I’ve seen the film twice; once at the cinema, when I was inconsolable afterwards and then, at home, sitting in bed. On both occasions I watched it alone. I do feel it’s a masterpiece, but I do not have the knowledge or the skill to comment in depth on film-making, so thought I would explain instead what it meant to me.

I must tell you that this account will contain spoilers but also that I am speaking frankly of illness, death and bereavement. I am also, for the purposes of this piece, not commenting much on the queer trauma that is also at the heart of the film, so beautifully realised alongside plangent period detail – all of which had me howling. I thought it was wonderful as queer romance. I might write about that elsewhere.

So, over a period of four and half years, late childhood slipping into adulthood, I lost all my immediate family, including my parents fourteen months apart from one another. My father died first, suffering in circumstances that had been very frightening for me – and he died in a way that might be best described as devoid of medical control. Noone ever spoke to me about it. I internalised that terror. But we will come back to that. My mother reacted to his death by turning inward and resenting me even more than she already did. It was complicated, painful and frightening. When he died, I was not invited to sit with her or my sibling in the church and we will return to that one too. I was a teenager. When my mother died, I lost the whole of my father’s family because they broke contact with me. My aunt said simply, ‘We won’t be seeing you again now.’ Like something out of a play. I had just thrown dirt into my mother’s grave. I listened to this. I thought only that I did not know what to do with it yet. Then, my much older sibling began to distance themself from me, before eventually breaking contact. I did not have my much loved godmother to tell, because I had lost her too. The only photograph I have of me as a baby being held is by her, not by my mother. I always felt that told me a lot.

There are many complications here; much dysfunction: a lot I just do not know about. There were some desperately twisted narratives which I have explored elsewhere. I always felt, and was led to believe, that I was a blot on my parents’ lives, particularly on my mother’s. But you see I still respected a lot of the things they were and I still loved them and yes: some terrible things had happened that I am still getting over today. Remember that I said I loved them too.

I know this part of my piece is chilling, I want to tell you things that are intensely optimistic, so stay with me. I used the word ‘yet’ when I said I did not know what to do about being told, graveside, that I would not be seeing a whole side of my family any more.

I know now. At some point I decided there were some things I would do and I had a resolution there; it took me a long time to know how to fulfil it. I think things were broken in my immediate family. That it was traumatic – of course it was traumatic: my whole being has been governed by the impact of developmental trauma because my brain and my litany of physical responses have been conditioned to act in a way that is not conducive to good health or living. Before I knew how to fix any of that, I still thought – I was absolutely sure – that at some point I could.

I thought that my heart could contract and I could hand this on; this pain. Or that it could expand so that I could give and receive love. I also tried to think about what darkness could teach me. Humour? Tactics? More empathy for others? I acknowledged that, in me, was a gleam of intense optimism because I was acknowledging that herein was choice, to be enacted however faltering. I also learned gradually to breathe through feelings of terror and to know how to access the support that would help me deal with my fragmented memory. Trauma memory, we know, is not linear; because of that I lived half in the past and when I did, on a fully sensory level, through flashbacks prompted by a smell, a cold face, some comments – many things. I also gradually learned that I could make myself and not be a composite of other people’s opinions of me. This is what I was. Love – the acceptance that goes with true love – changes all that too. It’s a part of a moving through.

In the film, Adam’s heart, his pain, his early loss: it’s all compact, there and at the core. He feels this hard lump of it, like granite – I know that; I know it so well – and is aware of the way in which his life is predicated on it. If not granite, it’s like an embolus of fear, always there. He is alone. More to the point he is lonely. There are only two people in the block of flats. It is writ large. So quiet. It is through meeting Harry, who is kind, intuitive and deeply sad because he has ‘drifted to the edges’ of his family, that Adam begins to unlock a sense of being out there, laughing, loving, sensuality, identity. He has the opportunity to see his parents again, which I found chilling and deeply beautiful. I had no chance and never will have a chance to say goodbye lovingly to either of my parents; there was no opportunity for talk, healing, fo anyone to say, as I write in my novel Saving Lucia, ‘You are my child. And I am sorry. I am sorry.’ Moreover I had no witness, as Adam, ultimately, has Harry – because Harry sees Adam’s parents too. However, later I had Mr Bookworm. my husband, who listened imaginatively – and still does this.

