On Losing Friends and Finding Words

Jackie Hagan, Kathryn Bevis, and poetic form.

Trauerlachenschmerz

I’d love to tell you that “grief-laughter-hurt” is in common usage in Germany, but I just made it up. Jackie Hagan died on June 20^th. Though her death was expected, I still cannot believe the words “Jackie Hagan died”.

Kathryn Bevis died on May 14^th. WTAF. I haven’t yet found the words for one deeply loved friend’s death, before another comes along. It makes me want to say something about buses, which is probably because I’m thinking about Jackie. She could find laughter in anything -

she could find anything in anything, could Jackie. I met her – and Steve Lyons - at the end of the nineties, in Rosie Garland’s weekly writing workshops. We had a friendship in several stages: first, mad youngish things discovering words and the Manchester scene (though Jackie didn’t discover it, she met it, loved it, slapped it around, changed it and ruled it); then trying-hard-to-get-and-keep-our-shit-together-in-our-thirties as Jackie lost her leg and was later diagnosed and I went through the sorts of things I’ve written about in Flood; then in the last few years, a more distant friendship based on watching her live through one of the most atrocious medical conditions with breathtaking courage and creativity, and with occasional bomb-blasts.

Kathryn’s “Butterfly House” offers us a path into, if not through, the grief of her passing -   

“You will survive like small boys pulled,

thank god, from a flooded cave by Navy Seals,

like Wonder Woman, loosing her ties only

a beat before being splashed across the tracks,

or like an orca, beached and calling to its pod

from the rocky shore”

(from “You Will Survive”, Seren 2024).

Jackie didn’t get to write that book, and I wish to God she had. But her stage shows and her social media posts reached and changed thousands of people. Here’s one of her final posts, written in May, months into a hospital stay:

“I love this rain. I am going to wash my hair one day and it will be amazing. My hand still doesnt work but at this point its like being a kid who is used to getting nettle stung. Im going to brush my teeth and im going to drink a pint of squash and stretch and let all the little critters scurry out of me and find somewhere else to live but not before they get sat around the wonky birdcatcher with acorn cups of squash going "OMG!"

I’m not even going to attempt to paint a full picture of Jackie, and her legacy. That will have to come over time, because Jackie was a solar flare and a dormouse and a lovely sofa and a battlefield and loads more. But Clare Beloved got me out of bed this morning telling me it’s time to find the words, and Conor Aylward suggested that the German language probably has some sort of compound noun for the laughter and the hurt, and that poetry, with its infinite possibilities of form and music, is the best way I know.

After my mother died, and my ferocious migraines started, I fell out of love with reading. It had been a particularly co-dependant lifelong relationship, and finding myself unable to read more than a book every couple of months was a profound loss and a big shift in my identity. I’ve had around five years of reading very slowly and sporadically – relying largely on audiobooks. But the last few weeks of intense grief and burnout have returned me, somehow, to the act of reading - often with a pint, in the company of my post-GCSE teen, in the pub.  I’ve just finished Airea D.Matthews’ Bread and Circus, Jodie Hollander’s Nocturne, and Amanda Dalton’s Fantastic Voyage - and I would be reading Kathleen Jamie’s Cairn if the teen didn’t keep on stealing it.

And of these wildly varied books are a beautiful, genius lesson in form, and how it can hold almost anything – philosophy, illness, neglect, love, 18^th century economics, abuse, racism, post-structuralist linguist theory, trauma, and in Amanda’s case, the grief  of losing a life partner, which finds both its metaphor and form in water. Like Conor just said to me in a text – “We need crutches to talk/walk around death”, and as one of Jackie’s closest people, he should know. As I’m writing this piece, Conor and I are also texting each other about Jackie’s Game Changing Lesbian Tea Break. I’ll leave that one with you.

And for the paid subscribers, I’ll also leave you with a new prompt based on an unpublished, unfinished hybrid piece, and the invitation to use prose or poetry to create your own creature of grief.

Thank you for reading. Take care.