Hi Paul. Once I have dried my tears I have to admire your writing. It is beautiful. Your metaphor about the beautiful, psychopathic girlfriend is brilliant.
For several decades I had a boyfriend who was clearly a psychopath. He was rugged and dangerous, fearless and unpredictable, except you could always predict that he would let you down, lie to you and betray you and when you remonstrated with him he would shrug his shoulders and say: 'Well, you already knew what I was like'. After he had broken my heart and stolen my money and my good name, more than once, at last I managed to finally break with him. My family and friends think I should hate him but I don't. I still think of him with love and regret. When I was with him the world was a more exciting place, my heart was lighter and I never knew what would happen. It was more than that but I can't explain. Now that is all behind me the world is duller and safer but I know that I will never forget but I forgive because that is his nature and his nature is what I loved.
Well, I know it's not relevant to you but I thought you might enjoy hearing about it. All my best wishes to you as always.
Rainer Ptacek was a guitar player who wrote and recorded in the blues genre, though he was forward thinking in his approach. Before he died was beginning to augment his playing with tape loops that formed an ambient canvas over which he would layer his compositions. As a young boy he had been spirited out of East Germany by his parents. In his early forties, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour that erased many of the songs he had written from his memory. For a while the cancer went into remission. When it returned it did so with a vengeance, killing him within weeks. He was 46 years old when he died.
Among the last songs he wrote is one titled 'Rudy With A Flashlight'. On lyric sites it is often erroneously credited to Evan Dando, of The Lemonheads, who covered it for a tribute album that was intended to raise money for Rainer's treatment and later, in the wake of his death, to support his family. This misattribution annoys me as it is a deeply personal song. It begins with Rainer watching one of his children playing outside at night, shining a torch into the heavens. In the second verse he drifts into idle musings on life:
“Some things take time to know
Some things you never do
Some things you can't forget
They just become you.”
Those final two lines embody the end stages of grief, as something that never leaves you but can be managed if you allow yourself to be transformed by it. I know that I will never get over the death of my last chameleon, Frederic. Those final thirty seconds of his life when, after eighteen hours with his eyes closed, they opened and were clear and focused and looked right at me, and into me, as I looked back at him. In this way we said goodbye to each other. Out of that grief has come a new attitude towards dying. Before, I often wondered, if you have no firm beliefs in an afterlife, then where do you aim your thoughts in those final moments. I know now that I will go looking for those eyes that looked at me. It has softened a future blow, and that has given the grief meaning and purpose.
As strange as it might seem, I mourn the time when I was sleeping rough in London. The eight days with no food; my trousers slipping down and the crotch flaying all the skin off my inner thighs; the beating that I took from a gang of youths who I thought were going to kill me; the isolation in the midst of a crowd; the madness where the people surrounding me seemed more real than I was to myself. Why would anyone mourn that?
I miss the purity of it. The stripping away of everything other than the bare essentials. The picking yourself up and dragging yourself forward on the threads of your will. The violence and brutality and the moments of occasional beauty. The night I lay my head down in a churchyard and could hear the platform announcements from the Central Line rising up through the earth. I left that part of me in London. I miss him and I grieve for him.
I think your grief is a little different from these examples, where there is a traumatic event that is followed by a slow process of coming to terms as one moves away from it. The legacy of your own trauma is both significant and enduring, literally anchoring you to the spot. It is hard to move on from a catastrophe when you are still living it. I don't have the answers. It is something I have thought about a lot since I began reading this blog.
I wonder whether a piece published a few days ago on Substack, by Aurelien, that also seems to address radical acceptance (albeit in the face of irreparable political and social decline) might be of interest. He talks of the need to achieve a state of grace in such circumstances. I hope that, in time, you too will find your own state of grace.
Would it help to think of the grieving process as churning away in the brain? You’re making progress with it unawares all the time? I think that’s what all the climbing dreaming is about. It’s not antithetical to the grieving process, it is the grieving process. I know people who shut things in boxes instead of grieving them and I don’t recommend it.
