What do you do when someone you love dies ? Not someone you are fond of or someone you have an affection for, but someone you love, someone whose being resides in your heart ? When Jon died I asked my daughter this because I knew that she knew, she replied "you live, you live mum" ...
My experience of grief is only one experience of grief. My grief for Jon who I loved. It is different to the grief that other women who loved him will be experiencing because their grief is their relationship, the man he was with them, the woman they were with him, the chemistry between them that made them them. 
The interaction between two is always very slightly different, even day to day between the same two, one and an other is another recipe. Even if one of the two is a thing like a place or an icon. The individual within the story is the difference. 
Yesterday I watched a film about a little boy who died of Meningitis. A dad talking about his young son dying. A film of him playing with his little brother, performing and playing. It is an agonising watch. I have not experienced the death of a child. The pain is unimaginable. It stops me in my tracks, there is no breath. I see those who are having to carry their loss from a point of innocence, not knowing, of sympathetic pain, of understanding that is limited by my lack of experience, please god may that always be my good fortune. 
Experience is the teacher. I have my experience and you have yours. I know what I know and you know what you know. If we allow ourselves to meet with open hearts we may find that we have common ground and through that common ground we may be able to share our experiences and learn from each other how it is to be another. 
This is what has happened to me since Jon died. I was felled by his death, my blog is testament to that. And i have a stack of notebooks, and sketch notes in 2d &3d, and close friends who have held my space and listened when i have felt shot down, who have re-lit my light when i have been in darkness. 
My grief is not comparable to the grief some one feels when their child, their baby, dies. It stems from a different relationship, so how could it be ? But I think grief has meeting places, the loneliness seems to be common ground, sadness is too mild a word to describe grief, but it is in the mix a kind of whole sadness maybe, I can't explain this feeling it has no words in me, it is akin to love but love in darkness maybe rather than light, those who know what I mean maybe will let me know. 
I have felt since Jon died that I am occupying a completely different world. And this too seems to be a shared connection. The world itself has not changed, it carries on regardless as if nothing has happened, day breaks and night falls, relentlessly marking the time between the last point of contact and the end. Does no-one know that this great person once lived and now doesn't ? But it is only the few who love a body whose world has changed, the rest of the world carries on oblivious to the pain that those who are grieving are coping with day in day out. And all the videos and blogs and memes and poems seem to say this that grief is not a finite thing it is there and sometimes it is less pressing and sometimes more. 
Last week I decided to open the email that Jon sent me just after Easter in 2017. We had had an argument. His emails had become less frequent and more offhand and I knew he had started drinking again if he had ever really given up, he said he was drinking daily as a habit because I had asked him what he did with his days and he had told me that he'd have a couple of drinks mid morning before returning home in the afternoon. At Easter I asked if he was seeing someone, and if so i said i should back off, because I was not sure if the days when his emails didn't come were days when he was with someone or days when he was blacking out, and if he was blacking out that wasn't a good thing. He replied rudely, I replied rudely, we exchanged a vicious spat of words. I did not like the way he talked about the woman he was seeing. I decided on Easter Sunday that year that I had to let go so that the woman he was with had a chance to bring out the best in him without the jealousy of an abandoned ex creating more difficulties. The email i opened last week did not suggest he was giving her his best but it may be that he was being a better man with her than the person he was in the email, i hope so. 
When I opened my folder of Jon emails and scrolled back to Easter '17 I found a time-bomb. An unopened email he had sent in August '17 that I had erased from my memory. I believe i blogged (about a year ago i think) about how at this time I had repeatedly woken to loud banging on my door in the small hours of the night that my first thought on waking, or maybe still in dream, would be "it's Jon" but then i'd know it was not real, that he was not knocking on my door, that it was only a dream, that it was not Jon. But this unopened email spoke of his missing me, of how he woke thinking of me, wondering if I was married to, or "besmitten" with, someone else, asking me to email. I didn't see it. I don't know how it got in my Jon folder. I don't know how I would have responded if I had seen it then. I felt betrayed. I was furious and heartbroken. Furious and heartbroken is a very odd combination of feelings. It hurts now, knowing that he like me was wishing we were still in contact at that time.
