat begrudgingly after two months of my asking. 
Now i don't really know Jon's family. I met his brother and sister in law and nephew twice. The first time, they seemed ok, Jon and i had only been together for four weeks so meeting his family felt a bit like being thrown in at the deep end but i liked him and went with it. I was surprised when his sister in law told me, in a very definitely private conversation, that "Hardy men don't have feelings". It felt peculiar, not warm, and certainly didn't seem to apply to the Hardy man i was getting to know at that point in time. That phrase has stuck with me ever since. It felt like an absolute, and that there was no negotiation with the statement.
Much later in 2016 when i begged his sister in law and, through her, his brother to help Jon after he had been hospitalised for the second time in less than a year. I said to them you need to help him or he will end up dead or disabled. They refused saying it was down to him, that they'd rung and he'd said he was fine, and that it was his choice.  It made me recall that phrase. I guess having no feelings allows you to wash your hands of another suffering. They told me to not get in contact with them again unless it was important i.e he was in hospital again. I asked them to tell me if he died. Credit due, they did do that. I did not get in contact with them again until after the sister in law told me of his death. 
Ugh why does all that matter ? I suppose it is back story. I am in a funny space, dreading going to Gozo if i'm honest, i don't know what i'm hoping to achieve by going. Initially it was a sense of closure, but closure is such a peculiar concept. It feels like locking in or locking down and i don't know that i want that. For sure i can't spend the rest of my life mourning Jon, but i have a feeling that the sadness i feel now is always going to be part of me. A something broken. Something that is always going to hurt, not least because our relationship wasn't all sunshine and roses. Because he did let me down big time and his family were nasty. Nasty in the way middle class people are nasty. Painfully polite and absolutely correct but clearly cutting dead. That's how it goes. I'm middle class i know those manners they are about control. Social exclusion and a certain kind of tone in this case piety that smells of contempt, a pulling of rank, these are ways in which dominance and disregard are administered. Anyone who has been on the end of it will know what i mean. It's a monkey game. 
So away from the loneliness of that, what do i hope to achieve from visiting Jon's grave and the island where he spent the last four years of his life ? A part of me is cursing myself for giving a damn. I mean, why ? He left me years ago, sure i loved him, and i knew him as a completely brilliant man, but i also knew him as a lousy jerk and he was nasty when he left. 
I have over the past week been filled with a grief that is ugly. I described it to a friend in text last night as foetid and globby and mean. It is related to his family who consistently feel like a secretly administered punch in the belly, a casual foot in the way as we pass "oh sorry", a huddled "you are not welcome" clique conversation, a curled lip, a stare through. Maybe they are lovely people, they have told me how lovely they are, it's just that it isn't how they feel to me. I could be wrong. In fact I am wrong on some level because i am sure they are lovely to those that they deem of worth. 
Anyways, well you see what i mean about globby, i keep coming back to Jon's family and really what does it matter. I suppose it matters because they broke in to our love affair. They broke in and took what they wanted and left me to sort out the pieces. And i dd it, i did it for six years. For six years he was dry, he wasn't always well, but he was dry. And being dry meant that he was able to sustain regular one to one unsupervised contact with his daughter, meant that he got a first class degree with the OU, meant that he could fulfil a long held dream of volunteering as a resident at Strumpshaw Fen, getting himself a chainsaw certificate whilst he was there. I think that period of time was the longest he was dry and what pisses me off quite frankly is that his family behave as if it happened by accident. They have told me how happy he was when he left me and arrived in Gozo but he began drinking not very long after we parted company and was surely drinking heavily enough to be hospitalised less than two years later. 
Maybe it is arrogant of me to think that, but while every other one of his partners that his family mention is described in sympathetic terms, i have never met with any real compassion and the strength of our relationship and what he achieved in the time we were together has never been acknowledged. That is a bitter feeling. It's an ego thing i guess but also a "fuck you for not helping him", a "fuck you for your self-satisfaction that  allows you to speak the way you do, think the way you do, act the way you do" ... oops, see, globby and mean. 
I wonder if i will "publish" this blog. Publish is the tab i click to make it go public. It's not the same as having a book published, a book that's been selected, and overseen by a publisher, an editor etc. Self publication is a much more degrading form of public exposure especially if the only censor is your self and the wits that you have the day you decide to put out there whatever it is that you have written or made. The bottom line is who cares what you think, need, want or feel ? 
