Today has been nightmare. My neuromuscular disease is out of control. I have tried to sleep but it’s difficult. I had a bad night due to muscle spasms and the same today. I am taking higher doses of the medicine for this. That scares me as well.
All because a previous neighbour told malicious lies about me. This wind chime situation is ridiculous and the law is an ass. I have started a petition to make a law so that no one can hang a noise making object without the consent of neighbours.
So I am really malfunctioning because of the wind chimes next door. I say next door, they are within arm’s reach over the fence. My head is in a fog, as well as in a constant headache, my left limbs hurt. I am bad tempered because of the area in my brain that is affected.
My laptop doesn’t work, I am writing this on my phone. I am crying out to be understood but no one does. They judge me and are unkind to me. But if they were in my situation they would want understanding and kindness.
What really upsets me is that the people next door and their letting agency do this to me because of the malicious lies told by Michael Ebsworth flatmate or whatever she is. She is violent towards him and speaks so badly of him. And his father will have nothing to do with him because of her.
I need my daughter so badly. I am so scared that I’m going to have a seizure. The wearing down of my nervous system is starting to make me miss a moment every so often.
I had thought I had someone to love when Mike came here. And he told me he loves the bits of me that are damaged by my disease. I can’t express how much I have longed to hear that. To be loved for everything I’ve been through. Not despite it. But he ran ranway atthefirst sign of honesty because his whole life isa lie. He is stunted at age eleven when his mother died and has made an enemy of all the people who have loved him. He’s an alcoholic and I don’t need that.
Since my last post my laptop has been seriously malfunctioning. This is my fifth attempt to write. To add a meme is impossible. Mike Ebsworth has changed his phone number in the hope of avoiding legal consequences but it’s not as simple as that.
I am concerned about him, as the woman he shares an address with tried to hit him, and I saw a bruise on his upper arm which he said was work related. But that doesn’t fit. Last November I saw multiple bruises on his upper arms and he said it was work then. I had no reason to disbelieve him, but I do now.
The wind chimes my neighbours hung continue to cause me headaches, nerve pain and muscle spasms. My head also seems to be in a fog and my concentration is out the window. I can’t remember anything, it seems. I forgot to go to two shops while I was out. I am worried that I will suffer a seizure . I need to end this blog, as I can’t see what I am typing. This is an additional pain the neck, so to speak.
A few days ago I met with a friend and because the place we were at was so noisy, we went to my home. She hadn’t been there before, and she exclaimed how lovely it was. She admired my use of colour and the art I choose to hang. Michael also used to love my home. He always complimented me.
Laura laughed when I told herMikeEbbsworth had left because he thought I wanted a carer. She said she had never known anyone as independent as me.
After spending the morning waiting for a phone call, I went to get a watch repaired. I tried a jewellers first, as that was what I was told I needed, but ended up at the little watch repair shop in a department store.
On my way there, I ran into an old friend and we decided to go for a coffee. We had a double vodka each. We talked about the past, our now, our pain. I ended up sobbing as I told him about my neighbours’ refusal to change the windchimes to a lower tone, like bamboo. I told him about the physical torment it gives me and how my former neighbour lied to the letting agent. About her malicious behaviour. I told him how I fell in love with Mike , and how he’s been trying to contact me all year and how he moved in and out within 24 hours.
I can never live with Michael. He drinks too much. He would be lazy and slobby. He left quite a trail behind him for his short stay. I’ve had enough of bad relationships.
I am seriously worried about my health due to those windchimes. It’s all because of Woodhouse’s malicious lies. That’s the one thing she does well.
So I went to a solicitor and am going to sue them, the letting agency and my current neighbours.
I have to. This has to stop. I have to regain my health and peace of mind. It’s time to stop considering others and put myself first for once.
My laptop is not working properly because the end of bed couch got kicked over in the night when Mike was here. I’m having to give vegetables away so they don’t perish. Mike Ebsworth has deactivated his phone number – an act of real cowardice.
The friend I met in town prayed for me. I so appreciated it. I have deep faith in God, and pray, but it’s been a while since anyone prayed for me. Not any one with real faith.
An old friend came over this morning. I realised I was in a very irritable mood, which is very unlike me. He put together a piece of furniture for me which is so very kind. I don’t remember when I met Jim, but I’ve known his wife since I was sixteen. She’s older, but I have no idea by how much. She’s just always been my friend, even when we haven’t been in touch for years.
