“But I feel more than words can say…”

A not-review of WAITRESS (2022 touring production)

The first time I listened to the soundtrack to WAITRESS, Sara Bareilles’ musical based on the 2007 film of the same name, I cried silently at my desk for approximately 45 minutes. In my defence, I was pregnant, and a musical about the life-changing impact of motherhood was always going to get me (something Mike knew full well when he urged me to listen to it!). But even then I couldn’t have anticipated quite how important it would become to me.

After my daughter was born in 2018, I struggled with pretty severe post-natal depression. It was some kind of cosmic joke — I had spent most of my life dreaming about becoming a mum, and I’d gone through a traumatic late miscarriage, invasive infertility testing and months of crying over negative tests to get there, and yet here I was, with my much-longed for baby, completely unable to enjoy her because the chemistry in my brain was utterly fucked. During that time, She Used To Be Mine became a kind of anthem — a love song to a lost self, full of regret and longing to go back to a happier version of me.

Thanks to excellent professional support (top tip: if you’re going to become mentally ill, do so a) in Northern Ireland and b) when you’ve just had a baby, because the oft-intractable NHS is actually suitably funded in this area and the help is incredible) and some stellar husbanding/parenting from Mike, I made a good, if slow, recovery, but I couldn’t listen to the Waitress OBC any more as it just hit too close to home. I resigned myself to letting it go, at least for a while.

Then came the announcement that Sara herself was going to be playing the lead role of Jenna for a limited West End run. For Mike — and for me — it was really too good a chance to miss. I have always loved Sara’s voice, and while I’ve never heard a bad version of She Used To Be Mine, for me Sara’s is the definitive one, and the idea of seeing her perform it in person was just… blissful. By that stage our daughter would be old enough to leave her with her much-beloved Auntie, giving us that rarest of things — a child-free break in our beloved London.

So we went. The whole trip was emotionally charged from the start — it was our first time away from Lyla for any longer than a day, it was the first time we’d managed to get back to London (the city we met and fell in love in) since she’d been born, and, to top it all off, there was this new thing called “coronavirus” which was closing airports across the world and threatening to make it our last visit for a while. All in all, set to be a feelings rollercoaster. And we were front row, dead centre. Madness.

It was wonderful, of course. Watching Sara perform She Used To Be Mine was everything I hoped for and more — both Mike and I started openly weeping at that point (sorry Sara) and didn’t really stop for the rest of the show. But for me the real revelation was the song that marks the show’s emotional denouement — Everything Changes, sung by Jenna to her newborn baby daughter. And I was listening to it for the first time since I’d undergone the incredible, life-changing, exhilarating experience of falling in love with my own child.

Oh boy.

It was, to be short, the most magical experience I’ve ever had in a theatre (and I’ve had a lot of magical theatrical experiences).

About a week after we got home, everything shut down. My world contracted to just me, Mike and Lyla. And honestly, we didn’t mind. We were the lucky ones — the ones who had a safe, warm, loving home to cocoon in. For six, seven months we stayed home, just the three of us. Not knowing they would be our last months as the three of us.

I didn’t know, but now I see
Sometimes what is, is meant to be

---

I’m 17 months on now from Mike’s sudden death, and starting to slowly rediscover myself — attempt to do the things I love again, try to find a way of being just Ems, rather than one half of Mike-and-Ems. One of the things I’ve started doing is using the night my wonderful friends babysit for Lyla to go to the theatre — sometimes with friends, but often just me. There’s something very freeing about being able to just go and have whatever emotional reaction I need to have in the moment and then… not have to have an opinion.

(Aside: I don’t know if it’s just me, but the older I get the more I want to be allowed to not have an opinion on stuff. There’s a quote from Marcus Aurelius, variously translated but something like: “You are not compelled to form any opinion about this matter before you, nor to disturb your peace of mind at all. Things in themselves have no power to extort a verdict from you.” The first time I read it, as an angry twenty-something, I thought “What a boring, passive way to live one’s life!” Now I read it and think how blissful that knowledge is, and that if everyone in the world adopted the same mantra, it would be a much more peaceful place. And YES I realise this is hypocritical to say when I’m writing a review of something. But a) it’s a not-review, not a review, and b) I never said I wasn’t a hypocrite.)

Anyway, the touring production of Waitress had Belfast as a stop along the way, and included in its cast the incredibly talented Evelyn Hoskins who I had seen as Dawn in the West End production. No matter the emotional wringer I suspected it would put me through, I still desperately wanted to go, and so I booked a ticket (yes, you guessed it — front row… any self-respecting theatre-goer will agree that it’s the best value you can get, I’m not just a glutton for punishment!).