That line is one of Jon's. He would say this to me repeatedly while we were together and he re-itterated it to me in one of the last emails he sent me in a slightly different form. While we were together if i was struggling with something he would say to me "no-one cares what you think, want, need or feel". Understand that is bad language from a lover. But by the same token turn it over and understand that if no-one cares what you think, want, need or feel it is a liberating statement because if no-one cares what you think, want, need or feel you have license to think, want, need or feel whatever you like. I think this where the self comes in to play, this is where we are guided by our self, our true self, our core being. Now that core being may well reference that which is outside of it's self, that reference is i guess the ability of the self to connect with that which is outside, to understand that it does not stand in isolation. But that capacity to interact with the outside as well as the inside is really born out of the life we have had. 
I've talked about this before in previous posts, the nature of being, of how experience teaches us our place in society, and how that place determines the possibilities available to us. Or maybe i've not talked exactly about that but words along those lines. The poor tend to stay poor and the rich tend to stay rich tho' there are exceptions they are not so common. It's like reading, or climbing trees, or dancing, or playing a musical instrument, or whatever, if you grow up in a culture where that is the norm you are more likely to find yourself engaged in those activities than if they are alien to your environment. 
Maybe now i will get on to an interesting bit of the blog. Recently i've been thinking about goodwill. We live in a world in which money is the big be-all and end-all god. But money in itself has no worth at all. A coin is  gesture of goodwill but it's worth is only the worth we give it. For a supposedly intelligent species it's a weird thing that we have given so much power to God-Money. I guess in a world that loves money, money can buy goodwill. I guess this is why the rich are so anxious about their wealth and holding on to it, it negates genuine goodwill. Let me return to goodwill. Goodwill that comes from the heart not the counting house. Real goodwill stems from inside of us. If our currency was goodwill then i think the playing field would level a little. Because goodwill has to be earned. Actually that's not quite right, because goodwill is also a gift that we inherit and that stems from the company we keep. But keeping it simple-ish as a running thread. There are some who are naturally benevolent and they are likely to hold greater sway in a world that leans towards goodwill. And there are some who are more inclined towards malevolence and they achieve order through ill will  Goodwill is nourishing. Ill will is not. Where am i going with this ? I don't know but i have an image of a dung beetle rolling a ball of dung. I guess that image is coming to me because goodwill feels like flow and ill will feels like interruption. And the picture of a beetle rolling it's ball successfully seems to represent a kind of harmonious beetle/dung/planet relationship. Maybe that's how goodwill as currency works. And maybe that's why ill will is so life and joy sapping. I don't know.
I've got in a muddle with this train of thought. Cut and edited it and made it no better so i'll stop. It's as far as it goes for now maybe, a random thought just splatted in the middle of a raging blog about Jon's family, raging because their manners feel hard and make me sad. I guess maybe the connection is goodwill. At how you spend goodwill, the goodwill gifted to you by another, is it re-invested in that other or spent elsewhere, is it received with thanks or demanded, taken, as a right. 
I was chatting on sunday to my son Richard about selfishness, the ideas we were playing with were not well formed enough for me to transcribe them to this blog but it was a conversation about the nature of selfishness and how it plays out and selfishness of individuals and individuals when they combine as couples or groups; and about the need to balance the inside and outside (that's my line); his thoughts were more interesting to me than mine because i already know mine and his were new to me and will surely shift my consciousness a little as i assimilate them into my being. I guess this is another example of goodwill in action, the sharing of thoughts and ideas which is a very close to source kind of goodwill. The sharing, the giving and also the receiving.
Hmm and i flick back to Jon's family again. They shared nothing with me in the time i was with Jon. And yet they took and took and took and after they had taken he would be tired and mean, and because i loved him i would try to fill him up, in the end it took it's toll on me, i got worn down and worn out, and when i was worn out he left taking the best of us and giving our life, the dreams we had made together to another woman. That was his prerogative, i forced myself to trust him right up until the last email he sent to me before we broke up, the break up email in fact. I didn't have to, i did it because i loved him. Trust is an act of massive goodwill. To put your trust in someone is a heart matter. Jon broke my trust, he took my heart and wasted it. Maybe i am going to Gozo to see if i can find a little of the heart he stole from me in 2013.  

Postscript - evening 27th Mar .. i'm adding this because i wrote this blog this morning and it's a weird blog but having made it public i want to leave it as it stands testament to feelings that i am struggling with. Hurt feelings. It may be that Jon's family did not realise that their manners came across as unkind or hurtful. My hurt was not allowed voice when i was with Jon .. "no one cares what you think, want, need or feel" ... and being always quashed they now seek outlet. I think this is often the way with pain that is unspoken or denied. It will eventually make itself felt one way or another.