Goodbye Lawrie
It was the fact that he had been killed in a fire that set his death apart from other friends I've "lost"- even those who took their own lives. The image of my friend being engulfed in flames was hard to dismiss. This morning, after not seeing anything on Facebook etc, I contacted the person who'd got in touch last night and begged him to tell me it was a mistake. He confirmed that our friend had been retrieved from his burning house, but had died on the way to the hospital.
I cried last night. UGLY tears. I cried when I facetimed a mutual friend whom I knew was even closer to Lawrie than I was. I didn't expect to, it just happened. I am NEVER that openly emotional. Again, it was the image of the manner of Lawrie's death which, I think, tipped that balance. One of the reasons I've struggled with grief is that I find it performative and ritualistic. There are things to be said to elicit expected responses with which I have never been comfortable. Too often, expressions of grief seem to be for the benefit of onlookers. I avoid situations where I am expected to intone words and phrases which feel disingenuous as they leave my lips. It might come across as having less feeling, when in reality, what I FEEL is a painful void. I found myself thinking that I didn't cry about my mother's death... In some ways, it was a relief (!). -Yes, a relief for me!!! My mother was a faint shadow of the imperious woman who raised me by the time she died. She was not happy. She might have been happier if I had looked after her more than (just?) paying for key bills etc, but I was 350 miles away. Also, her death, though sad, was almost expected, and, although I think she was found on the floor having fallen out of bed, she did in the comparative comfort of a 'care home', not in a burning house.
Lawrie was fun, gifted, complicated, difficult, a clown, a Poy Boy, often misunderstood and taken for granted. It had come to a head a few years ago when he just cut himself off from the 'communities' with which he'd been involved e.g. ECC and The Radical Faeries. I don't think he had fully recovered from an incident twenty or so years ago when he was accused of hypnotising someone at an ECC event so that he could have improper access to them. It was rubbish. It transpired that the small, cute and well liked "victim" had a cocaine habit none of us even knew about. Immediately afterwards, as part of his 'recovery' the "victim" severed ties with ECC etc and Lawrie was blamed even more.
I remember playing digeridoo with Lawrie, body painting, juggling and poy. A friend commented wryly that it was somehow fitting that Lawrie would die by fire; he was fascinated and had had a couple of near misses in the past. He flirted outrageously with me when we first met- even though I was with my partner, he was the kind of guy who would do that BECAUSE he knew there was little chance of it developing; he liked the game. Having said that: he did end up with a guy with a similar skin tone to me... I confess here that I never thought that relationship was healthy, but that is as much about my thoughts that this guy was... Well, I thought that he might have been using Lawrie and I also thought he was 'on the spectrum', which is NOT to say that I did not like him, I think that when he left Lawrie, it hurt him badly.
I think it was just before the first lockdown that Lawrie formally returned, (albeit a bit at arm's length) to some semblence of society. Gary, who contacted me was probably most responsible for that, he refused to give up on him and encouraged me to contact him. I sent him messages etc which I could see he had read, but he never responded directly.
What a loss. Lawrie was a true individual, a one off. I feel gutted- like someone scooped my guts out.
I
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