And I was not disappointed. My goodness, what a show. It was everything the West End production had been — laugh-out-loud funny, incredibly moving, packed full of talent (seriously, if you told me 15 years ago that Matt Willis from Busted would be one of the best Dr Pomaters I’d ever seen, I would have — well, I would probably have believed you because I bloody loved Matt Willis from Busted, but 2022 me wasn’t quite so sure it was going to work and was delighted to be proven completely wrong.

Like I said, I knew when I booked it that it would be an emotional experience, but what I didn’t expect was the particular moment that would break me (and break me it did — sorry to everyone who had to share a train carriage home with the fully-grown woman sobbing into a tissue the whole way back to Bangor). It wasn’t Everything Changes. It wasn’t even She Used To Be Mine. Nope, it was the song Dawn sings in Act I, when she’s umm-ing and ahh-ing over whether to put up her online dating profile: When He Sees Me.

Listen, I’m not dating. I have no intention of dating any time soon. Logically I understand that widowed people can date, and that they can remain head-over-heels in love with their late spouse while doing so, but my head and heart are still so full of Mike every single day that I don’t think I’m anywhere near ready.

But. But. There’s still a small part of me that thinks… maybe one day?

And When He Sees Me spoke to the soul of that small part of me, the small part that thinks maybe I deserve to be loved again, to experience that kind of happiness — different but still good — again. And also the small part of me that is terrified of that ever happening.

Dawn sings “What if when he sees me, what if he doesn’t like it? …What if I give myself away only to get given it back?” — a sentiment which I’m sure resonates with anyone who has ever dated, or thought about dating.

But the genius of Bareilles is that it turns out that isn’t Dawn’s biggest fear. What she’s really most terrified of is something a lot more complicated.

Or even worse he could be very nice, have lovely eyes
And make me laugh, come out of hiding
What do I do with that?
Oh, God

What if when he sees me
I like him and he knows it?
What if he opens up a door
And I can’t close it? 
What happens then?
If when he holds me 
My heart is set in motion 
I’m not prepared for that 
I’m scared of breaking open

The only thing that scares Dawn more than being alone forever is… not being alone forever. And oh my goodness, when I heard that, it was like having my own innermost thoughts and feelings, ones I hadn’t even been able to voice to myself, being sung back at me by a redhead in oversize glasses.

Right now the way I’m getting through the day-to-day of life is by being okay being alone. By focusing on me, on Lyla, on building some kind of life for the two of us that looks and feels okay. By not allowing myself to want anything more than that — not even allowing myself to entertain the idea that there is anything more out there for me.

But then there’s that small part of me. The part that wonders if that’s enough for me long term — as a person who loves to love, who loved being one half of a partnership, who relished in the kind of contentment that only comes with the fulfilment of, as Balzac put it, “the heart’s eternal quest to be completely known and all forgiven”.

And like Dawn, I think I’m even more terrified of the prospect of finding that than I am of not finding it.

But still I can’t help from hoping 
To find someone to talk to
Who likes the way I am
Someone who when he sees me
Wants to again…

Letter to Mike – August 2021.

Hey My Heart,

Ten months came and went without me even noticing. I couldn’t believe it when I’d looked at the calendar and realised I’d missed the actual date. I thought about it in the run up, as I always do, but somehow the day itself escaped me. It was actually my first night in the house alone since you died – an incredible amount of time and a testament to the love and care our friends and family have shown me. And it was tough, I won’t lie – so in a way, I suspect my brain was protecting me by not allowing me to acknowledge the date. Combined, it might have been too much.

Ten months. Longer now than the period of time we went without contact before we got together. The longest I’ve gone without hearing from you since the day we met. And yet you are still such a presence in my life – still with me every day. I talk about you – and to you – every day. Not in a melancholy way – sometimes, but usually just… you’re there, part of my internal life, part of my routine. Where I used to talk to myself I now talk to you. And I like that. It’s a way of carrying you with me, always. A part of me.

I follow an amazing grief blogger on Instagram called Mira Simone. She, more than anyone, puts words to my experience of grief when I can’t. Her writing lifts me up and heals me, helps me to understand that no matter how it may feel, I’m not treading this path alone. It’s a well-worn one, walked by millions and millions of women and men before me. The other day she posted a video about what grief feels like which really resonated with me. She ended it with a simple fact: “grief is love”. Grief is love.