When you wrote about suicidal ideation and cries for help I thought of Beckett characters, and now I come to think of it they’re also expressing something like radical acceptance (apologies to Beckett experts everywhere) : “I can’t possibly go on… I’ll go on.” It’s completely intolerable, they don’t pretend it’s tolerable, there’s no logical linkage between the refusal to go on and the subsequent acceptance. Actually it strikes me that the most logical reason (for anyone) to stay alive is precisely that it involves “going on” which implies the passage of time which implies change - of some kind. With time eventually you get change, internal or external or via some other state you haven’t envisaged, it’s just the timetable which is frustrating and generally a bit out of one’s control.
Incidentally, and because you refer to being indulgent or similar from time to time, this is an extremely valuable piece of information for me, that an activity can be a sustaining or guiding passion in life in that way. I have some things that come close but reading this I don’t think I have quite *that* thing, so thank you for elucidating it.
I mean by this logic though any other decision could have rendered you without cognition and incapable of profound thought and expression. Or with the same injury (or worse) you now have, but earlier.
I send all my warmest thoughts to you Paul, and can’t help but feel this series of blog entries should become a National treasured artefact of what someone enduring a spinal cord injury goes through. It’s so brutally honest, incredibly thoughtful. Thank you.
I’m so sorry for your intense grief. Grief has a force of its own, and also it’s own time line.
Yes, grieving will take longer. CLimbing is finished. But here is an article about how AI can help you in the future. It is in French, sorry. I hope someone can translate it for you. There is hope that you can again be in the wilderness. But on your two feet:
Always thought provoking, Paul’s analysis of his cruel situation is heart wrenching. How to accept you will never take part in climbing or any other sport that has consumed you for years comes to many of us. For me it was competitive amateur tennis having had 40 years boy and man playing the game. My lower back had been giving me ample warning for the last few years and my osteopath had grown rich from my visits. I took up golf perversely and became totally immersed in improving my handicap from age 50-65 playing often 3 times per week. Inevitably my back deteriorated and I decided to undergo a 3-level artificial disk replacement at a back clinic in Munich costing c£35k. On the morning of the operation having had the calming anaesthetic, the surgeon ordered a CT scan and took the decision to abort the operation. Later he explained that he feared I would resume golf and might place too great a stress on the spine both above and below the new structure. I would probably end up in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. His advice was to give up golf and accept that I would need to nurse my spine for the rest of my life. I returned to the UK and did just that. For the intervening 15 years not once have I yearned to be hitting a tennis or golf ball.
What a story. It hit you what you were doing to yourself. The desire to risk everything in pursuit of what we love how strong is it. The passion. The price for that.
Hi Paul, Thank you for your words. My heart goes out to you, and the rage at the cards life randomly deals out to unsuspecting participants. I have had three occurrences of cancer in the past five years. Stage 4 colon cancer. Chemo, an ostomy bag, five surgeries, throw a hostile divorce in there; I can tell you it's been fun. Your grief makes total sense; a version of you has died, and you are floating nebulous in a new life that is not one you know. For better or worse, this new reality will normalize over time, and your old life will feel farther away as more of this life starts to take up memory space. Rage, feel angry, and keep talking about it. Push back and ask for what you need, like modesty and respect while emptying your bowels. There is a lot for you to grieve and patience is a bitch.
Only to say - 8 months to mourn such a loss? It’s NOTHING. Takes much longer.
Indeed it does. I'd say, think in terms of an ongoing process.
Hi Paul. Once I have dried my tears I have to admire your writing. It is beautiful. Your metaphor about the beautiful, psychopathic girlfriend is brilliant.
