Everybody’s grief is different. There is no one way in which it manifests itself, no one true prescription for how to deal with it. In the same way it’s foolish to draw up a hierarchy of grief, of trying to determine who is more entitled to their grief and for how long and what is the dignified or right way to mourn. But there are some universalities to mourning, some things that are immediately recognisable if you’ve ever lost somebody close to you.
Cartoonists Tom Hart and Leela Corman lost their two year old daughter Rosalie Lightning in November of last year, the same month as Sandra died. Ever since, Hart has been putting his grief in comic form, the first book of which was released recently. His impressions of her death and what it felt like are fragmented, not quite coherent, heartbreaking, immediately recognisable.
What gets me the most is the search for meaning Hart shows, wanting to understand why this happened, but not getting a proper answer when there are no answers to be had. I’m loath to compare their grief with mine or to draw some pat lesson from it, but reading it and Hart’s blog I almost felt lucky. Lucky because I had had so long to prepare for Sandra’s death, having known almost from the time that we first started having a serious relationship about her healthcare problems, then once became acute, having three years in which her death was always a possibility, but most of all, because having had her made her own choice to end her life, she set her own deadline. That makes for a different sort of grief than that which Tom Hart and Leela Corman have been dealing with. There’s therefore only so much I could ever share with them, but it’s there in this comic.
Be warned though, Tom Hart’s comic is heartbreaking and gut punching no matter if you’ve experienced any such loss or not…
Two years ago Edgar Davids was already slumming when he played for Championship side Crystal Palance, but now he has joined bottom of League Two club Barnet as player coach:
Read in the local free paper today: government plans to make patients pay for “unnecessary” visits to the doctor or emergency room. This is probably not going to become real policy, but is used as trail balloon to shift the window on how we think about medical care, slowly shifting more and more of the burden towards the individual rather than the insurer or the government. The healthcare system here is slowly being hollowed out, insurance premiums going up while basic coverage is whittled down; this is just one more shot in that war.
While everybody has been distracted by other news, the Dutch Senate quietly passed two laws that allow the government to enter into people’s homes on suspicion on fraud without having a shred of proof. The second law states that anybody caught committing fraud for the second time will see their entire income automagically disappear for five whole years.
Anybody on benefits of any kind is ‘at risk’ of having a pencil pusher at their door at any time now. As well, anybody who receives money in the form of a government allocation (kids, housing, etc.) is also a candidate for a pencil pusher’s visit. Old people and parents are not amused.
It’s something that has been slowly creeping into the “debate” over social benefits here, the incessant need to be able to check up to see if somewhere, someone is cheating the taxpayer and nothing is sacred to make sure this doesn’t happen. And if you do “cheat”, you deserve to die in poverty.
But let’s not do anything about those poor bankers who made millions through losing billions, legally and illegally.
Let’s swipe an idea from Branko, who after all got it himself from Scalzi and see what sites pop up for each lettre of the alphabet (save for ÆØÅ of course) if I use Opera’s autocomplete (other browsers are available):
A: Acesweekly, David Lloyd’s (off off V for Vendetta and Night Raven fame) new digital comics weekly.
B: the BBC radio player, tuned to radio 4, for my inner fogey.
C: Tom Spurgeon’s Comics Reporter, essential reading to keep up with Yank comics.
R: Requires Hate, which puts the boot into everything that really is bad in science fiction and fantasy, like racist and sexist kind of bad, rather than just awful writing. Is everything people who make the toen argument dislike.
S: oh look, financial analysises of football clubs. That’s interesting.
