But, you know, there’s a lot about pain associated with loving someone so much that had I known about the pain of love and someone gave me the choice, I think I might have gone without the love in order to avoid the pain.
So tell me about the pain.
The pain of losing Jess has turned me into a different person.
So tell us about Jess, tell me about Jess.
She was a sweetie. She was very bossy, eldest child, really bright, and when she was a child she was so happy. I was thinking about her today actually, because I think I mentioned to you before that I do find thinking about her really painful and I tend to not. But when she was about five, for Christmas she wanted fairy dust, because she was well into Peter Pan. She thought if she got fairy dust she could fly, like the kids in Peter Pan. And she kept going on and on and on about it and I think Ken and I were, we’re not going to be able to get fairy dust for her. So I kind of had to say apologetically, you know, it’s a film, we can’t really fly you know.
And I felt like I was letting her down because she was so full of joy, she kept talking about babies when she was about five, wanting babies, and I kept saying, oh, there’s time for babies, Jess. I wish I’d encouraged her now - not when she was five, but when she… I thought there’d be a long, long life for her to live. She was very switched on to injustice, I think our sort of politics have always tended to be a bit Left, quite Left, really, of centre. So she was suspicious of big business and privilege and all of that.
Well, she knew she had a privilege, she was very aware of that, but she was very much for all like justice and equality and she was going on marches and things like that, you know, she found dealing with politicians and looking at the news and stuff where they always say one thing and do another, she found that really upsetting, she was quite sensitive in that. And she used to talk about how the news was ruining her mental health, and I just thought, I thought she was being a bit of a wimp. I thought, well, for goodness’ sake, just turn it off then, you know. She was, yeah, she had friends, she was bright at school, she went to uni.
She was reasonably, well, I thought she was reasonably happy at uni. I knew she wasn’t typical, she tended to shut down her… she wouldn’t share her deepest thoughts. She’d get everybody else’s deepest thoughts out of them, but she had a way of closing her own away. Her close friends knew more than I did about her sort of turmoil, but it seemed that she had suffered with depression going back to schooldays, you know, going back to secondary school.
