September 20th 2018 – In a year of days I won’t forget this is not a day I’ll ever forget. This completely floored me and reading again it floors me still.

I mean I’m not really smart, but I think I’m reasonably intelligent. I can explain the double-slit experiment in Quantum Physics well enough, I can train someone on Windows, string a decent sentence together, but I don’t understand Brexit; but then no-one understands Brexit.

So why in God’s name did I get funeral ashes so wrong? I always thought they were a token; a gesture of the person who had gone. They didn’t give you the actual ashes of the deceased, I’d assumed. I’d often wondered why people got so concerned about where those ashes were to go, I mean it’s just a symbol really, isn’t it?.

Recent events have taught me otherwise of course, but nothing prepared me for today. I bought a frame for one of Gail’s photos then I collected Gail’s ashes from the Funeral Directors. What a life journey that short trip was.

Because, though they are certainly ashes, they aren’t really either. This is Gail. This is the woman who I adored and worshipped since I met her in 1987, a woman I would happily swap places with now. A person who regularly and literally – in the proper sense of the world – took my breath away with her beauty. She’s now in a box. A fucking box. A green box 6″x 8″x 5″. It’s heavier than I’d have thought, but this is her regardless. All that’s left of that woman who could stop a conversation at twenty feet when she entered a room. A box I have my hand on as I write this, so she knows how desperate and fucking desolate I feel.

I have a juxtapose; the picture in one hand of how she was, the only thing left of that beautiful, vibrant woman in my right. Friedrich Nietzsche was wrong: what doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger. It makes you weaker, it eats at you, it destroys your very soul and reduces life to just existing.

I’ve learnt a lot about myself today. I’ve learnt I’ve not got the strength of mind nor body to cope with this living hell.