It’s probably quite unusual to lose one great love in January and meet your next in the December of the same year, but this is exactly what happened to me.
While studying to be an English teacher I went along to Queen’s University climbing club, having discovered the joys of the mountains on my year abroad. It’s a widely accepted fact that few relationships survive the rigors of the Postgraduate Certificate in Education course, and following a break-up I threw myself into hillwalking, and off I went to the wilds of Donegal, finding solace in the beauty of The Poison Glen and Mount Errigal. When a climbing trip to Orpierre in France was mooted that Easter, I was on-board in a heartbeat, despite only vaguely knowing the others who were going.
As it turned out, I got on rather well with them, especially with a dark-haired young doctor with a mischievous streak. Looking back, I cringe, because photos show a love-sick caricature of myself with giant hearts in my eyes where the pupils should have been. But the effect wasn’t all golden and harmonious; in fact it was almost vomit-inducing in its intensity. Suddenly, I got it. I understood crimes of passion, and for the first time the lyrics of Mariah Carey made sense. I was desperately in love. It was traumatic. My friends watched aghast, as any nonchalance I may have possessed evaporated as soon as Donal entered a room.
Two strong characters, we were either on a besotted high, euphoric that we had found each other, or in a state of conflict. We had one brief and terrible hiatus in our relationship. Some woeful planning meant that we spent most of the summer of 2003 apart, with Donal in the Alps and arriving back on Irish soil two days after I’d left for a holiday to Venezuela. I missed him with a shocking ferocity.
Every part of the trip, fastidiously planned by my friend Rhaiza, was diminished by his absence. Roaming wasn’t an option on my mobile phone, but we managed one brief conversation, in the town of Chorini on the Caribbean. I sat at a plastic table with a flowery cloth, on an old-fashioned telephone with hens clucking round my feet. On hearing my voice he let out a whoop of joy. A van rumbled past with Bob Marley’s Could You be Loved blaring. I’ve yet to hear that song since and not feel a surge of warmth in my heart.
But. When I came back and fell into his arms at the airport it didn’t feel the same. In the days and weeks to come, his feelings didn’t seem as strong as mine, and I felt angry that I hadn’t made the most of my trip. Feeling dejected and humiliated I broke it off. We spent two weeks apart in which I struggled to eat, started smoking again in earnest and memorably broke down in front of a class of twelve year olds, who were enormously kind. In the movies, these scenarios seem glamorous, but don’t be fooled. It was shit in every way. That was until he arrived at my school to pick me up, under the guise of buying a birthday present for a friend. Donal was loath to admit he was ever wrong, but while waiting at a red light he gave me a side-ways glance, and said, “Sometimes, I can be a bit dim.” I think I managed to play it cool for about 48 hours, but after that, we were back on.
Life was still complicated though, as we were making decisions about our careers and more importantly, on what continent to pursue them. Having visited the Antipodes on his elective year, Donal wanted to return to New Zealand, which he adored. I should have been applying for teaching positions, but truth be told, had Donal fancied Siberia or war-torn Sudan, I would have followed him. And so, I did some substitute teaching and Donal continued his work as a locum, and we saved enough to fly from London, one cold and rainy night in November 2004 for the frenzied city of Bangkok. From there we visited Cambodia, Malaysia and Australia before arriving in Christchurch two weeks before Christmas. And here, things got puzzling. Like Ireland, it was lush and green, but oddly, also wet and cold. I kept checking myself. This was “down under” and we were supposed to be having barbecues on the beach. The Kiwis were thrown by the weather too. “This is bizarre,” they kept saying, shaking their heads.
And odd it was. The chilly climes put a dampener on what had been the most magical of times. Despite an incident of near-drowning and the obligatory doses of food poisoning, our trip had thus far been bliss. But now, Donal, a lifelong pioneer, had no interest in the vineyards that I longed to visit. He didn’t drink tea or coffee, while I wanted to sip lattes in the hippie coffee shops of Nelson. We started to bicker. New Zealand was expensive, and after one too many mornings waking up in freezing tents I got a bit ratty. After one sleepless night in a youth hostel, I declared, “I’m going home. I’ll earn some money then I’ll come back.” But when Donal rolled his eyes and said: "Don’t be ridiculous, you aren’t going anywhere without me,” I knew we were in it for keeps.