I don’t know what to make of this mood. I feel very hot and the ceiling fan on. It’s not a hot day and the humidity is lower than yesterday. I’ve had irritations, but they don’t usually get the better of me. I threw up this morning because I mentioned what Mike had done to me. It’s still very raw and painful. But I found my front door key, it was on the bed after I remade it when Mr Ebsworth left.
The wind chimes my neighbours have continues to provoke symptoms of my disease that I haven’t experienced in years. My left arm and foot do their own thing. I cannot control them. It’s worrying. My neighbours have been told by letter that the pitch is making me ill, but they refuse to take them down.
My laptop is very unwell indeed, as it got kicked to the floor by accident while Mike was here. He seems unmoved by this, or by the money I spent on green groceries. I think I’ve mentioned this before. This blog is meant to be about my health and my journey with it. Not the bad manners of other people.
It is a legacy from when Dawn Woodward, a malicious person and compulsive liar lived next door. Just now I can hear some pipe music and I’m going insane. … It’s stopped.
I’ve also been trying to sign into my Samsung account and it is a merry go round. It has driven me into further irritation.
I don’t know what to do. Whether to stay in and rest or go out and see friends.
This post doesn’t have a title as I copied and pasted this from elsewhere in my docx, and it won’t co-operate with my wish for a title. I’m a hopeless blogger. My cleaner just left and told me I keep my home much tidier than a lot of places she cleans. She didn’t need to say this. She said it because she is kind and full of love for people. Life is too short to criticise and find fault with others all the time.
I came across this earlier, and wanted to share it. This is love. Life is too brief to waste it criticising other people. For every finger we point there are three pointing back at us.
My cleaner just left. She asked why I was short of breath when I reached the bottom of my stairs. I explained briefly, and she replied that she thinks I’m amazing because my home is so much tidier than other homes she cleans. She didn’t need to say this. She said it because she is kind and loving. She helped me swap lamps around because my bedside lamp bulb died at the weekend or before. She noticed the lamp we brought up was bulbless, and brought one up from my cupboard. I can get a replacement bulb today or whenever it suits me, mainly it’s remembering. The real name for a ‘bulb’ is lamp which I learned from my electrician friend. I need a lamp for my lamp. I find this amusing because I am easily amused and pleased.
Mike continues to attack me. Let him. Life is too short, I’ve had three family members die in my arms. I want to live my life…
I haven’t been out today. I couldn’t face getting up. I am weary from crying and vomiting from sheer hurt. And Mike’s attempts to bully me by text and email.
He thinks someone we shall refer to as Malice was hurt by him because they tried to hit him. But hurt doesn’t lash out, it folds inward, it seeks to self protect. I feel bent over wih pain, as though a sack is hung around my neck.
I took my last post down because he didn’t like his name being there. His name isn’t copyrighted so I’m free to use it. I cancelled a social date with a friend because I couldn’t stop crying and didn’t want to be brave. I saw friends yesterday and am tired of being told he is an idiot and doesn’t realise how wonder I am. I’m sick of hearing it. I just want to lie in my bed with my daughter and chat.
To make things much worse, he brought up things that are painful reminders of my sister being so very ill and how very badly a vicar behaved before and after her death. He also lacked tact when my Dad died, and I never mentioned it. I should have done. It did him no favours nor me.
It seems Mike just can’t get that I am so hurt. He thinks it’s ok to keep on being unpleasant. It’s not, as I’m falling apart.
I bought food for the both of us and for his lunch at work. A lot will perish before I can eat it. Doesn’t matter to him.
My nerves hurt from the windchimes next door. Relentless. It’s cruelty. It frightens me that people can be so wicked.
He crooned this to me over and over as he held me.
The following day he left me after jumping to wrong conclusions. And I am afraid that I will die alone.
I’ve been screaming with pain, both inner and physical. I hurt so much by Mike’s departure. He left because he thought I wanted a carer. The very last thing on my mind. I wanted a partnership of equals, but naively I trusted him to try to discuss how much help I should keep having. I’m paying an awful amount of money to have half a hour of help each day. I asked him what he thought of me employing someone privately, less frequently but for a longer period of time. All he said was ‘don’t cancel it’. I found this frustrating, but knew he was tired. I left him to sleep and popped in on my friend. He left.
When he told me what he was thinking, I was incredulous. I could not grasp it. Beyond belief. My illness and appearance stop me from believing anyone would want me. But Michael Ebsworth has always told me he loves me and finds my body very attractive. Oh, the thngs he does to me! He’s such a passionate lover. Tender yet demanding.
