Joining

 This weekend saw DC and me take my elderly and vulnerable parents to their grandson's wedding. My mother was determined to go despite the time travelling by car and the overnight stay required. My dad, who has Alzheimer's, followed most of what was going on but was clearly confused about relationships between people. He's less and less located in time, place and person. By contrast, my mother retains an encyclopedic mental map of who's who. She's always been bitterly disappointed that my brother moved to his wife's home city and they raised two boys alongside his wife's family. She knows names, life events and relationships of that family but feels she missed being a grandmother to the boys in the way she wanted. Not a great fan of weddings I wasn't keen to go but without me her dream of being at the wedding with all the fantasy she'd created around it would be dashed. Little choice then for me there. The wedding, in a castle complete with deconsecrated chapel ticked all the 'fantasy' secular elements... readers can imagine! For DC and me the wish to take part in such an affair is something of a mystery. Gone are the days when married life commenced in the church and the couple started to build a life together after the ceremony. These days couples are more often than not already wedded in real life and the ceremony is just a 'rubber stamp'. As a gay men in a relationship of over three decades I've had to negotiate a time when there was effectively no legal recognition of the life I was building. In fact, in the days of Clause and Section 28 it was described as 'pretend'. Pretend! Thankfully those day's are gone and same sex couples have the options of marriage, civil partnership or continuing as before with or without living wills, various ways of owning property etc. And so it was that I remembered my brother's wedding back in 1990. At that time I was still trying to put together the pieces of the jigsaw of my own incongruent masculinity. Without the picture on the box lid and without knowledge that a) there were happy viable alternatives to the closely policed norms and b) the process of putting the pieces together isn't the same as for the congruent. Soon after I would hear gay men observe that we can and indeed have to make our own rules. Except of course, that isn't exactly so. More accurately, we had to determine the nature of the water through which the congruent swim blindly and navigate the amphibian shores upon which we might find fertile ground to grow our lives. The decades have passed and observing my nephew's wedding in this context I was struck by the polished appearance of all these young people. They could have been chosen to be on the cover of a wedding magazine. Whereas I recall back in the day we were all more a mixture, now, gym toned, immaculately groomed and dressed the young are Facebook trained. A tyranny I was spared. Yes, certainly masculinity was policed far more closely than today but our general lives weren't expected to be performed on social media. And so it was that I contemplated how it feels to be in the second half of life surrounded by this first half of life energy. My sense was that it isn't so much age as the vast web of contingency that we really feel at such gatherings. For my mother the wedding was a day of immense importance and her being there a measure of her function as a grandmother and in some way a person. For me it was a bubble upon which images were projected and fantasies aired. Much the same could be said of a lot of what we think of as reality but here for a day there were people believing in a future based upon love. The script still seems to say that belief needs a classic wedding to be celebrated, but in our hearts we know that the celebration has been going on every day of the ten years the bride and groom have already been together. And TOGETHER is the word of the day really. Gathering together people feel part of rather than apart from. Except that together isn't a geographical thing, it's a heart thing. And that's the thing about my attendance at my brother's wedding. I wasn't really at home with myself and I wasn't really much of a part of his life. In this respect I wasn't together with, I was there, which isn't the same at all. Hopefully my mother feels she was together with at her grandson's wedding, because that is why it was so important to her.

I've said in the past of DC and me that we've woven together three cloths - the life and personhood of each of us and a shared life of our relationship. We are who we are because of those we've been with - no man is an island. The task before us is to weave with love but so often I know that for my own part, fear has driven the shuttle. Which provided that wisdom is picking the thread, might not be as much a problem as it can seem. But none of us know the the final cloth of our lives, for it extends beyond what we think of as our life. Maybe in a secular wedding, without the overarching notion of something greater than ourselves, this very aspect of our humanity can be lost more easily. But hopefully, we can all remember often enough, that we're not as separate as we think.