But the strangeness in the weather continued. After Christmas celebrations in an eco-lodge on Marlborough Sounds, we drove towards the seaside town of Kaikoura. We almost crashed our car when news came through about the Boxing Day Tsunami. Beaches and coastal towns on islands where we had just stayed in Thailand had been swallowed up. The devastation was too much to comprehend, as was the fact that we had been spared. As a teenager I had joined an evangelical church and since I no longer worshipped regularly, and was unsure whether I even still believed, I lived in a state of perpetual fear. All my apocalyptic visions came back, and one night, as the wind and rained battered a tiny hut in which we stayed in Akaroa, I started to sob. All these events surely meant that that the world was about to end. Donal was remarkably calm and reassuring as he held and comforted me. I worried he might have thought I was basket case, but the next evening, as we overlooked the sea eating fish and chips, a lady asked us if we were on honeymoon. “Not yet,” said Donal, giving me a squeeze. I would replay that moment over and over in my head for months to come.
As it turned out, we were both right. In some ways, our worlds did end. Donal was right when he’d said that he’d look out for me. A day or two later, we set off with another traveller to climb a peak in Mount Aspiring in Wanaka, and camp overnight. This time, there were no complaints. Being up so high is like being suspended between worlds. The snow and air were bathed in a pinkish glow and the stillness was only punctuated by the sound of huge chunks of ice as they broke and fell away into oblivion below. We went to bed laughing at the attempts of a cheeky kea parrot who was determined to get at our leftovers from dinner.
The next morning the sun beamed as we began our descent. We had passed climbers the day before clad only in trainers and felt safe and secure in our hiking boots. That was until I slipped on some long glass on which the ice from the night before had not quite thawed. Donal grabbed me in a rugby tackle and the two of us tumbled off the side of a cliff. He fell much further than me. I broke bones in my neck, back and pelvis and sustained minor head injuries. Donal died. To this day I remain bewildered as to how I managed to survive. But I was airlifted off the mountain and was flown back to Belfast two weeks later in time for his funeral.
*
Physically I recovered, but mentally, the violence of the accident still shocks me. People still ask if I want to return to New Zealand, and I look at them with incredulity. However, I feel something of Donal’s energy and vivacity stayed in me after he died. He had a tremendous capacity for goodness and a huge heart. I know that it pleases him, that my life didn’t end that day, and that I have embraced my second chance. Back in Belfast in December 2005 I met another boy, and this one was pivotal in making me whole again. Donal saved my life, but Stevey took what was broken and put it back together. Stevey’s pluck, tenacity and humour in taking me on is a source of constant wonder to me. Some people never know love once, and I have had the privilege to know it twice.
However, it is impossible to suffer such a harrowing loss and remain unchanged. Grief is the most complex emotion, and its course is unpredictable. The pain of loss and the particularities of my accident haunted me doggedly for years, and it is something I have struggled to process. Acceptance takes time, and life experiences such as these do not recede into the distance when a rosier present appears. Perversely, I have found, that the feelings of shock and desolation can rush back in a surge when I least expect it. Perhaps the mind is cleverer than we realize, and buries such painful memories until we are in a more robust state to endure them. Recently I heard an interview with an actor on the BBC who spoke about the pain of losing his two-year old daughter. He was keen to impart to any listeners who had, or were suffering a bereavement, that trauma following such a loss does, over time fade. Reconciling oneself to the absence of that loved one is another stage of grief, the intensity of which will fluctuate. However, the shocking, sledgehammer-like blow of trauma does, thank God, diminish.
What I found desperately heard to manage was acceptance of myself. The accident changed me, as did the whole experience of being so deeply in love and then losing that version of me which had moulded around another person. By the time of his death, Donal and I had spent almost two months traveling together, so aside, from a forty-eight hour period when he went off hiking with another traveller, we had been together almost 24/7 for eight weeks, without friends or family. Moving around as we did, we became each other’s sense of home. I remember on one occasion he had gone on a dolphin watching trip alone, since I had already been while he had gone trekking, and such was the expense I couldn’t go again.
