you do it to yourself

This is a line from a Radiohead song which would play in my head everytime I looked at M in her industrial humming hospital bed that took up the whole of the front room so that noone else could sit in there comfortably with her.

It's true. She did it to herself. And I knew she knew that because at no point did I ever hear her complain or express bitterness about her situation, though I once overheard her - J put up a curtain between the front room and the kitchen to give her privacy, but she seemed to think that because we couldn't see her once it was drawn, we couldn't hear her either - I once overheard her say to a visitor, "I keep thinking - naaaaah! This ain't happening."

And that's one of the things she must have been thinking about as she lay there, before the morphine dosage shot up from happy to high, to terrified and terrifying. I know too that while she could still think at all, she must have been thinking of the other things she did to herself in her unhappy life, the things she did to herself that fucked up her children's lives.

After 3 months of working up the courage to make his decision, J is leaving me. Yesterday J came up to pack his things. He told me about a funeral his friend attended recently. There is a tradition in the dead man's community that at funerals the names of close male friends or family members of the deceased are read out. The people named are then taken to a place where all the other mourners beat them up. J's friend left the funeral with four broken ribs. J said, "It's to hide the pain."