And that’s exactly it. As time goes on, my grief has become precious to me. It’s something I treasure, and nurture. Something I hold within myself. I wish I didn’t have to – of course I do, I wish more than anything you were still here, and me and Grief had never had to become acquainted. But that isn’t possible, and so now all I have is my grief – a marker of the love that we shared, the love for you that I still carry. That’s not to say I wallow in it – I don’t, I am positive and proactive and all the things you would want me to be. But I honour it. I feel privileged to be the person mourning for you, just as I felt privileged to be your person. You were beautiful, inside and out. You were wonderful. You were my soulmate. Grief is the price I have to pay for getting to love you, and I pay it gladly. You were worth it. You still are.

I love you, Mikey. I always have. I always will.

Your Ems 💖

Planning.

I’ve always been a planner.

With Mike, planning was easy. Because we knew so early on that we wanted to get married and have babies and all that good stuff, we were pretty strict about The Plan.

No, we weren’t going to go on holiday because Buy A House was in the plan, and that needed all our money. No, we wouldn’t stay in London because Have A Baby didn’t really fit in to that, and we knew we wanted to do that asap. It was all about The Plan. We knew what we wanted our life to look like, and dammit, we were going to get there.

Well.

That worked out well, huh?

I mean, it did, because I loved my life with Mike and I wouldn’t change it. I’m so glad we ended up in Northern Ireland, so glad he got those last years with his family and by his sea and so, so, inexpressibly, unfathomably, breathtakingly grateful that we had Lyla.

Beyond grateful.

But I realise now that all those years we were pouring absolutely everything into something that was, unbeknownst to us, never going to happen. And some of that energy (and money!) could have been used elsewhere, to make our daily lives more joyful, richer, more full of experience. Made the last years of Mike’s life about living, not striving.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to throw all thoughts of the future out of the window and stop planning altogether. Not only is that not sensible, it’s also so completely antithetical to my personality that it wouldn’t be possible! But what Mike’s death has taught me is that it doesn’t make sense to always be working towards a potential future at the detriment of the actual present that exists right in front of you.

Because the future isn’t going to look like you expect it to. It just isn’t. It might be worse, it might be better – but it will be different to the picture you have in your mind. You’ll be different, for a start. Your circumstances will be different, in ways you probably can’t even imagine. And all those carefully-laid plans – well, some of them will come to fruition, but others won’t, and even the ones that do might not make you happy in the way you imagine.

All we have is today.

I’m not saying I’m going to jump out of a plane every day or give it all up and go travelling, or anything. I don’t think every day has to be a stand out adventure. But I’ve realised that it’s important to make the most of every day – to find the small joys and suck the marrow out of them.

Because that’s all we’ve got, really. We have to do the long-term things – the working, the saving, the planning for the future – just in case.

But first and foremost, we have to be in today.

Just in case.

Quicksand.

Here’s where you get stuck.

So. Your life has changed completely and irrevocably. There’s no way of going back, no way of bringing back your person and having that life you had before. And you know that. Logically, you know that. But the problem is, that life was so good. It was so happy, and content, and comfortable. Everything was right. So of course, that’s your template for happiness. Everything about it is, as far as you’re concerned, an essential element to creating a happy life.

So what now? You’re looking at that life and desperately wanting to recreate it as soon as humanly possible because that’s happiness, right? And without all those elements you can’t be happy? So you just need to put all those elements back together and everything will be okay again, yeah?

Only – wait. Hang on. That big, central piece. The most important element of that life is gone and gone forever. And there isn’t another one.

I know. I know. I’m so, so sorry.

It sucks. It sucks beyond the telling of it. I know the pain it brings you. Because I’m there right now. As much as I wish it wasn’t true, it is. There was only one Michael Waring, and nobody – nobody – will ever be his particular combination of sweet, loving, funny, whimsical, silly, caring, generous, good, smart, and giving ever again. Nobody.

So here are your choices. Here are my choices.

Either we accept that nothing else could make us happy and therefore we’ll never be that happy again. Or we believe that we can find happiness in another way – not the same, but equally good – and we start making it happen.

This sounds like it’s leading to a positive, uplifting lesson but honestly? I’m not there yet.

My brain knows that’s the choice in front of me, and it knows which is the best path to take. But my heart hasn’t connected up with that yet. It’s still wavering between the “but-if-Mike-would-just-come-BACK” and “well that’s it, the happiest part of my life is over, I’ll just have to accept it”.