While he was away, I found myself unable to settle, especially as the time drew nearer when he was due to return. The youth hostel had glorious bay windows and I remember finding it impossible to read, my eyes drifting upwards for a glimpse of his blue rain jacket appearing, and imagining the light in his eyes as he told me about his excursion. Later I heard that the Swedish have a particular word for this state of excitement, when one is too agitated to remain seated while waiting for a loved one to arrive. Impossibly, within days of this event, he was dead.
Although I felt like my life had ended too, I had no choice but to start again. Just as the bones in my back and neck and pelvis had to knit and fuse and heal, I had to piece myself together.
*
Somewhat unbelievably, in December of 2005 I met someone else, and five years later we were married.
That story was, however, the shorter version of events, and the longer one is grimmer and sadder. In this longer version, I was far from being my best self.
In the winter 2006 this younger man and I dated for about four months, but Stevey was 22 and I was 26 and I felt like the oldest twenty-something in the world. In truth, I wasn’t very nice to him.
He was lovely and coped admirably with my extensive baggage- but this, I thought, was never going to work. I dumped him, cruelly, and embarked upon a new relationship with a friend of who had been very close to Donal and also to me. In hindsight I see that I was trying to keep some of link to my old life alive: a link to the mountains, and a link to Donal. It was a flawed relationship where we tried to make it work, despite having different expectations of the future. The friction between us grew and escalated, culminating in a ferocious row on New Year’s Day 2008.
It is hard to understand but after my accident I had pulled myself together - I had healed physically, I had gone back to teach, I had travelled again. But this breakup made me feel like a total failure. Entering into it in the first place had been a risk, and now that I had supremely messed it up, I felt incredibly low.
This is it, I thought. I will be single forever. I will never have children and I will never hold anyone’s hand and will always have to nod sadly when waiters ask, “Table for one?”
But thank God, even though I didn’t believe in myself anymore, I had a family and friends who did. Every Sunday I went home and watched five episodes of Come Dine with Me back to back on Channel 4, and my mum made me my dinner. I missed the Mournes, and some women I’d met at Queen’s climbing wall asked me if I’d like to go walking with them. Their lives were complicated too and I feel like together, we walked our way out of a depression. Before my accident, I felt hat I had never really “fallen out” with anyone. Now, in my home city, I felt like a stranger. Suddenly there were people who didn’t like me, didn’t want to talk me, and I felt like I had done something very wrong. As well as feeling lonely and confused, feelings of paranoia began to grow. And then one afternoon in February I stopped at a corner shop on the Ormeau Road and saw a notice for a travel writing class. I signed up immediately.
This class became a lifeline. For two hours every Tuesday, I stopped self-flagellating and discovered that most travel writing wasn’t about the actual journeys at all, but the journeys within. I learnt how James Morris went to Egypt and came back as Jan Morris after gender confirmation surgery. I read stories of grief, loss and addiction. Suddenly my life didn’t seem so complicated after all.
I wrote about trips to Venezuela and my most recent trip to Vietnam. I began to realize that the accident and subsequent poor decisions did not define me, and that the writing lent me some perspective.
The lecturer showed us a magazine looking for reader submissions and helped me edit my piece on Vietnam. A month later it appeared as a five page spread, complete with photos of me canyoning off a waterfall. In it I looked brave and happy with no indication of my self-loathing.
And then, one night my phone pinged. It was Stevey, the boy I had unceremoniously dumped almost two years before. Unbeknownst to me, a friend of his had gone to the same writing class and had shown him my article. “Congratulations,” he said. He hoped I was well. It was now May. I was feeling stronger; more resilient, and I suggested we meet up.
We tentatively got back together. I still wasn’t sure it would work as we were very different. He didn’t exercise, unless it involved walking to the pub, he didn’t read much (unless it was on a phone), he didn’t drive and he drank too much (see earlier point). He had hair which bordered less on the ridiculous and more on the anarchic. He came to visit me in Madrid with no shorts and no sunglasses and no sun cream. I had to take him to El Corte Ingles and kit him out. But, he happily accompanied to the Museo de Reina Sophia to look at paintings by Monet and George Seurat. He stood somber in front of Guernica. He expressed eagerness to eat in an Ethiopian Restaurant, and to join me for dinner with three generations of a family he didn’t know; and speak in pidgin Spanish while matching the father drink for drink in Cacique and coke. He gracefully accepted the overbearing mother criticizing his accent. They liked him. I started to like him more and more.
