I saw Sheer Mag again this week, but this isn't really about that, although maybe it is in some mystical structural sense whose meaning I can't discern. The last time I saw Sheer Mag play live was seven years ago, the weekend after Nick and I started dating. He came with me. The band had released their first album a week before, on the day of our first date; they released their second album a little over two years later, a few days after we broke up; and they released their third album earlier this year, on the weekend between Nick's hospitalisation and his death, aged 32, the following Wednesday. The gig this week came five months to the day after his funeral.
I don't know what to make of this, that the three biggest milestones of the nearly seven years I knew Nick can be mapped so precisely to one band's discography. I also don't know what to make of the last time I was in Ireland before his funeral having been when I travelled to Dublin in 2016 for a screening of The Tree of Life with live orchestral accompaniment, and the message telling me Nick had been hospitalised coming as I was sitting in a Glasgow cinema waiting for another screening of The Tree of Life to begin; or that I went to that Dublin screening with Steve, one of my longest-standing friends, and the weekend following Nick's death I found myself in London staying at Steve's home, the first time I'd seen him in a year, a trip that had been planned months in advance.
I like Sheer Mag fine, particularly that first album and the earlier EPs, but I wouldn't say I have an especially close connection to them, which makes their structuring omnipresence even stranger. I wasn't really in the mood to be listening to Thin Lizzy-inspired political punk either in August 2019, when I was moping over the end of a relationship, or in March 2024, when one of my closest friends was in hospital fighting for his life, so I didn't give either second or third album much more than due diligence; or, to put it another way, the odds aren't particularly high that I would be listening to Sheer Mag in any given week regardless. They've just always seemed to turn up at these fulcrums, unbidden.I do know, ultimately, that none of this means anything other than my subconscious trying desperately to impose some kind of pattern on a situation that still feels incomprehensible five months later. There's no Pynchonian web connecting it all. Sheer Mag aren't to Nick and I what Tyrone Slothrop's dick is to V-2 rocket strikes, even though it feels like that. An awful thing happened that I can't explain. That's it. Much of the time, that's all anything is.
I feel I should point out, at this juncture, that Nick and I remained very close even after we split, and that this isn't me dwelling in the long-gone idea of a relationship. We were together for two years, but we were friends for over twice as long as that after the fact, to the point where I've found I can't really remember much of the day to day from our time together. I'll look back on calendar entries of things I know we did together and think 'but what else did we do that day? Did I stay at his or did he stay at mine? Did we eat?' I can remember us as friends much more clearly.
Maybe that's why one of the main things I've struggled with over these last few months is accepting that I'm entitled to my grief. I think of Nick's parents, his brother and sister-in-law, his niece and nephew, his partner, his friends from back home who knew him far longer than I did, and wonder where I fit. Our existing relationship - a former couple who remain the closest of friends after splitting, even when each starts another long-term relationship - was complicated enough to raise eyebrows without the added complexity of mourning. I've lost a friend, sure, someone I spoke to almost every day, but I haven't lost a son, a brother, an uncle, the love of my life; what business do I have still feeling like this for months afterwards? He had hundreds of friends, right?
Some clarity came from a recurring annoyance in people's condolences in the weeks after Nick's death. A constant refrain, as friends and acquaintances would tell me how sorry they were for my loss (again, felt weird about having it described as my loss, as if I had exclusive ownership of it), was that Nick was 'such a lovely guy, never had a bad word to say about anyone'; and reliably, every time, I would think, but never say, 'Nick? Never had a bad word to say about anyone? Nick? The most delightedly bitchy gossip I've ever met?'
It took me weeks of increasing frustration to come to the realisation that this wasn't just a hagiographic flattening of a complex human being who I knew more fully than just about anyone else I've ever known; to most people Nick really was someone with nothing bad to say about anyone, because that's how flawless his presentation was. His media training would kick into gear even for the lowest level of interactions, never betraying any unseemly feelings but not coming off as cold, either. That is, unless he trusted you enough just to be himself. And when it came, that realisation of just how few people Nick let himself drop the front around, then I felt like maybe I'd earned my grief.
The day after Nick and I split back in 2019, a few days before Sheer Mag put out the second of the three albums that would become milestones for us, oso oso released basking in the glow, which would become my Break-Up Album™ over the following months. They released their follow-up to that album in March 2022, the day before Iain and I went on our first date (at the time of writing, we've been together almost six months longer than Nick and I were). Their first album since then came out this week, in tandem with that Sheer Mag gig. Barring a minor fraud attempt on my debit card, nothing of note happened this time. Sometimes these things just happen, until they don't.
