Month: April 2023

I hadn’t been sleeping for ten nights. It had gotten bad. Really bad. I was almost hallucinating. I had planned time off work but with no sleep and shite weather the week was difficult and disappointing.

There is always an underlying reason why I can’t sleep. There’s always lots of shit going on but sometimes there’s more than usual. Stuff takes time to process.

On 8^th April I messaged Barbara. Barbara is my old therapist who I have a friendship with. You’re not supposed to have outside relationships with your therapists. But I’ll explain.

Barbara and I worked together for seven years in the early 1990s. Most of those years was four times a week on her couch. As friends much, much later she told me that she’d regretted the couch work. She thought I could have been helped better had I had more of her gaze. But who knows? Barbara re mothered me. Re parented me. She did a fantastic job. I struck lucky when she took me on as her client. I was a shitty mess. She was instrumental in helping to turn my life around.

When we ended our therapy we kept in touch. I sent her a photo of my son Oliver when he was born. She always replied with sheer delight.

After a few years of performing stand-up poetry and comedy (it was Barbara who encouraged my creative side) I broke into the therapy/ comedy scene. Advertising myself as ‘Therapist by Day/ Comedian by Night’.

One Saturday I was doing a show at the Guild of Psychotherapists. It was a benefit gig for their reduced fee scheme. Barbara came to see me perform and wallowed in her ex-client making a packed room of therapists laugh out loud. She was so proud. Like your Mum would be.

Our friendship developed from there. We always thought we were being a bit naughty despite our therapeutic work having ended so many years before. Whatever might the strict Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalytical psychotherapists say?

Barbara retired soon after our ending. She went on to work as a volunteer for mental health organisations and at the Globe. Twice, years later, she came to watch my kids perform at the Globe youth theatre. Once when I’d had a rather nasty MS attack, and couldn’t work, she sent me a cheque for £1000 to spend on a yoga retreat. Actually, she did this twice! Naughty Barbara.

Since her health deteriorated our contact continued in email form. We shared our poetry and weekly or monthly thoughts. Especially during the pandemic.

After 8^th April I hadn’t heard from her. I knew she’d opted out of chemotherapy for cancer. She was 91. She’d had enough. She was having palliative care. But for how long? How long had she got?

On Monday 17^th I received an email from a friend of hers. She had died over a week ago. I was shocked, still am, but relieved I now know.

Despite the news and exhausted from lack of sleep, I attended my usual Monday yoga session. Our regular teacher was off sick and a new young teacher was taking the class. Turns out her name is Barbara. She has bright pink hair, just like the colour of my Barbara’s DM’s (she wore outside of the therapy room). My Barbara was like the Vivienne Westwood of Therapists.

I told yoga teacher Barbara I was tired and had just heard about the death of my friend, also called Barbara.

“Just do what you can,” she said.

I put my mat down, claiming my space in the room. The class was unusually quiet. Just eight of us. A man came and put his mat next to mine. I’d seen him once before a few weeks ago. I remember men more because there aren’t many that go. We’d exchanged pleasantries.

“Don’t be alarmed if I start crying,” I said. “I’ve just lost my friend Barbara. It’s uncanny we have a Barbara teaching us today.”

“My God mother died in January. She was called Barbara too,” he said.

Barbara’s are cool.

The yoga session was amazing. Me the man and alive Barbara chatted outside. Yoga Barbara was concerned she’d be the next Barbara to die. Me and the man decided she had the good Barbara spirit within her and not to worry. Our Barbara’s lived long lives.

That night I slept and have slept since. My Barbara is at peace. I will never replace this relationship or our unique spiritual bond. I am missing her already.

Soon I will hear about the funeral arrangements and where she will be cremated. I’ve never been to a funeral where I know absolutely no one. How strange it will be alone. Barbara and I shared the love of ‘Harold and Maude’. An unusual and beautiful film. Watch it if you haven’t. It’s about another unique relationship with life and death and lots of funerals.

“I’m anxious about going to the funeral not knowing anyone,” I said to my husband.

“You’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s just like going to a party when you don’t know anyone.”

“But the person hosting is usually alive,” I said. “Normally they introduce you to at least someone.”

We laugh and like Barbara, he is there. And if he doesn’t have to work I know he would come with me. The most important thing is that someone is there. Thinking of you.

Thank you Barbara for being there for so much my life.

“It’s been here for one hundred and fifty years,” the Pharmacist said. “The only shop in the street not to get blasted in the war.”

