Have just read a message on ILE written by someone who survived the tube bomb that killed Liz. She says she is sure that Liz won’t have known anything about it, given where she was on the train etc. I am grabbing on to this thought tightly – one of the things I couldn’t bear but couldn’t stop thinking about was whether Liz had suffered, whether she was in pain, knew she was going to die, what went through her head...It's nearly three weeks ago now but it feels more like three days. 14:29 . . .
In the end I had so many thoughts in my head that I had to write something down. It's long and rambling and selfish, but I need to put it somewhere:During the week after the bombings it felt like we had stepped into a parallel universe. The world I knew was not one where Liz, of all people, could go missing – it just wasn’t like her. For the first day I was convinced that she was helping out somewhere, dispensing medicinal alcohol, arcane folk wisdom and brisk sympathy. She was just too practical and knowledgeable for anything to harm her. And too vibrant, talented, alert, too in love with life, for it to be taken from her so violently and randomly. Nobody deserved that death, but Liz? It was impossible to process.I spent large periods of time that week not thinking about it. I couldn’t bear to check the Internet for updates, but made Matt do it for me. I told myself I was hoping, but really I think I was just fearing. The world felt even more surreal and changed than ever – all the more so because Matt and I had only been married a week, we were still on honeymoon and had no routine and nothing to do but spend our wedding money in Habitat. Nothing was real. Some of the time I was still euphoric, and in my more realistic moments feeling damn lucky.On Friday the confirmation came that Liz had been killed. If anything I went into even stronger denial – if this was the stupid, evil parallel universe it felt like, then surely we would return from it soon to our own world and Liz would be alive. At the same time I started desperately gathering together photos, and trying to recall all the fragments of memory. I wanted somehow to construct a whole picture of Liz out of these moments and images – though I realise now that she will always resist that exercise. ‘Larger than life’ is a meaningless cliché, but it was true of Liz. She was greater than the sum of her parts, she could embrace whole worlds with her questioning mind and her big heart.I spoke to Rob on, I think, the Sunday. Couldn’t think of anything to say except ‘sorry’. Every time I thought of what he and Liz’s family were going through I felt sick. Newspaper and radio coverage didn’t speak to me at all – it seemed all too abstract when anyone said we would not be scared or defeated, or let our ‘way of life’ be threatened. I do feel scared, and defeated, and threatened.On Monday I went back to work. Another cliché, but I felt impossibly distant from my colleagues, despite (maybe because of) their kindness and sympathy. Then I would think about Liz’s family again, and feel that in comparison with their pain I too was just looking in from outside. I spent a lot of time – probably too much – reading ILE and talking on instant messenger that week. Reading ILE felt supportive and moving in one way, but as the week went on and the thread about Liz got longer and longer, I couldn’t help feeling swamped in words that with every new post lost some of their impact. It was wonderful to see that Liz had touched people who had never met her, but sadness is not the same thing as grief. It feels churlish to write that. It was just strange the way that circles of friends, acquaintances, cyberfriends and well-wishers were artificially collapsed into one long list of messages. And yet it still wouldn’t be long enough. On Wednesday or Thursday an obituary of sorts appeared in The Times. It was so damn short it broke my heart.I walked around at work that week feeling ugly and wrong; it felt like people’s eyes were just sliding off me, like I was practically effaced by the horror of what had happened to someone I knew. People don’t want to see it. (This is silly and fanciful, of course.)On Friday we went to the funeral. As I got out of the car and saw that it was really happening I felt completely stunned. Then there was a tension in my stomach, a knot of disbelief that didn’t go away all day. The service was beautiful and terrible; I was amazed that Liz’s mum and dad and Rob all managed to talk about her without breaking down. We learned so much about Liz, but it felt like we knew it already in a way. There was a great feeling of unity and support among all of us, I think, no wrong note struck, no dissent – how could there be? Liz was so clearly everything good that was said about her. She was a polymath who never said or did anything just because it was cool, she had no tolerance for pretension or pseudery. She pursued interests because she loved them, it was as simple as that. She spent so much of her time creating, whether in the form of words, pictures, music or baked goods, that it feels even more desperately cruel that she was caught up in such destruction.After the service I spoke to a lot of people, some of whom I hadn’t seen for a very long time. It felt terribly sad that it took Liz’s funeral to bring us together, but in a way it was like we’d never been apart. There are some strong bonds there, and we’d be there for each other in other circumstances I feel sure. As we sat on the grass, Sinister old hands who’d maybe first met and sat on the grass together 8 years ago, Liz’s absence ached but her presence was everywhere as well. Thank god, we managed to laugh and be ordinary and perhaps look ahead to when we can all enjoy our lives again without sadness or guilt – Liz would have approved of the booze and the pastry I ‘m sure.One of the first things I thought when I got the confirmation that Liz was dead was ‘well, that’s that then: there is definitely no god’. I still think that, but on Friday I think I saw something that was equally worth putting faith in. 16:07 . . .
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