When it comes to writing, I am as a newborn soul, which I think is what an actual writing person would write meaning ‘I have no idea what the bloody hell I am doing here’ – I have looked up and seen myself in the mirror and realised I have currently have exactly the same expression on my face that I do when I’ve ordered the third cheapest white wine in a restaurant and the waiter brings it over for me to peruse the label, safe in the knowledge that the next words spoken will be ‘Yes, that will be fine, thank you’
So I may start writing on one subject only to discover within a paragraph I’ve digressed onto something else entirely and got stuck there: hence an entire blog accidentally whinging on about not being able to sleep. But maybe there was an element of subconscious wisdom that what was actually going on was too big and too difficult for me to be able to write about. I’ve used fake names throughout this blog out of respect for people’s privacy: after much thought I feel it is only right to make an exception here. Tragically Jacqueline Rohen, known to her many friends as Jax, died very suddenly from an infection on Tuesday 28th April, aged 40. Unusually I’ve looked at the date today – it happened longer ago than I feel like it did but that could be the weirdness of the lockdown, or the suddenness of her death – in fact it was this blog that she’d Whatsapped me about on Sunday – to say she was going to send me some ideas she had of what I could do with it: on Tuesday she was dead. But I think it’s more that although I hadn’t seen her for a while – she had gone to Uganda with her partner to help him with the Bulindi Chimpanzee conservation project: it didn’t matter if I didn’t see her very often, because she was someone I knew would always be there.
I only realised this when The Ex said the same thing: when I met him he was sharing a house with Jax, and they described each other as soulmates. And as I write that I can hear copies of OK magazine being slammed shut in indignation: a soulmate is the person to whom you get married at your dream wedding on which you should spend more than your children’s education. This has some religious history to it admittedly: the breaking of the glass at a Jewish wedding symbolises not just the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, but the shattering of one soul before birth into two: to be rejoined at marriage. And among the OK magazine readers apparently there are people who literally believe that there is one person in the world who is your designated soulmate: ‘the one’. I would look up how many people there are in the world but I’ll only copy it down wrong: but trust me, there are absolutely loads. I feel like this makes your chances of finding them pretty slim: also if they die, then presumably you can never fall in love again? I can speak from experience here: it did seem unthinkable and impossible for many years that I could ever do love again, then it appeared and happened in a time and place nobody would have ever expected.
I expect the OK Magazine readers (I know I’m being really judgemental here: there are other magazines that pack just as much of a punch when it comes to total crap) are also asking: why wasn’t I jealous? Wasn’t I worried that The Ex might ‘see the light’ (vomits) and one day marry Jax instead of me? I never crossed my mind actually: it was more like a boyfriend with a bonus: a source of sunshine, love, hysterical laughter, white wine and Scotch bonnets eaten raw without breaking a sweat, and I never doubted when the Ex and I separated that she would still be my friend : I knew she’d always be there. And now she isn’t, and there’s another thing I took for granted.
Maybe ‘soulmate’ always made sense to me here because I have a long term issue with how we value – or rather don’t value – friendship. I’m not talking about the friends for, as they say (whoever ‘they’ are) a reason or a season, but the those that will last a lifetime: the friendships that can be picked up effortlessly from wherever they were last carelessly flung, with the potential to bring joy and sorrow as great as that of a marriage, and often outlasting two or three of those. I’ve always maintained that, like the old lottery adverts that claimed ‘It could be you!’ that would have been statistically far more accurate if they’d read ‘It almost certainly won’t be you’ – rather than people saying ‘oh, we’re just friends’ – it would make more sense to say ‘oh, we’re just getting married’. You probably think I’m being cynical and bitter: I’m not downgrading marriage (I even had one where we actually made it as far as death did us part, although that happened a lot sooner than we’d hoped) but if you are gay initially you are told that all love you feel is wrong: so you start from a place of your own discovery, which gives you an advantage in that it’s easier to identify and leave behind some of the traditional aspects of relationships and marriage that are far more to do with control and ownership than with trust and respect: it is not a matter of downplaying the significance of romantic love and marriage: but it is a disservice to everything to place it on a Disney pedestal as the thing that will define or fix your life and follow a specific model, leaving friendships barely visible down below: they are a lot closer in every sense than we like to think.
It looks like I’m digressing up onto a soap box – but it took me so long to write this because (apart from just being too sad) I didn’t know how to do it: the significance of losing Jax has made, for the moment, all the lockdown stuff and the no work stuff etc feel relatively insignificant, and yet writing a blog as a tribute to Jax seems inadequate on the scale of an supermarket online order substitution where for the complete works of Shakespeare they have substituted a book by Jeffrey Archer. So this is not intended to be a tribute: it is only today’s blog, where I write a little bit about someone I haven’t really felt able to before.
Jax hadn’t always had the easiest life, but really was human sunshine – by that I don’t mean necessarily constantly happy: but always kind, wanting happiness for others, and she had a way of bringing out the best in people. She was very funny and it’s only just occurred to me now that her humour had a similar basis to that of the unique Victoria Wood: able to find the find the hilarious in the ordinary and in herself rather than only able to raise a laugh by making fun of other people. When I met her she was working as a receptionist but wanted to write: she worked hard at writing with increasing success and her first novel published by Arrow was available from the 1st of May. I am so sad she didn’t get to see it come out: though happy that she had official confirmation (getting a publisher is a big thing) of her talent and hard work.
I don’t know if it’s the lockdown situation that made everything seem so unreal and impossible or just that she was so full of life: it was some days before things really sunk in in the way grief normally does: it happened properly the moment I saw the chart rankings on her book: it is at 247 out of 80,000 books: and I realised what I wanted most of all in the world was for her to know that. Grief is another situation where we feel we should somehow offer advice and help: I know better and yet still a part of me feels I ought to offer platitudes – even though I know they don’t really do anything: what grief, and grieving people need, initially, is to be allowed to sit with that grief, without having to hide it, or downplay it, or lessen it. It is different, I suspect, for all of us and for each person we lose. I’ve been told a lot of things about grieving that clearly were the case for some: but were not for me. But there is one thing that I did find helpful and real, which is that grieving is like traveling along the spiral of a conical shell – I’ve forgotten who told me this, I think it may come from Buddhism but my Google searches revealed, at best, only ‘Why the cone snail is one of the ocean’s deadliest creatures’ so we may never know. But it has held true for me. You begin travelling around the spiral from the pointed end, and there is a line down the shell which is grief: when you start, you pass it constantly, but as you travel, the gaps in between that line become bigger: you will always return to that line, possibly for ever, and it may be as painful when you pass it as it was at the start, but rather than feel that life can only be unbearable pain forever, know that between those moments, though they will still happen, you will find you are not so much sad that someone is gone, but you are happy that you knew them.
Below are the links to Jax’s novel ‘How to Marry your Husband’ on amazon – where it has amazing reviews (although it is also available from other possibly more ethical suppliers) and also a link for charity donations in her memory for the Bulindi Chimpanzee and Community Project that she was also working for, and which meant a great deal to her.
https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/bulindichimpanzees?utm_term=8bK2djaxg
This is only a blog, and cannot do any fair justice as a memorial, so I will say none of the traditional things here: apart from may you rest in the peace that you deserve, my beautiful friend, and if there is an afterlife may it supply much white wine and Tabasco x
Daxx goes home: self isolating with crazy 