Enthusiasm

It’s been an odd few days, to say the least. The great thing about the internet is information can be communicated immediately, but the flipside to that is that information can be communicated immediately. Within hours of Andy R’s accident I, and many other people, knew about it. And then we waited to hear more. And waited. To her immense credit Jenni did a courageous job of keeping us informed but there was only so much she could do. I went to bed that night dreading the morning, half wanting to jump up and keep checking online and half wanting to just hide from the unthinkable, except it was all I could think about.

In the past you’d hear news like this after the event. Now you live it in real time from a great distance. The combination of being involved yet utterly powerless is horrible. Other than reporting the news in the areas where people who know Andy might see it, I couldn’t articulate what I was feeling. It was all so glib, my reaction so inconsequential, and worst of all, there was no firm basis on which to react. Writing this now feels so selfish and utterly pointless, but I need to do it, so it is selfish.

Andy is currently in limbo. He’s unconscious and will probably never wake up. If he ever does he will be a shadow of the man he was. His daughter Sophie wrote “He’s, in effect, dead.” Which is true – he’ll never be the man he was and that is just fucking awful – but he’s still breathing. Do we write the obituaries now? Do we mourn him? Should we mourn him while he’s still technically alive? What tense do we use for him now?

Am I beating myself up over these specifics because I just don’t know how to deal with this?

Despite it being one of the most gut-wrenching things I’ve ever read (I was flinching all the way) I’m grateful to Sophie for writing what she did. She did an important thing by drawing that line.

My favourite recent memory of Andy was at the Ladyfest Birmingham festival last year. He’d come up with a couple of friends and was crashing at mine, so I popped down to catch the end of the show. The gig turned into a cheezy indie disco and I watched this 40 year-old man in his trademark skinny-fit t-shirt bopping away in the midst of a predominantly female studenty crowd, thinking he really shouldn’t be able to get away with this, but he fits in perfectly. He combined the boundless enthusiasm of a teenager with the wisdom of a sage.

Last night I went to a party. It wasn’t a big party, more a gathering really, but it was at a student house and had a bonfire. We sat around the fire from 9pm to 4am drinking beer and then tea and talking about all sorts of stuff, some of it deep, some quite inconsequential. I didn’t talk about Andy but he was there. I think it was the sort of small but important thing he would have approved of. Just sitting and talking and coming away with, as he once put it, batteries recharged.

It might seem odd to some, but I think the best tribute to Andy is to just keep carrying on. To create, discuss, play, be alive and love life for all it’s oddness and essentialness. It seems to be a normal reaction to this sort of loss to feel the need to do something but Andy was someone who endlessly did something, who delighted in people doing something.

There are a couple of biggish examples of doing something in the pipeline. Andy and Sophie were planning a “music etc.” festival in Dalston for October which looks like it’ll go ahead, while something will be happening at the Caption small press comics convention next month which Andy had been involved with since its inception. For the latter I’d like to suggest dedicating the exhibition to him with work like Jeremy’s Get Well Soon strip, effectively having a place to remember him that doesn’t overshadow the event, since the enthusiasm Caption tends to generate is a tribute in itself.

And that’s how I’m going to try and deal with this. Just keep on going, feeding off the enthusiasm of others and giving it back many-fold, like Andy did.