For several decades I had a boyfriend who was clearly a psychopath. He was rugged and dangerous, fearless and unpredictable, except you could always predict that he would let you down, lie to you and betray you and when you remonstrated with him he would shrug his shoulders and say: 'Well, you already knew what I was like'. After he had broken my heart and stolen my money and my good name, more than once, at last I managed to finally break with him. My family and friends think I should hate him but I don't. I still think of him with love and regret. When I was with him the world was a more exciting place, my heart was lighter and I never knew what would happen. It was more than that but I can't explain. Now that is all behind me the world is duller and safer but I know that I will never forget but I forgive because that is his nature and his nature is what I loved.
Well, I know it's not relevant to you but I thought you might enjoy hearing about it. All my best wishes to you as always.
Not my metaphor :)
It's a reference for any climbers reading
Rainer Ptacek was a guitar player who wrote and recorded in the blues genre, though he was forward thinking in his approach. Before he died was beginning to augment his playing with tape loops that formed an ambient canvas over which he would layer his compositions. As a young boy he had been spirited out of East Germany by his parents. In his early forties, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour that erased many of the songs he had written from his memory. For a while the cancer went into remission. When it returned it did so with a vengeance, killing him within weeks. He was 46 years old when he died.
Among the last songs he wrote is one titled 'Rudy With A Flashlight'. On lyric sites it is often erroneously credited to Evan Dando, of The Lemonheads, who covered it for a tribute album that was intended to raise money for Rainer's treatment and later, in the wake of his death, to support his family. This misattribution annoys me as it is a deeply personal song. It begins with Rainer watching one of his children playing outside at night, shining a torch into the heavens. In the second verse he drifts into idle musings on life:
“Some things take time to know
Some things you never do
Some things you can't forget
They just become you.”
Those final two lines embody the end stages of grief, as something that never leaves you but can be managed if you allow yourself to be transformed by it. I know that I will never get over the death of my last chameleon, Frederic. Those final thirty seconds of his life when, after eighteen hours with his eyes closed, they opened and were clear and focused and looked right at me, and into me, as I looked back at him. In this way we said goodbye to each other. Out of that grief has come a new attitude towards dying. Before, I often wondered, if you have no firm beliefs in an afterlife, then where do you aim your thoughts in those final moments. I know now that I will go looking for those eyes that looked at me. It has softened a future blow, and that has given the grief meaning and purpose.
As strange as it might seem, I mourn the time when I was sleeping rough in London. The eight days with no food; my trousers slipping down and the crotch flaying all the skin off my inner thighs; the beating that I took from a gang of youths who I thought were going to kill me; the isolation in the midst of a crowd; the madness where the people surrounding me seemed more real than I was to myself. Why would anyone mourn that?
I miss the purity of it. The stripping away of everything other than the bare essentials. The picking yourself up and dragging yourself forward on the threads of your will. The violence and brutality and the moments of occasional beauty. The night I lay my head down in a churchyard and could hear the platform announcements from the Central Line rising up through the earth. I left that part of me in London. I miss him and I grieve for him.
I think your grief is a little different from these examples, where there is a traumatic event that is followed by a slow process of coming to terms as one moves away from it. The legacy of your own trauma is both significant and enduring, literally anchoring you to the spot. It is hard to move on from a catastrophe when you are still living it. I don't have the answers. It is something I have thought about a lot since I began reading this blog.
I wonder whether a piece published a few days ago on Substack, by Aurelien, that also seems to address radical acceptance (albeit in the face of irreparable political and social decline) might be of interest. He talks of the need to achieve a state of grace in such circumstances. I hope that, in time, you too will find your own state of grace.
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/a-postcard-from-the-far-side-of-despair
Would it help to think of the grieving process as churning away in the brain? You’re making progress with it unawares all the time? I think that’s what all the climbing dreaming is about. It’s not antithetical to the grieving process, it is the grieving process. I know people who shut things in boxes instead of grieving them and I don’t recommend it.
