Under a recent post, Kevin made the comment:

I continue to be amazed how much your love for Elizabeth informs your blog.

To which my inevitable response must be that it could not be informed by anything else. Elizabeth said, once, in her Cannabis Chronicles, which were written after she had become a “card carrying pot smoker” as she used to put it, that she hoped that I would someday write about the love that we shared, and, as I write, I find that is what, in some sense, I am always writing about.

Elizabeth and I shared a very precious thing, that simply grew in intensity as the years went by, and so everything I write is “about Elizabeth,” about the love that we shared and about the things that interested us most: women’s issues, gay liberation, and assistance in dying amongst them. The latter was something that became very pressing as Elizabeth’s disease progressed, but it was always something that we supported, and it was inevitable that, after she had been helped to die by a generous Switzerland, when her own country slammed the door in her face, it would be something upon which I would focus. For one thing, she asked me to do this, after I returned from Switzerland. Indeed, she thought that her dying with assistance in Switzerland would become an issue across Canada, and would reopen the subject — which, of course, it did for a few weeks. The problem is that Canada is so large, with so small a population, that a few news cycles are simply not enough to keep something before the public, and reopening the conversation seems almost always to return to square one. However, I think there is some movement, and so I keep pressing the issue in and out of season, and I do so because of Elizabeth. The title of my talk at the Eschaton conference coming up at the end of the month is the same as the title of this post: “This, really, is all about Elizabeth.” And so it is. It had a longer, boring title, but as I wrote I recognised that Elizabeth was at the centre of it, and so I renamed it.

One thing that struck me yesterday — and then I got sidetracked trying to put a few finishing touches on my talk, and this post was supposed to go out yesterday – was Howard Jacobson’s punchy piece in the Independent about grief and closure, about Maurice Saatchi’s grief over the death of his wife Josephine Hart, and his rejection of the usual advice just to move on. (You can also read Saatchi’s interview with Brian Appleyard, here.)But, says Jacobson,

The popular wisdom is that we must move on. Achieve closure. When I hear the word “closure” I reach for my revolver.

After Elizabeth died, I sought help, briefly, from a counsellor. I had never experienced grief like that before, numbing, overwhelming grief. Indeed, though my mother died in March of the same year that Elizabeth died, and my father in August, Elizabeth having died in June, I was pretty much a basket case, largely because the love that Elizabeth and I had known was so precious and, I think, somewhat unusual in its intensity. I did not grieve my father or mother so much. They had had long lives, and I had longstanding issues with them, but I did grieve, and still do grieve Elizabeth’s death, because we were so very, very close – sometimes, I think, people thought, impossibly close.

Anyway, the counsellor wanted me to go to a group therapy session, but that is something I would not do, not only because it would be populated with religious folks, or that it would be a group, and I do not like to do things in gangs, but because I know the routine. I’m a long time old hand at grief counselling, and, of course, the received wisdom is that the one who is grieving should move on. Time heals everything, so the saying goes. But it doesn’t. As Jacobson says in the title of his Independent piece:

Wordsworth knew it. Saatchi knows it. There is no getting over death, no moving on.

But, of course, there is for some — it’s no doubt a matter of degree — but for people whose lives were deeply invested in each other, there is no moving on. Indeed, knowing this, Elizabeth and I both chose to put the words on our gravestone:

Certainty like this comes but once in a lifetime.

And I knew that when I exchanged vows with Elizabeth that my vow was not “until parted by death,” but simply “until death” itself, and so it will be.

I do not go to the lengths of Lord Saatchi, and set out a table-setting for Elizabeth, or arrange her newspapers just as she liked them, nor do I visit the cemetery and eat my meals there, but I understand the feelings that lead him to do all these things. For I understand, as he does, that simply to forget and move on would be a great betrayal, a betrayal, in my case, that would simply go beyond the bounds of possibility. One of the poems that I returned to again and again in the first year after Elizabeth died was Wordsworth’s sonnet “Surprised by Joy,” the one that Jacobson refers to in his article about moving on. That page in The Oxford Book of English Verse, is well used, the corner dog-eared:

Surprised by joy — impatient as the wind
I turned to share the transport — Oh! with whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind –
But how could I forget thee? Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss? — That thought’s return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn,
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

I often find myself amused by something that would have amused Elizabeth, and turn to share it, and, of course, she is not there to share the joke. But there never was a likelihood of my forgetting, but those lines

                                  Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss? — That thought’s return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore

were shot through with significance for me, mainly because I could not imagine moving on, forgetting, “even for the least division of an hour,” and I have not and cannot.