He knows me. He knows my home can be untidy. Nothing was a surprise to him. And I spent ages sending texts making suggestions on what possblities there were to make this house our home, not just mine. He told me I don’t open windows. Almost all my windows are open all the time. I won’t mention his untidiness and bad habits here.
I went to see the ‘asthma’ nurse in the morning. She is so lovely that I dissolved into tears. I tried to see a play last night which had bought a ticket for about a month ago. I had to leave the theatre to vomit in the ladies and couldn’t face going back in. All the while Mike was firing texts at me.
I’ve been screaming out loud too because the wind changed direction a couple of days ago and I can hear the windchimes all the length of the garden. My nerves are yelling at me to make the chimes stop. My muscles hurt so much on my left side. My neighbours have been told that they cause me nerve pain and they do not change them nor move them.
Naja Marie Aidt’s new memoir, When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back, translated from the original Danish by Denise Newman, begins with an epigraph from Rilke’s “The Tenth Elegy.” The lines are all about grief—“The new stars of the land of grief,” the first line tells us, “Slowly the lament names them.” The epigraph proceeds for a few lines, naming the different stars, before concluding, “But there, in the southern sky, pure as the lines / on the palm of a blessed hand, the clear sparkling M / that stands for Mothers……—.” And so begins Aidt’s book, putting a specific form of grief on the mind and heart of the reader—that of a mother grieving her lost child.
On March 16, 2015, Aidt’s son Carl died. His death was an accident, self-inflicted while in the depths of a particularly dark mushroom-induced psychotic state. When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back is Aidt’s reckoning with that death—with how it could have happened to the son that she knew, with why the police’s response to the emergency call of Carl’s friend was so slow, with how Carl could have jumped out of a window to his death but that death not have been suicide, and much more. It’s raw and angry as Aidt yearns for understanding, yearns for her son to not be dead.
As Aidt goes about the Herculean effort of wrestling with her son’s death, she utilizes a remarkable variety of forms; her grief is expressed not only through the substance of her words, but also through the structure of her text. The work includes passages from her diary composed in the years of Carl’s childhood; quotations from writers as varied as Anne Carson, Stéphane Mallarmé, and C. S. Lewis; passages that read like rants at death, at life, at what she’s having to live through (“DEATH WALKS BESIDE US IT IS REAL IT IS NOT CALLIGRAPHY NOT A FUCKING IMAGINED SUFFERING IT IS REAL,” reads one stream of consciousness passage); poems and journal entries pulled from Carl’s papers after his death; and more. All of it taken together leaves the reader with a real sense of the author’s lostness, her groundlessness, of what the death of one dearly loved leaves in its wake. A coherent form no longer seems reasonable, nor possible, in the book Aidt has constructed.
Indeed, Aidt actively wrestles on the page with the idea of making art out of her son’s death—an inherent contradiction in the book she has produced, which is an undoubtedly beautiful artistic achievement. “Beauty has abandoned my language,” she writes. “My language walks in mourning clothes. I’m completely indifferent.” Another passage, from a page-long rambling paragraph, aptly describes Aidt’s conundrum in the work she’s doing: “It’s not possible to write artistically about raw grief. No form fits. To write about actual nothingness, the absence of life. How? To write about the silent unknown that we are all going to meet, how? If you want to avoid sentimentality, the pain stops the sentence mid-sentence. Words sit inadequate and silly on the lines, the lines stop abruptly on their own.” The task Aidt has in front of her with this book is three-fold: to reckon with the death of her son on the page; to create a work of art out of the “inadequate and silly” words her grief produces; and to remain honest to her experience in doing so.
By these measures, the book is a real success. Aidt’s willingness to wrestle with how inadequate and foolish her effort feels, and to leave that wrestling in the book, reinforces the reader’s sense of what Aidt is experiencing. She must pursue understanding; understanding is fleeting. She’s a writer, so one of the ways she can conceive of wrestling with the death of her son is through putting it down on the page; at the same time, the words feel foolish and inadequate. Nothing is sufficient.
The reader’s access to Aidt’s grief deepens through Aidt’s rejection of conventional notions of how text should be laid out on the page. The reader navigates variations of text formatting throughout the book—it’s aligned to the left in some places, and scattered throughout the page elsewhere. The size of the text varies, sometimes in coherent and traceable patterns, at other times seemingly at random. Italics and bold type are used generously throughout—discernibly in a few instances, elsewhere with no traceable intent. All of this textual experimentation cements the triumph of honesty and self-expression that this book becomes—the triumph of honesty in self-expression, complete and unmitigated. Aidt is writing what she will, in ways that feel appropriate to what’s being expressed. Her experience is unorderly; she has produced a text to match it. It’s a testament to Aidt’s translator and her editors at Coffee House Press that the finished version of this book feels essentially unedited.
