A little bit about me

Okay, so if you're reading this and know who Mikko was, you know who I was.

When he died, one of the hardest things for me to figure out was what I was supposed to be going forward. Mikko was my first husband, and I can say (with no disrespect to Anthony, with whom I now share my life) that I will never love anyone with the intensity and ferocity and sometimes-all-consuming-desperation that I have felt for "the Finn".

At the time he died, that marriage had ended in practice, although it endured in a legal sense. In daily life, Mikko had become the friend I saw more often than any other, who ran a late night bottle-o around the corner from my home in Carlton, who rang me three times a week to go for pizza, a glass of wine, a movie, a chat. He was the bloke I'd swing past to see when I needed a break from writing my final papers for my masters, and who rang me in those final weeks to say 'there's a new publican at Dan, and he's proper Irish. We gotta go - it's gonna be great again'. We still fought at swordfighting training and traded tales of our respective romantic adventures. He was the bloke who would walk me home and still have awkward moments, because sometimes each of us would forget that we weren't in a marriage any more, and 'nearly' hold hands, or kiss.

Whatever he and I had become, he was my best friend, and I miss him. I know I'm not the only one and my grief is, in many ways, no different to anyone else's. But he continues to dominate my thoughts. So much. So often.

I spent most of 2005 in a state that I can only describe as 'never very far from tears'. In 2006 I moved to the UK, found peace and a new level of reconciliation in our beloved Wien, finally saw Helsinki in the summer, and learned what it is to exist long hours from the place your heart calls home. Even now, three years on and still living 10,000 miles from Melbourne, surrounded by people who never met him, it often takes but a moment and an unwitting word to conjure up memories of happy days, or gutwrenching confrontations, and always that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when I'm reminded that he's not just 'not here' in Oxford, he's 'gone'. Hot tears flow thick and fast when I'm alone - on a bus, or by the Thames, or under my doona at night...

I'm trying, with all my heart and soul, to make this blog a record of the thousands of ways in which he changed the world for the better. If it inspires one person, or changes one life, I'll be pleased.

Invariably, sometimes it's just gonna be about the loneliness, which I live with nearly every day. But what can you do? If any of us gives in and follows him, all we do is prove him right. And it will never be all right with me that Mikko found this world such an awful and terrifying place that he had to take himself from it.

You were bright and brilliant - and right about many things, rakas Mikko. But leaving the world was not one of them. I hope that, wherever you are, you know that now, even though these days you're in a place where it no longer matters.

aina,
Gigisi