So, of course, what I will have to say at the Eschaton conference is, really, all about Elizabeth. It’s about religion, death and dying too, of course, and I hope to say a few things that will interest those who come about my own curious life — the life that Elizabeth rescued me from — and about our life together, and how this transformed things in a way that I never thought possible. In a letter to the Toronto Star, to which I took great exception, and which I asked them to take down, because it amounts to a libel against me, a Robert Osborne suggested that there was something improper and possibly unlawful about our relationship. But that is not true. Well, improper, yes, in a Christian sense, since it is not usually accepted for priests to seek love outside of marriage, and so my professional life hung by a thread for a little while, but unlawful – never. The important thing was the sheer depth and intensity of our relationship, which was so completely decisive in my life (and Elizabeth’s too, I think I can fairly say) – as you will learn, if you come to Eschaton. Elizabeth transformed my life in ways almost beyond imagining — certainly beyond what I thought possible.

Jacobson writes, incisively:

Language is always the measure, and the phrase “moving on” tells you what’s wrong with the idea. It is insentient, it lacks the knowledge of experience, it describes the emotional progress of an automaton. Moving on is what a policeman gets you to do when you’re blocking the traffic. Whether one does, in the end, move on is mere contingency. Things have their way with us and we don’t always live up to our promises to ourselves, let alone to others. But in principle I’m on the side of going nowhere.

Moving on would be betrayal, though contingency is no doubt a factor in what happens to people in grief. One is simply borne aloft by one’s emotions, and there may, of course, be, for some, a necessary moving on. But I was too old, and too bound up with Elizabeth simply to go on. Going on was taking a cause that seemed to need support, and prosecuting it to the extent of my small resources. But moving on is not a possibility. I still, to this day, stop by, almost daily, at the cemetery just to say “Hi!” – as I did last night, in the dark. Of course, I know she cannot hear me, but it is a comfort to know that “she” is nearby. When we poured out our hearts to each other before trying  to sleep the night before she died, she insisted that she would always be with me, just as we were meant to me, and that has turned out to be true in more ways that I could have imagined, though the thought of it brings tears to my eyes.

But that does not stop me going on with life, though life now has a different rhythm and purpose. Just as Lord Saatchi calls himself his wife’s “understudy,” bringing a book of hers to publication, so I go on, just as Elizabeth asked me to, to work towards the day when what she was forced to do in exile will be freely available in Canada, and the religious forces of unreason when it comes to matters of life and death will be defeated. That is a day to which I look forward with great anticipation, though I have to admit that it probably won’t come about in my lifetime.

Religion is an overpowering cultural influence, and it sets its mark on far more than just our death with dignity laws (or lack of them). It is, though, good to see that the mad religiosity south of the border didn’t make as big an impression as they thought they were going to, these men (and a few women) who refused to be washed away by the flood (upon which they seem to be fixated). That’s why I linked the funny (though as Veronica Abbass points out, not always correct) piece on the dinosaurs in the GOP. It’s good to know that the dinosaurs not only failed, but are now scrapping amongst themselves for a portion of their patrimony, though no one in the Republican party remembers what that patrimony consists in.

However, as I will say at Eschaton, it looks like we are winning. The forces of unreason cannot prevail in the face of the information revolution that is spreading around the world. You can’t for ever simply deny things that are obvious without someone noticing. Sure, I know, conspiracy theories and alive and well, and dwelling on a server near you, but, in the long run, this kind of puffery and ignorance will go the way of Thor, Zeus, Odin and the thousands of other gods who have had their day and are only myths and stories now about a time when the world was young. But I know that I have a goddess, and that only I worship her. But she is a goddess to me because she transformed my life. Without her I would be so much less of a person, still seeking, pointlessly, amongst the rubble of an ancient religion for the answer, when the answer was really close at hand. We must, as Auden said, love one another or die. That’s as good a creed as anyone needs. Trying to love God is a waste of time. He’s not there, or didn’t you get the memo?