Loss - compounded

I just lost the most important audio from this project so far. It was the interview with someone who works for Survivors of Bereaved by Suicide in East Sussex. We chatted for several hours and the interview gradually became a conversation around shared experiences of loss. I actually admitted in this interview that after losing someone to suicide, I did experience my own urges to follow. Something I have never ever verbally admitted before. My heart genuinely skipped a little after doing so.

I got the train back from this interview feeling weird. Very moved and supported by our discussion, but also depressed and gloomy - I had revisited some tricky thoughts that I had buried. Suicide is such a DIFFICULT death, and death is messy enough that often I deal with the death / loss side and put the suicide bit aside for later. I was forced to actually think about it a lot on that day and it was super poignant for me.

In the frantic process of running around between school and work that is my life this year, I exported the audio to a usb via a college computer one morning and then hurried off to work. I revisited this audio the other day, a month or so later, only to find the audio I transferred was actually just of me testing out the Tascam, and not of the interview.

2 and half hours. Gone.

Loss compounded.

Losses have a habit of building up like this. The loss of this audio (ironically about suicide, which links to my experience of loss) suddenly enveloping itself within the loss of my father.

This happened before: during my first term at University, my mum was being weird on Whatsapp with me. Especially if I asked for a photo of the dogs. They came down one day and asked me to book a nice restaurant. Being a brat, I naturally picked the nicest one I knew of. This lunch (at which I was horrifically hungover, I should mention) was actually just a way of them telling me my dog, Muffin, had died.

And in an instant, the loss of my dog became tied up with the loss of my dad. I wept for days on end and still can weep about Muffin’s death because I tacked so much else onto it. It was much more socially acceptable for me to cry over my dog than to have to say the tears were for my father who committed suicide, and so I grieved for my dog without really realising all the other grief that was going on inside it.

Now I grieve for this audio. And, to be honest, at various steps on the way in this creative process I have hit hurdles that feel like grieving again. Every time i get creative block it feels like grieving again in a way, because I am so at a loss as to how to articulate the kind of emotion I want to transmit.

How do I move forward? I try and recreate the key ideas of that audio lost and use it as a way of inspiring me. Same for the creative block - how can I use these moments of block, grief and pain and translate them? That is what I must try to do.