For some reason the song, 'Shine on you crazy diamond,' is playing in my head...

I have long been fascinated by the threads of life, happenstance, choice, random and decision that keep people linked throughout time and space.  Somehow the bond seems able to traverse earthly constraints and distances like continents or time.   It is something that I attempt to explain to others but invariably I fail because I begin to be perceived as one of those.  Those, vary, from Jesus freak to someone away with the fairies.  My bipolar condition has not helped because one of the manifestations, which I have already touched on previously, is a prophetising zeal which comes with mania.  It would be a lie to say that I was not caught up in religiosity and a complete misinterpretation of the Christian faith before I became ill.  But it is fair to say that my own fall from what I had perceived to be God’s grace had the result of my losing my faith and belief in God. 

It occurred to me, though, in the pre-fall time that a) God was a belief and b) that heaven may well be here.  In the absence of understanding what isn’t here and what cannot be seen or known I thought about heaven as a legacy.  That memory and what a person has contributed, through word, what they have done or made or been, who they have touched and loved and been loved by, may be what heaven is all about.  That thought, when my understanding of my faith was so infantile, has travelled with me, through my darkness and it is not one that I have thrown out with the bathwater, though the insistent, demanding infant has been.  I don’t believe that I am all grown up, far from it, but I think I have grown beyond expecting a paternal figure to reach down and pop my dummy back into my mouth because I am uncomfortable about what is.

Death is part of what is.  It is a part of life that I have not known how to handle.  I have been so steeped in believing that the best is yet to come and that heaven is to be reached through death that I have not recognised nor been able to readily accept the end of physical life.  I have dug up dead animals, in the hope that somehow, they will have gained new life.  I have avoided becoming attached to pets because I cannot handle their death.  I have lost young friends, my father and a lover through untimely death but have also had grandparents die which is when convention makes the whole idea, somehow more palatable and acceptable, to me.

Now she has been severed from my life.  Someone or some persons have deliberately cut short the treasure trove of memories that she was contributing and I was accumulating, cherishing and storing in my life.  Those memories are in my brain, in photographs, on paper, in the ether, in bricks, railway bridges, food, jewellery, dresses, swings, baths, a duck (more of that another day), births and now also, in death.  I can see her in death and I can imagine, not experience, her suffering but also her courage because I knew her, she was strong and she was brave.  I witnessed her first son, crowning, during his birth.  I thought that I could or would never manage to erase that picture from my mind, the agony, blood and pain.  But I have succeeded in part, or time has helped, to at least blur what is there; the miracle and diversion that childbirth brings helps.  I therefore know that the vision I have constructed about the circumstances of her death, through what I have read or been told will also fade.  How can the imagination, the past, the conscious and subconscious have such an appetite for deconstruction and fabrication.  Why does it seek to draw pictures, visions, images that disturb, whilst providing a soundtrack of words, terror and abandoned silence?

The word trigger is defined below:

trig·ger/ˈtrigər/

Noun:	A small device that releases a spring or catch and so sets off a mechanism, esp. in order to fire a gun.
Verb:	Cause (an event or situation) to happen or exist.

It is fascinating that a physical mass of cells can, through circumstance, be primed, sitting and waiting to be fired whilst apparently, the custodian of those cells is in control.  It seems so cruel that in some senses there is endemic failure on the part of the conscious individual to protect itself from releasing springs or catches that cause explosions within and without. 

I have been skirting mania because my deepest fears have been reawakened through what happened to my lovely soul sister in South Africa.   How can we not, even for a moment, find ourselves where she was, with her, with her father, with her family retracing steps, hoping for some other outcome, as the full horror of the reality imbeds and becomes entrenched in our minds and lives.  Because with each step I have taken into the darkness, I have tracked anguish, pain, fear and blood through my mind.  It is though, miraculous, that even in that murk somehow, she is managing to radiate through. 

What I see of her shines confidently out, rising above and beyond any human attempt to hold her static, in death.  In that respect she is utterly remarkable and because of that, I miss her even more.