Her formless work is generated from what feels like a formless life in the absence of Carl, in line with the effect Carl’s death has on her and her community of grievers—“We find ourselves in a futureless time,” she comments at one point. Time itself has lost its coherence; just as form, style, beauty in writing no longer feel tenable, so time has lost its sense of forward movement. “We sit around a kitchen table and survive second to second; we rarely get up. We’ve become rigid, while the spring light rises and falls in the sky outside: Now that you can no longer be in chronological time, neither can we.”
Even still, the reader is presented with a coherent narrative. Aidt employs a smart technique of telling the actual story of Carl’s death within the larger recounting of her grief, within the sensory depiction of that grief. Aidt tells the story in stops and starts, in italicized, set-apart paragraphs. Each paragraph tracks back a couple sentences prior to where the previous concluded, slightly retracing steps in the way, perhaps, that Aidt retells the story to herself—halting, repetitive, delaying the conclusion as long as she can.
As it happens, Aidt’s form-less, beauty-less language of grief is not the only thing that produces its own kind of beauty. Carl’s death itself brings beauty in the despair, and it’s a triumph of this book that Aidt’s recognition of this truth does not come off as trite. Coming as it does near the book’s conclusion, after the devastating majority of the book has imprinted itself on the reader’s mind, it feels surprising when she recognizes it, but not forced.
Aidt recounts two poems that she wrote while Carl was still living; his death was still in the unimaginable future. The first poem begins with the lines from which the book’s title is drawn:
When death takes something from you
give it back
give it back what you got
from the dead one
when he was alive
when he was your heart
give it back to a rose,
a continent, a winter day,
a boy regarding you
from the darkness of his hood.
“I thought intensely about you as I wrote those two poems. I saw you before me as I wrote them,” Aidt recalls. She goes on to consider the power of poetry, its role as the receptacle of omens felt but not understood—“It becomes an experience which belongs to the future, which can express, though it is not yet experienced in reality.” There’s another quality to poetry, though, that Aidt chooses to highlight: “But poems also say something about the giving back what the dead gave us when they were alive. That the dead’s being in a way still needs a place in life, and we should pass on the love they gave us. Here lies the hope. A hope that what you gave me will grow in others, if I am able to share it. And that my love is strengthened and made more beautiful because now it contains your love.” Aidt’s loss will never go away, but her hope, even in the midst of her pain, is that she can harness the love she received from her son. That good may come, even from this—a conclusion that feels trite in my writing, but earned and true within Aidt’s work.
Books change based on who is reading, though as a reader, the default I have to push against is to universalize my own sense of a book. This book, however, had me particularly conscious of my identity as a reader—namely, as one who has never experienced such grief, and never will experience this particular type. This, of course, deeply informs my reading experience. When I read this book, I see its structural and emotional intelligence and honesty, and recognize it as such. I imagine, for a mother reading this book—for one who knows the horror of which Aidt speaks – that this reads more like recollection.
Taken from Ploughshares the newsletter from Emerson College.
I feel this so much since my older sister’s pointless death almost a year ago. My dog, my best friend, died a week later.
So less than twenty four hours after Michael Ebsworth arrived to live with me, he left while I went to a neighbour because he was sleeping.
Last night he told me could never be without me. I met him when he lived next door. I thought him boring. One night he got to my bedroom because he wanted to talk to me.
I accepted an apology on the grounds that he help me put things together that I needed around my home. This led to him seducing me. His ‘partner’, unaware of all this, began to be malicious to me because she wrongly assumed I had sent messages on Instagram. I never saw these messages.
Mike then pursued a relationship with me, which was very happy until we were found out. He then lied to me,
Recently I started getting emails from his account but I thought it was the woman, toying with me.
Mike arrived last night. He kept saying it was my home, but I had already assured him I was happy to change anything.
I have lived with depression on and off for many years. Right now I feel I’m looking into my left shoe with my right foot. I’m so in love with this man.
I am so low. So hurt. So betrayed. I can’t see the way ahead. I wish I had never withdrawn my complaint to the police about the sexual assaults. I would never have had the opportunity to have feelings for him.
Writer and psychologist. My health, a journey with two life shortening diseases 
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