“That’s amazing,” I say.

The Pharmacist points to a black and white photo above the shop counter.

“One hundred and fifty this year?”

“That was five years ago,” she corrects herself.

“So, it’s one hundred and fifty-five years old,” I say.

“Yes.” She smiles.

The Pharmacist wears a long black wig that flows over a bright orange shirt that hangs over black leggings. She has bright and open eyes.

She holds my hands in her lap.

How many folks have walked in and out of this shop? I wonder. How many folks has this woman listened to?

“I’ve worked here twenty-eight years.” She reads my mind.

“I reckon you’ve saved a fair, few, lives,” I say.

“During Covid I did save a man. He couldn’t get a face-to-face appointment with his doctor. He came back into the shop weeks later to tell me he was going to take his life but I’d turned things around for him. His wife is now pregnant.”

 A young man knocks on the shop door. She opens it and he walks in.

“Do you have any calamine lotion?” He asks.

“No,” she replies. “Two months now. Have you tried Boots?”

“Yes,” he says. “And three other chemists.”

“There’s been a chicken pox pandemic,” she says.

I remember when my daughter had chicken pox.

“Is it for a child?” I inquire.

“Yes, my son.”

“You could try getting some porridge oats, putting them in a stocking and then soaking them in the bath. It soothed my baby. She was only six months. I remember her up all night crying. The oat bath really calmed her.”

“Just porridge oats?”

“Yes,” I confirm.

The man leaves. I am in need but can still help others.

“The war, Brexit, and the aftermath of the pandemic has got us in this state,” the Pharmacist says. “Now, where were we?”

“We were talking about fear,” I said.

“Ah, yes. False Evidence which Appears Normal”

“That’s brilliant. Can I write that down?”

She hands me a Fosters and Son’s pen and a packet of post-it notes. I write down FEAR then hand back the pen.

“Keep it,” she says. “I have loads.”

The pen has the Pharmacist’s name, address and number on it.

“And you know what FINE stands for?” I ask her.

“No.”

“Fucked up and In Need of Emotional support.”

“I love that,” she says.

I’ve been in the chemist for an hour and a half. I came in to buy more pills for insomnia. The Pharmacist looked at me with her open eyes and I burst into tears. She shut up the shop, sat me down, pulled out another chair, made me a cup of jasmine tea and gave me a bottle of water and a packet of tissues.

I’ve had insomnia for three months and am going quite mad. I’ve tried everything. I’ve stopped working for the summer. Can’t work. Please don’t start with suggestions. I’ve got the book ‘Breaking Insomnia Without Really Trying’. I didn’t try and it didn’t work. I tried and tried and tried again even though I knew I’d tried everything before because I already knew what would be in the book before I got the book but I didn’t trust myself that I knew. I am mad. But I believe we are all mad.

“We are all in the departure lounge, waiting for our plane,” the Pharmacist says. “Live life, don’t worry, be happy. You don’t want to be the richest person in the graveyard.”

She shows me her bracelet.

“I put it on my left arm when I want to block out others, and my right to give out.”

The bracelet is on her right arm.

“Life is a series of stages and pages. Don’t allow an event in life to affect your future. The top of the mountain is the bottom of the next.”

I tell Yvonne my book is with a publisher and I’m worried about rejection.

“Sometimes doors shut because you’re ill prepared.”

I wonder how prepared I really am.

“Take the beam out of your own eye before you look at the speck in yourself”

How much more inner work can I do? Jesus.

The Pharmacist squeezes my hands and prays for me.

Five weeks on and I have turned a corner. I’ve been seeing the Pharmacist’s recommended acupuncturist and have slept for many solid nights. I had a comedy rebirth in a pool in Corfu. My friends reparenting me as I came out of the water. I’ve got in touch with more pre verbal trauma that surfaced during Covid. It is our bodies that remember our earliest traumas. Left haunted. Unable to sleep. As a baby.

My new therapist (see blog about the old one) says she is honoured to have worked through this nightmare with me. And it began with a nightmare. A spider so big and so real I jumped out of bed, screamed and woke my husband. He checked the bed.

“There’s nothing there. You were dreaming,” he reassured me.

It was so fucking real.

The disturbance caused me to looked deeper. There is always a reason.

I sent the Pharmacist a postcard when I was in Corfu.

Shall I go and see her when I run out of sleeping pills? Or take her a copy of my book when it gets published? The pills don’t work anyway. But the Pharmacist’s prayers do. It will be the latter.