And it doesn’t really matter how much my head tells me that I need to try and find a new kind of happy – one that might feature another love one day, but equally might not, and might instead be filled with friends and passions and my beautiful little girl – I can’t make the rest of me get there any faster. In fact, trying to force it only makes it worse. Doing anything before you’re ready is excruciatingly painful and utterly pointless.

So for now, all I can do is keep putting one foot in front of the other and hope that eventually, I catch up with my brain.

Buckaroo.

Friday was A Very Bad Day.

Most days now I start off functioning okay, coping okay, but as ever, aware of the nagging presence of Grief, sitting there on my shoulder.

She’s still quite a new friend to me – other people I know have learned to live with her, even to value her as a reminder of the love they shared with their lost person, and I can see how that will happen, over time. But for now, she and I are still getting to know each other. Still learning to tolerate our various quirks and hang-ups. Still warily eyeing each other up and testing boundaries.

On Friday she was poking me a bit. Just a little. Nothing I couldn’t handle. A few intrusive thoughts. A few moments of that gutting sense of loss, under control as quickly as it arrived thanks to my honed distraction techniques and coping strategies that keep me from falling apart and allow me to carry on doing my job and caring for Lyla and getting things done.

But then things started to go wrong. Other, external things. A broken laptop. Some (mild) criticism at work about a slightly stressful project. Nothing huge at all. Things that, when Mike was here, I would have shrugged off, or at most gone and asked Mike to talk it through with me, got a hug and been reminded of what’s important in life.

Yeah. That’s not what happens now.

I completely fell apart. We’re talking sobbing, wailing, hyperventilating, even thoughts of suicide (don’t worry, I stayed safe, I have lots of coping strategies for that in place and they work and will continue to do so – but it’s been a long time since I’ve had the urge and it was frightening). I could not get my emotions under control. In the end I had to go and take a Diazepam – something I’ve not had to do for 6 months – and just crawl into bed and wait for it to pass.

So silly. Such a big reaction, for something so tiny. But it always is something tiny. A broken laptop. A child with a cold. A missed bus. An argument with a friend. A burnt dinner. Something so small that when you find yourself wracked with sobs you can’t quite believe it. Such an overreaction. So little resillience.

Did you ever play that kids’ game, Buckaroo? The one where you load the plastic donkey with hats and ropes and lanterns and firewood and, if I remember correctly, a banjo? And it would take everything without complaint until suddenly, without warning, something – one tiny thing – would tip it over the edge and it would buck and throw everything all over the floor?

Yeah. That’s basically what it is. All the time you’re carrying Big Stuff. The usual things that we all carry – working and parenting and day-to-day stresses and the joys of living in a global pandemic – but also my new friend Grief (and let me tell you, she is HEAVY). And next to her, your child’s Grief, because that’s a burden you have to carry as well. And it’s hard going, but it’s manageable – you’ve learned how to carry it, over the months or years. You can carry it and keep going.

But then someone adds something else, and it’s too much. It’s too much and you can’t help but buck, and, to be frank, lose your metaphorical shit.

What a mess.

But there’s no choice but to pick it all up again. Working and parenting and being a friend, they’re things we all have to carry. And Grief, of course – the burden you can’t put down.

So you gather it all, and you load yourself back up, and you wait for the next tiny thing. The rope. The lantern. The bloody banjo, for goodness’ sake. The tiny thing that tips you over the edge.

Buckaroo.

A scream.

I’m writing this on a phone so please forgive any typos and the inevitable brevity. This entry feels a bit like a scream I’ve been holding in for weeks and if I don’t get it out on paper it’s going to boil over into some kind of ugliness. So. Phone composition it is. Needs must.

What I’m struggling with is that life will never be as good again. How can it be? Mike was my soulmate in every sense. Everyone I speak to reminds me of that. That our love was something special. That many people never get to experience a love like it. That it was obvious from first meeting us that we were made for each other. I’ll never get that again. How could I? The chances of meeting Mike were so infinitesimal. The chances of meeting another person who sets my whole world alight, who completes and complements me in every way, who understands me and loves me wholly and fully and also happens to be the funniest, sweetest, silliest, most beautiful person I’ve ever met are essentially zero. They have to be. Nobody gets that lucky twice.

And then even if I did, even if by some miracle someone else came along who fulfilled me in that way and made me feel as loved as he did, they won’t be Lyla’s Daddy. They won’t love her in the way Mike did. They won’t have the shared memories of her infanthood, they won’t know how she liked to be sung to, how she used to do a little sigh in her sleep that sounded like a text alert tone, how we had to bounce her on a yoga ball to get her to sleep. They won’t be half of her. And on this fucking day, Father’s Day, that all seems more important than ever.