He helped me prepare for job interviews. He switched effortlessly from reading funny stories on Reddit and looking at memes of cats, to show me how ICT could enhance the learning experience of reluctant readers. He didn’t even teach, but he did work in IT and had been on Wall Street when Lehmann Brothers and Bear Sterns collapsed. He did all this, while sporting the attire and hair style, of someone who’d attended a Stone Roses gig, then stayed up partying all night with Ian Brown and John Squire.
He went to Tiffany’s and bought me a silver bracelet which I have worn on my left wrist for eleven years now. “Holidaying here Sir?” the pompous salesman had enquired. “I work next door," he replied, his accent pure West Belfast, “at the Stock Exchange.” The salesman immediately became infinitely more helpful.
One morning I picked him up at Arrivals after he caught the Red Eye back from the States. The bags under his eyes were as big as his black holdall. I brought him back to my house and we have lived together ever since. He was easy to be with. He didn’t object when I corrected his grammar and hauled him out of bed to go running. He tholed my bad moods and innumerable quirks.
But three years and two daughters later, I hit a rough patch. I felt terrified, all the time, consumed with angst. Wise people told me to write down how I felt, to try and make sense of it. I didn’t know how. “I know,” said Stevey - “you need a blog.” Initially, I wasn’t very receptive. “Sounds a bit poncy,” I said. “Who’s going to want to read about Helen McClements?”
“Quite,” said Stevey. What about calling it Tales of a Sour Wee Bastard?” Years, before, as I waited in a queue outside the shop on Botanic Avenue in Belfast, a stranger had called me this, and it always tickled him immensely.
I’ve been writing the blog for four years now, more for me than for anyone else. Despite the acerbic name, its message is one of hope and resilience. Yes, life can be hard and sometimes shite, but writing has helped me to learn and grow and is cheaper than therapy. Stevey is good-humored about it all, despite the lambasting he takes, as my LSB (long suffering bastard.) My new writing life is something which has brought me much happiness, and it is always an immense joy to meet someone who tells me that what I have shared has resonated with them.
What was also instrumental in helping me like and accept myself again, was deciding, many years after my accident, to seek some bereavement therapy. Although I had attended a few sessions in the year after the tragedy, which had undeniably been beneficial, other events had unfolded in the meantime that so consumed me with hurt and rage that I needed direction. Unbelievably, when I went along to the charity which offered the counseling, it saw that it was my former Religious Education teacher from school who was to be my counselor. Together we navigated the experiences which had brought me to that place. We looked at photos together; she made me recall events with Donal that I hadn’t spoken of with anyone else. Even saying his name again was a relief, with someone who wouldn’t look scared about my reaction, or who would try to change the subject. That is the thing about losing a romantic partner- it seems almost disrespectful to your current partner to remember them, although they were such an important part of your life, it can still seem like a betrayal to mention them. My counsellor was wonderful; never shirking from making me confront the moments which had brought me great pain, in an effort to finally address them, in a safe environment where I had professional support.
Happily, Stevey was enormously supportive as I sought to reconcile my former life with my complex present. He and I now both feel comfortable when I mention Donal and we tell our children about who he was, and about how he saved their Mummy’s life in an accident. I won’t let Donal be forgotten, for the man he was; for the joy he brought me, and for my life now cherished with the miracle that is my family.
Therapy and writing have helped me to appreciate that there really isn’t enough time to dwell on sorrow, and in doing so we only miss out on the richness that that looking to the future can bring. As my counselor told me, life is a mosaic, and the light shines all the more vividly when pitted against the shadows.
Helen McClements is a mother, writer and teacher from Belfast. She can often be heard on BBC Radio where she shares her musings on 'Thought for the Day'. In contrast to this, she writes a blog called www.Sourweeblog.com, where she unleashes her frustrations at juggling parenthood with work and the vagaries of life.
