Part Two ... because there is more, there is always more. I'm going to write about memories, again, history, personal and social, the who and how it is told. I imagine that Jon will slip into the story because although some people might say "oh shut up, get over yourself, he left you, he died, no one cares" their opinion has to be nothing to me because though he was surely and often a git i loved him and loving him changed me. I cannot deny the changes that happened to me and in me as a result of our knowing each other and so he stands as a markable, remarkable presence. 
So where to start. That so wasn't necessary, but i don't know how to write so there it is and there it is again. Where to start. I am currently reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I have just read The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, and Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo. Each one of these books are a historical account of a story. Wolf Hall tells a story that has been covered by many, a story that perhaps most English people over the age of seven have an inkling about, and a viewpoint or opinion even now, nearly five hundred years on. Private Peaceful is one of those books that makes you weep for all the men and women killed for living in an unjust time.  Michael Morpurgo, the author, addresses the injustice of 290 British and Commonwealth soldiers killed for desertion in the first world war with his usual grace and gift for engaging with heart, his own i think and his readers. Private Peaceful is a story told by one man, about his life and his brother's life and all that touched them. It's a story about a single death but also the life that led to that death. And living after death i suppose too. It's about how lives link and connect. Because we are linked. We are linked even if we don't want to be, sometimes the links we don't want are the hardest to break. The Sense of an Ending addresses human connection on a very personal historical level. It's a quick read but every word is meat. The story could be anybody's story. If we get to be old the likelihood is that somewhere along the lines we will have done something that perhaps at the time seemed like little but later turns out to have been a wrong. I have wrongs sewn into my seams. I imagine most of my friends and loved ones do too. 
What is it that i'm trying to say by mentioning my recent reading matter. I'm mentioning my recent reading matter because Wolf Hall in particular is making me think about how and who tells a story, or history. And because Britain is my country, and we are in a spot of trouble at the moment, and having a historical moment, and it's causing strife and disorder in the highest court of the land, i guess parliament is the highest court unless you count the Queen. Wolf Hall is also about Britain at a time of upheaval, and to me the story resonates with the history being made today. Maybe it is always like that to a greater or lesser extent. 
Wolf Hall, the book, is also set in my history, my history with Jon. How can something like a book be part of relationship story, i guess in much the same way as anything else if connection was made over a book then the book stands as a open door leading back to that connection. 
Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize in 2009 Hilary Mantel, the author, seemed to come from nowhere though in fact she had been a working author for years just not very well known except among her peers. I remember Jon reading it and talking to me about it, sat on the sofa in his living room, my reading it now flashes back to the time, i wish that i'd read it with him but books come when they are meant to and back then i was battling demons on all sides, work, college, my family and his, and all my energy was engaged in not giving in to feeling worthless and worth less than worthless. I am reading it now and thinking about him and that's nice but also quite sad. He's here reading it with me, as is my son, who read it last year, and who is thankfully still living and with whom i can talk to about it. Not talk to a past him but a present him, a now him. 
That's one of the big "fuck-off"s with death, i think. Not being able to hold another conversation except in your head, never to see the other person, to laugh with them, or touch them is really painful. I remember Jon talking to me about his mother after she died. He said that after she died she was easier to get on with because he didn't have to deal with her bad bits and could just relate to the best of her. I didn't know her. I gathered quite early that she and his sister-in-law had been at odds. And that her family rep (Jon, his brother and his brother's wife) was as someone difficult and unpleasant. But that at her funeral someone else had said to him how kind she was. I did not know her so my judgement of her is of no worth, she may or may not have been as described, she may have had reasons to be as she was described. Because people often do and may not know or want to acknowledge why they are as they are. 
Reading Wolf Hall has been mind-opening. Who can fail to be intrigued by that period off history ? It has legend written all over it and creative types have played with the storylines and characters over and over again. It is to me to read about Thomas More who wrote Utopia, to know him as a not-nice character, a torturer, a religious zealot, a mean husband, the image i'd had of him was as a gentle family man, someone almost saintly, this had, in the main, come from a 1970's film i have seen more than once. How easy it is to fall in with a narrative if it is the only source drawn from. 
This has been some of the problem with Brexit. Maybe any conflict where sides have arisen. I guess all the time there's a need to look more than one way if wanting a rounded understanding is wanted.  If wanting a rounded understanding is needed. If I see only my own point of view as valid then all i can do is dance on the spot and hope that enough people will dance on a spot close to me so that i feel myself not too isolated. Alternatively if i am prepared to see, to feel, to engage with other people's thoughts, needs, feelings then i have opportunity to step out of my spot and make my dance a more moving thing. My opening out to others creates space for interaction that holding myself tight shut like a shellfish on a rock will never do.
Because i don't think any one person can always be right. Most of us will have come up against someone who believes themselves always right. But, really ? Really ? I don't know how to deal with people who are never wrong. I suppose that the drip dripping of time will wear them down in the end but whew in the meantimes saint's preserve me from having to spend too much time with those who are are without fault. 
Er hum, where am i going ? History. Memories. Well a lot of my blogging has been about memories this past year and i have a project idea building at the back of my brain about memory, same as a million other artists, authors, play-writes, poets, film makers and all the others with a calling to the arts. But memories are a very personal form of history. And yet even as we write and read back to ourselves our own histories, they trip and fall and become imperfect. When i wrote a few weeks  ago about the church at Wenhaston and the devil weighing the souls, that was my memory, but returning a week after i saw that my memory had missed St Michael, and that he was the one doing the weighing and the devil very close by was just looking on waiting for the wicked to be weighed and passed on to him. And before that i spoke about my hair being green when i was pregnant and straight after i remembered that it was probably pink and blue and bleached a good white blonde and the green had been cut off just before i got pregnant.
Recognising the holes in my own memory make losing Jon feel harder because i know that the time we spent together is passing into kodachrome dream-like images, images that replay and feel real but also not real. I don't know how better to describe the feeling. It's hard to accept someone i love being so physically cinematic, so physically distant, but that is how it is for me now. It hurts, i don't want a sugar coated Jon, i want him good and bad, as i always wanted him. So, and there's that "so" again,   i find him in books, and fields, and hedgerows, and, and, and: and what i find is feeling, the feeling of him, it's not him, but it's him as i knew him, sometimes brilliant and sometimes a bastard. And the bastard is not such good company but i did learn a lot from the bastard in him just as learned a lot from his brilliance. 
Do I close there ? I struggle with endings. Some people are good at them, are masters, but i don't know how to close, for me there is always an after. Perhaps it is that sense of one thing leading to another and another and tho' threads drop and fall away new threads pick up the stream and go forward. Now I am walking the coast path very very slowly and maybe I'll blog about that next and put in a picture or two to lighten my blog. But it's life isn't it, it keeps going.
In a few weeks time Britain will or won't be a part of the EU but life will go on and the body of our country will have moved little. What the politicians are fighting over is a lot about money, i think, and power. Some care about the human cost and some don't. And i'll give my vote to those who do. And some care about planetary cost and some don't, and similarly i'll give my vote, my coat, to those who do. And that in the end is all the little man/woman/child can do is give their coat of arms to the causes they feel most strongly for, whether in their personal or political life. And there perhaps i'll end because it's as good a place as any.