When you wrote about suicidal ideation and cries for help I thought of Beckett characters, and now I come to think of it they’re also expressing something like radical acceptance (apologies to Beckett experts everywhere) : “I can’t possibly go on… I’ll go on.” It’s completely intolerable, they don’t pretend it’s tolerable, there’s no logical linkage between the refusal to go on and the subsequent acceptance. Actually it strikes me that the most logical reason (for anyone) to stay alive is precisely that it involves “going on” which implies the passage of time which implies change - of some kind. With time eventually you get change, internal or external or via some other state you haven’t envisaged, it’s just the timetable which is frustrating and generally a bit out of one’s control.
Incidentally, and because you refer to being indulgent or similar from time to time, this is an extremely valuable piece of information for me, that an activity can be a sustaining or guiding passion in life in that way. I have some things that come close but reading this I don’t think I have quite *that* thing, so thank you for elucidating it.
I mean by this logic though any other decision could have rendered you without cognition and incapable of profound thought and expression. Or with the same injury (or worse) you now have, but earlier.
I send all my warmest thoughts to you Paul, and can’t help but feel this series of blog entries should become a National treasured artefact of what someone enduring a spinal cord injury goes through. It’s so brutally honest, incredibly thoughtful. Thank you.
I’m so sorry for your intense grief. Grief has a force of its own, and also it’s own time line.
Yes, grieving will take longer. CLimbing is finished. But here is an article about how AI can help you in the future. It is in French, sorry. I hope someone can translate it for you. There is hope that you can again be in the wilderness. But on your two feet:
https://fr.euronews.com/2023/05/25/un-homme-paraplegique-peut-de-nouveau-se-deplacer-grace-a-une-nouvelle-technologie
Paul comprend le français
Super. Ca va lui donner un peu de courage. Esperons!
Always thought provoking, Paul’s analysis of his cruel situation is heart wrenching. How to accept you will never take part in climbing or any other sport that has consumed you for years comes to many of us. For me it was competitive amateur tennis having had 40 years boy and man playing the game. My lower back had been giving me ample warning for the last few years and my osteopath had grown rich from my visits. I took up golf perversely and became totally immersed in improving my handicap from age 50-65 playing often 3 times per week. Inevitably my back deteriorated and I decided to undergo a 3-level artificial disk replacement at a back clinic in Munich costing c£35k. On the morning of the operation having had the calming anaesthetic, the surgeon ordered a CT scan and took the decision to abort the operation. Later he explained that he feared I would resume golf and might place too great a stress on the spine both above and below the new structure. I would probably end up in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. His advice was to give up golf and accept that I would need to nurse my spine for the rest of my life. I returned to the UK and did just that. For the intervening 15 years not once have I yearned to be hitting a tennis or golf ball.
Wow, that was one very wise doctor.
You are right - he declined about £30k. Not all surgeons would have!
What a story. It hit you what you were doing to yourself. The desire to risk everything in pursuit of what we love how strong is it. The passion. The price for that.
Hi Paul, Thank you for your words. My heart goes out to you, and the rage at the cards life randomly deals out to unsuspecting participants. I have had three occurrences of cancer in the past five years. Stage 4 colon cancer. Chemo, an ostomy bag, five surgeries, throw a hostile divorce in there; I can tell you it's been fun. Your grief makes total sense; a version of you has died, and you are floating nebulous in a new life that is not one you know. For better or worse, this new reality will normalize over time, and your old life will feel farther away as more of this life starts to take up memory space. Rage, feel angry, and keep talking about it. Push back and ask for what you need, like modesty and respect while emptying your bowels. There is a lot for you to grieve and patience is a bitch.
Spent today in tears grieving everything too so sending all the hugs to you 💜
"What if" is such an insidious and addictive swamp. Without a crystal ball, that last climb was all the climbs you ever did.
Also noticing that there are a lot of sports adapted for SCI (see eg https://spinalpedia.com/learning-portals/adaptive-sports-for-quadriplegics/). Skydiving someday?
That you're (still) grieving does not seem strange AT ALL
You might find this interesting if you haven't read it already - R. Jay Wallace, The View from Here:
On Affirmation, Attachment, and the Limits of Regret: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-view-from-here-9780199941353?cc=gb&lang=en&