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Website of Kate Armstrong

I wrote 'The Storyteller' (Holland House, 2016). I'm writing my next novel.

‘The Storyteller’
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An evening of many tears, and much shaking, and this: Until he died I didn’t realise he was mortal. I did, of course, know that at some point Matthew would die. I expected - with nine years between us - to be the one left alone. But I associated ‘mortality’ with age and, in my mind, that was so far ahead of us that it had no weight. Now it has a weight, a heft, that is dragging me down. I feel it; there’s something of lightness that has gone. Mortality has become an anchor to my life. (Others have known this before me; I needed to learn it for myself.) That doesn’t - not for me, not yet - make life more precious. What it makes it is more serious, more important, heavier. I was told early on that the petty would fall away. That’s my growing experience. I’m no Romantic, so I won’t savour thoughts of that heavier death to intensify my experience of life. I won’t chant, as a medieval Christian, that in the midst of life we are in death. But I can understand why both, weightily, importantly, have been said. #grief #copingwithgrief #griefwork #griefsupport #regentspark #mortality

I’ve been thinking about bravery and about curiosity - the former because I’m more in need of it than I ever have been; the latter because it was a characteristic of Matthew’s. I started off musing on them separately. I’m now convinced they are two sides of the same coin. There will be some among you who immediately comment that I am brave. Thank you. But in many ways I’m not. I endure. I stand up and go on again. Both of those have an element of bravery. But my sort of bravery tends to be dependent on closing my emotions down, putting my guard up, getting all my defence mechanisms in place - and then stepping out into the cold, hard world. That mode of bravery is at the expense of what therapists have repeatedly encouraged me to call self-compassion; it can also be at the expense of taking joy in life. There are reasons for that behaviour on my part, and those are not the point. The point is that my particular pattern only takes me so far. Matthew had less of the push-on-regardless type of bravery than I do. What he had in abundance (what spurred him on) was curiosity - a willingness to open himself to the world, a delight in new people, new places, new thoughts, new experiences. His curiosity could be infuriating: he had to look at every single restaurant menu in a new town before deciding on a place to eat; he tried to read every book review, and hoarded unread literary magazines for years in case there might be something in them he didn’t want to miss. But his curiosity was a fount of enjoyment and a revelling in the richness of the world. Just today my world does not feel rich or warm. I am deep in the post-adrenal crash that was - apparently - inevitable given what I succeeded in getting through between August and November. I don’t regret how I got through that period. I’m proud of the services we put together for Matthew, and every ounce of energy it took to honour him was worth it a thousand times. But it came at a cost, and I’m paying it now. (Maybe also it is the cost of love.) (Continued in comments...) #grief #recovery #bravery #curiosity

Over twenty-five years of teaching, Matthew must have taught thousands of pupils. One thing I remember him repeatedly saying: he wanted to inculcate in them enthusiasm and curiosity and appreciation - for all types of literature, for the complexities of different languages, for art of multiple periods, for physical activities. It wasn’t that he himself was always positive. He could be world-weary, sometimes angry, often melancholic. But Matthew was never cynical, and he never affected boredom, and he believed in particular that those poses were dangerous to teenagers. You have to learn and appreciate the world, he would say, before it is ok to dismiss any of it. Fifteen is too young to be encouraged in cynicism; it is an age for having life opened up in excitement, and not for closing anything down. I don’t know what specifically made me think of that today. But in a year of tragedy and trauma and pain, a year in which despair could easily be much more than a pose, remembering the attitude with which Matthew so passionately taught young people is a help to me as well. #grief #recovery #selfcare

For the last two days my grief has abated a bit. There’ve been tears but they’ve come at night when I’m alone and in the dark. During the day I’ve been getting on quite well at eating and reading and writing and - most of all - resting, still all in the quiet of the hospital. I’m well enough now to be allowed out for a walk, and to enjoy the fresh air as I go. And there’s a heron in this picture if you search for it hard enough. #grief #trauma #depression #recovery #selfcare

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