One of the things about emails and letters and texts is that we don't know if the other person has received them. When I accidentally sent an email to Jon in September giving us our last conversation, and me now two still unopened mails, he will have assumed that i had read his August email. I hadn't. Would it have changed the way we communicated then i think so, tho' how i do not know. Embodied contact allows us a greater depth of feeling because we are witness to movement and shape, smell, sound, space, timing, and so much more, all the subtle signals that our animal bodies recognise without even knowing, the light in someone's eyes, the curve of someone's smile, the inclination of bodies, the touch and how the touch is received. I felt, and still feel, sure that if Jon and I could have met for a coffee we would have met as old friends who loved each other still.
A certain generation (type) of people may remember a computer game called The Sims. The Sims was a model for life, a way of telling people-stories, soap opera lives were lived out on a screen under the hands and in the mind of the game player. Births, deaths, marriages, work, love, money, learning, friendships were all there guided by a god-like handler. The first version of the game was quite manageable especially after you got the cheat that gave you unlimited finances. Unlimited finances make a difference to wellbeing it seems, funny that. As the game evolved with add ons and new versions and real time relationships it became more tricky. Want to get in touch with that friend, in the first game people didn't age with you but later they did, their friendship didn't just diminish if you accidentally dropped contact because you were busy building your house, or making out with your new lover, they aged with you, some of them died. I'm aware that The Sims is something my sons and I would recognise as a formative experience but it's not a catch all. My point is really that relationships need nurture and the easiest way to nurture a relationship is to give it time and space and love and light just like anything you want to grow to flower. A plant may flower without attention but like The Little Prince's rose that flower becomes your flower when you give it your attention. 
I wanted to blog today because this past week has been a funny one for me. Opening Jon's Easter 2017 email on the two year anniversary was a challenge i had met in my mind before I did it. Discovering the one I did not know about was a shock. It was kind of loving, so kind of nice, but it made me cry a lot. Last year at Easter his daughter's mother wrote to me saying they had letters I'd written to him and would I like her to send them to me (I said yes but I have yet to receive them). That made me cry too.
Sometimes when a feeling is difficult it is best to meet it, chances are it won't go away on it's own and will keep nagging and nudging until it is met so I decided I needed to go back to Bungay and to tread some of the soul paths Jon and I wore together in the years we were lovers. 
My relationship to Bungay did not begin with Jon. I was friends with a girl from school and I remember staying with her for a weekend and bicycling around the town. And later, when I was very nearly full term with my first baby, her father and I stayed the night with a friend of his in the old pit where he lived in a caravan with a goat and his dog and some chickens. Because I was only 20 and her father just 21 the friend seemed fantastically old, I suspect he was probably mid thirties or fortyish, but people in their thirties and forties look old to the young i think tho' they may not feel it. The caravan smelt of pee and I was very keen not to have my baby there so when the bus failed to turn up we walked and hitched back to Norwich. I think we walked about 9 of the miles and I suspect that my daughter's determined nature was in part forged by that experience. 
Since Jon and I parted company I re-met Bungay through the sculpture trail at close-by Earsham where/when I met my friend Andy who lives there. But Jon is a big part of my relationship to the place. So if I need to feel really close to him it's where I go. I think this is my third trip since he died and each trip has been for a specific reason, a need to connect with that which was best in us, to the time and place where we were most solid, where i feel/felt closest to him. Time passes, I cannot undo Jon's death. All I can do for peace of mind is endeavour to accept and understand what is. That's not easy. And as I said at the beginning of this blog, my grief isn't comparable to anyone else's because it is mine and something only I know. Someone who has lost a child or a sibling or a parent or a husband/wife may wonder why I am bleating on about Jon but their wonder is not really my business because grief just is, no-one in their right mind would ask for grief if they know how grief feels because it's like a stain that can not be over-painted, the pain of the loss is forever, i think. I'm sorry if that is un-comforting. But I am wondering if the pain i feel for Jon, because of his absence, is how he maintains presence in my life and reminds me of the pleasure we shared.