What I’m realising that is breaking my heart is that there’s no rule in life that things keep getting better. I think I always believed there was, and that they would. And they had – obviously we had been through tough times but ultimately the trend was upwards. Having Mike by my side was the security that life would keep getting better.

And now he’s not.

It feels impossible to go on with that knowledge, to know that I’ve hit the highest high and things can’t ever be that good again. That I’m almost certainly never going to find that kind of soul-deep connection, that intense love, that absolute wide-eyed adoration ever again. That my beautiful child will always be without her Daddy. It feels so pointless even trying, although I know I will, for Lyla. But it’s getting harder and harder. As the shock wears off and the hope gets extinguished, life gets duller and more painful. Every night now I go to bed with a headache from repressing tears all day, holding in this scream that is always threatening. Every night I have flashbacks to finding him, to screaming his name, to CPR and all the absolute horror that followed. Every day is bookended by that waking nightmare. And then I have to just get up and carry on and smile and interact with people and all the time I’m just internally screaming…

I just want to yell at everyone, shake them and ask how they can possibly be going on as normal when Mike, my Mike, my wonderful Mike is no longer in the world. I don’t want to be like that, full up with negativity and anger but I am. I worry that one day it’s all going to come spewing out, this toxic sludge of all the horrors I’m holding in, the flashbacks and the anger and the fear. And I have no idea what that will look like but I know it won’t be good.

Even now I want to minimise this, to say “it’s okay, I’ll feel better tomorrow, I just need some sleep”. But it’s not okay. I’m not okay. I’m drowning. And there’s nothing anyone can do because nobody can bring Mike back. Nobody can tell me – honestly and truthfully – that things will be okay, that I’ll be happy like that again, that Lyla will be okay. Nobody can hold this pain for me or stop the flashbacks or cure these fucking headaches. I have to just go on with it all. And it’s not fair. It’s not fair. He was the best thing in my life. The best thing in Lyla’s life. The best thing in the world. And now he’s gone and everything is worse and always will be.

How the fuck do I live with that?

With this ring.

What are you going to do with your rings?

Somebody asked me this quite early on and at the time my immediate reaction was “Wear them, of course.” In those first early days I couldn’t imagine a future without Mike and, in all honesty, the furthest I was planning on staying alive was the funeral. So my wedding and engagement rings stayed firmly on my finger, with his next to them on my little finger (thanks to his lovely slender piano-player fingers and my short stumpy ones!) – a weird reminder of where it had lived for the time he was in hospital where he was so thin he couldn’t wear his ring, so I wore it for him.

Now, though, we’re almost a month on and I’ve been starting to think about that question again.

I said yesterday that I don’t feel married any more, and I don’t. So looking down and seeing them on my left hand feels incongruous – like somehow I’m being deceitful. But equally I do still believe that Mike is my husband. I know that sounds contradictory but I don’t think it is. I’m not actively married. But I will love Mike forever, and when he died he was my husband, so he will always be my husband, just as he will always be Lyla’s Daddy even though he’s no longer able to actively parent her. I absolutely want a marker of that – something physical that shows the world that once, we were married, and we were so happy and in love that I can’t bear to NOT wear the rings that bound us together in some form.

So I’ve decided to have our wedding rings interlinked and put onto a chain, something I can wear forever to mark this very strange status I have of choosing to marry and then not choosing to be no longer married. I’ve found a local jewellers who can do that for me after Christmas, so until then both our wedding rings will stay on my left hand. I’m secretly quite pleased that I have to wait a little while as I don’t think I’m quite ready yet to take them off entirely.

But today I moved my engagement ring to my right hand, where I plan to wear it always. And it feels so strange. Because you wear them so constantly, wedding and engagement rings create a dent in your finger where they sit naturally, becoming so much a part of your hand that you can’t even tell they’re there. But when you first get engaged you’re so aware of the ring all the time, you can feel its weight on your hand. And moving mine to my right hand feels like that again. I notice it when I look down at the keyboard. I feel it every time I move.

It’s like I’m engaged again, only this time engaged to be widowed. Which sounds incredibly morbid but is actually comforting somehow. Like I’m saying to Mike, okay, we can’t be married any more but I’m always going to belong to you, and this is what marks that. With this ring, I thee mourn. A promise to always love him, to always be true to his memory. That no matter what happens in my future, this ring will sit on my right hand and be a reminder of the joy and happiness he brought me – as my partner, my fiancé, and my husband.

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