TURNING TO JESSICA AGAIN (CW: loss, grief)

Do you have a place you go to when you feel the need to cry but your brain won’t let you; a memory, image or piece of video that does for the emotions what a finger down the throat does for the body?

With me it is Jessica Ennis (as she was at the time) winning the 800m at London 2012, and with it the heptathlon gold and glorious immortality. That moment when, with the weight of the county’s and the world’s expectations on her young shoulders, she pulled past the bigger, stronger women on the final bend and headed for home, has such emotional heft for me that I fill up every time I see it. Always have. Always will.

Like Johnny Wilkinson’s last-second kick for the 2003 Rugby World Cup, it is a rare moment of sporting perfection, but it has more than that. Having shown such indomitable strength and resilience over the two days of competition, her tears revealed her vulnerability and, as her face crumpled, she seemed suddenly too small, too human for the moment she had created.

I turned to Jess Ennis earlier this week. The death of my brother had been so horrible, so unexpected and so… so…. so bloody well WRONG that we’d all found it hard to accept that it was real. I’d cried when I’d first heard about it, cried freely and openly, lucky enough to be with someone with whom I could do that.

Over the following days, as with the death of my father only a few months before, someone had to step up to be the person who filled in the forms,  contacted the undertakers and tracked down his bank in Spain, all the dreadful bureaucracy of death.

That someone had to be me.

Once again, I had to be the strong one.

As I re-read the linked post, written in the run up to my father’s funeral, I realised that being the strong one, rather than dealing with my own feelings of loss and sadness, was becoming my primary focus. I was fighting to protect the rest of the family, especially my deceased brother’s nieces and nephews, for whom he was always very special, from the hideous minutiae that had become my daily grind.

A crust had started to form over the rawness of my emotions.

How fortunate I am that, after two years of working with a therapist to connect with my emotions, I was able to recognise this crust for the threat that it was, and to have the wherewithal to deal with it.

The wonderful Jess was only just starting the second lap when the tears came. By the time she reached the final bend I had turned away from the screen and was in full flow. Sorrow for my brother, sorrow for all the people so horribly impacted by his death and, most importantly, sorrow for myself flowed out of me in a sobbing, shoulder-shaking rush.

The crust that had formed turned out to have the character of that on a ball of bread dough left with an incomplete covering of clingfilm. When that happens, I just fold it back in and it dissolves into the mass of the dough. After an hour or two, no trace is left and the bread will shape, prove and bake as normal. The tears had the same effect; a few moments of cathartic release that allowed me to go back to dealing with how my poor brother’s body would get from A to B and who should come to the funeral.

I knew that, although I was, once again, being the strong one, I hadn’t lost touch with my emotions.