Adam is a scriptwriter. When we meet him, we learn he has been trying to write something about his parents. A story. Did he invent them into being in order to understand? A narrative. Something (that word again) linear? Did he also invent Harry? Reviews describe them all as ghosts. Perhaps. But what substantial ghosts, operating in the world of the living, either already aware of their tenuous link on this world, like Adam’s parents, or about to experience that, as with Harry. However you interpret this, it is beautiful and very optimistic. Yes. Optimistic.

I have seen people writing about how the film was too painful for them or dreary or too bleak. This was not my experience. It was a film about love and how we may receive it, which is the best of us. We cannot grieve without love and, sometimes, we cannot love without grief. It is good to speak of this openly. Because there is an opportunity, no-one is alone in the film, at the end. Not his parents, who have the chance to say what they need; not Adam – who also gets to comfort them about how they died as they slip away (he is not entirely truthful, of course) from him. Furthermore, he is able to be with Harry, who has died alone, unfound, unnoticed by his own family. And Adam is different. He has been through a terrifying process – the film does not baulk at this – and regardless of whether it is also the story of a man who knows how to invent a narrative, he is loving and he is smiling. His heart is also changed. ‘I should have let you in. That first night’ he says to Harry. ‘But I was scared.’

No-one here dies alone. There is some ambiguity, I think, in whether Adam has also died or was dead all along. There is a spaciousness in the supernatural here. I do not need to be sure.

I said before, your heart can contract or there can be an expansion. What happened to me, in complicated circumstances, did me irreperable damage, but gradually, through professional help and by keeping myself open, things were altered. Broken, but beautiful. If you follow me on social media, you may recognise this phrase. It’s what I want for all of us. We cannot avoid death, or pain, or fear, but we can make the circumstances available so that, however broken we are by loss or suffering, we can still integrate and still create things. We can still love.

In my case, I came to think that I sat in the world awkwardly, with the mess inside my head – but I would do it anyway. I have some lovely extended family, my friends, my boys. I tried to take the pain and make it my teacher, so that I could be more sensitive in my work – from secondary teaching through to creative writing mentoring now. When eventually I started writing, only a few years ago, I developed a strong autobiographical thread, much immersed in magical realism, because that was the mode entirely natural to me. I came to understand more about trauma and, when I felt ready, to think about how I could explore my books in contexts. That is what my PhD is about.

Along the way I met and married a man who asked me for directions in the street and had three children with him. That was a considerable risk. Wildly impulsive. There was something in me which had not withered: I was able to take that risk. It is our silver wedding anniversary this July. I want to say that it is a wide world and there are always more people to love: love is pure gift. It is always ubiquitous, but no less precious for that. We may feel because of trauma, of not being loved, of loss, that it cannot be experienced and felt fully. We may have been separated out, as I felt, and made to feel we are not loveable. That is not so. My experience is the opposite of all this.

Back to the film. It is a profoundly affecting piece of work. As a study of trauma, loss, love, identity and measuring so sensitively the atmosphere, the temperature of a period of time.

There is one thing I hope. That there will be people watching who feel less afraid of their end; of others’. And I want to offer you a few lines from a story. I am a writer, like Adam. It’s about loss and the fear that it engenders. Also, that if you can tell stories, have vocabularly, speak openly, ‘you will not be alone.’

‘Care for your own heart and devise a vocabulary for your loss, unique to you. It comes to us all, but with a word-hoard, you will not be alone. Remember too, that in darkness, as I have seen, there are navy and lavender lights and a star which laughs.’ (‘A Gravedigger’s Lament’ – from Ravished)

The film ends, lovers, friends, together on the bed as darkness deepens. But there are stars in the sky outside. And then there are more.

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