Grief

The way other people treat the deaths of celebrities is grief at its best, according to this psychopath.

My Aunt Teresa died on Friday. It was the end of a short and sudden battle with an aggressive cancer. Not a bad way to go all things considered, as you hear of people fighting a painful, drawn-out cancer over a number of years, with multiple remissions and recurrences before it finally getting the better of them.

However, the speed and abruptness of this (just over eight weeks from diagnosis to death) has hit members of my family hard. Her husband, my uncle, is heartbroken. My grandfather, who celebrated his 90th birthday in May, is especially devastated, having already lost another of his children to alcoholism about seven years ago. My mother and my other aunt, who are the eldest and have always been closer to each other than to their other siblings, are in shock.

Well, what can I say? Ever since we got the news about the cancer, I have watched my family go to pieces in disbelief and shock, which has been quite alienating because I don’t feel the same way. I can’t say I was expecting the illness, and then the death, but equally it’s not as though these things are unheard of. Why shouldn’t it happen to someone we know?

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time at Teresa’s house in the countryside near the coast. It is – or was – an ideal place to get away, as the house is big, and both my aunt and uncle liked their privacy so we only saw each other for an hour or two in the evening on some days. However, being well-educated they were interesting people to talk to. There is great hiking countryside around, so I could disappear all day doing that, or one of them would drive me into Eastbourne or Brighton so I could go hunting girls and/or guys with a wadge of their cash. She liked having me around as she had no children of her own and I could make her laugh.

At about the five week mark of her illness, I visited Teresa in hospital to have what I expected – and turned out – to be our last conversation. I informed her that since she was dying, she might as well know I was a psychopath and didn’t love her, but that I had genuinely enjoyed my visits to her house and that I hoped she would consider leaving some money towards my future, the plans for which I divulged. She was all weak and drugged up so she didn’t say a great deal, but did tell me she loved me no matter what and had already written me into her will. I guess I’ll find out whether that’s true within a few weeks.

A couple of days later, I went on a two-week holiday to Lanzarote and enjoyed myself immensely exploring the volcanoes, watching some rare birds, and eating seafood.

I’d been home a week when Teresa’s husband phoned to tell us the news. That day I spent some time thinking about my aunt and what she had been to me, remembering the interesting conversations we had had and thinking it was a pity there wouldn’t be any more visits to her house now that she was dead. In other words, I mourned.

The next day was Saturday, and I got on with my life. The sun was out and I had a book to read, and places to be that night. The phone calls from tearful relatives did somewhat test my patience, but overall it was a satisfactory weekend.

The funeral is next Tuesday, but I need to be free for job interviews so am not going, and to be honest the job interviews are just an excuse because I’d rather attend my own funeral than bore myself at that emotional shit show. Should probably send flowers to make people think I mean well.

At this point, I am seriously sick of the histrionic drama of my mother, grandfather, alive!aunt and all the rest of them, so am glad they will all be elsewhere for a couple of days. All this random crying and sullen silences is very dreary when you’re the only one feeling upbeat, and it’s all utterly pointless, because Teresa is gone and not coming back. I don’t believe in the afterlife, but maybe it really does exist and she’s been saved! More likely, she no longer exists and the fact that she’s dead matters not one jot to her because there is no “her”. Nothing.

Now I know our brains are hardwired differently so they physically can’t react like me, but I honestly think it would be simpler for them if they could have just spent a couple of hours on Friday remembering/discussing the good times they had with Teresa, celebrating the life she had, and then paying someone to dispose of the corpse in a way that would be appropriate and that would give us all a good laugh – maybe donate it to the Wolf Conservation Trust (she loved those animals) or launch it with a trébuchet into the sea from the cliffs near her house. Alas.

This blog post will, I hope, be the last time I give more than a second’s thought to my dead aunt, but I’m writing it specifically because French singing legend Charles Aznavour has also just died; they ran a 30 minute feature on the radio celebrating his life. It was brilliant – they summed up the sort of man he was, brought out Paul Gambaccini to recount the first time he met Aznavour, and played some of his biggest hits. It was short and to the point, giving those of us who knew of Aznavour a chance to feel sad he was gone and informing those who didn’t why they should care. Tomorrow, the news cycle will roll on, and that’s how things should be for all deaths, no matter who it is.

In fact, since Monsieur Aznavour actually left behind some music that can still be enjoyed, perhaps he’ll be in my thoughts more often.

Aunt Teresa, this is for you:

Emmenez-Moi means “Take me away”. Off they go.

Psychopath’s Heaven – a poem

Power.
Power.
Power.
How I crave after it. How I desire it. How I lust for it.
Power over what?
Power over something.
Power over anything.
Power over EVERYTHING.
The power over life and death, to be able too look into the eyes of a man, look into them. And take life from them. To see it leave their eyes. The light in their eyes, I want the power to turn their eyes dark.
I want to be invincible. To stare at death in the face, and laugh.
I want to be immortal. To live for eons on end, never aging, never weakening. Only gaining power
The power of destruction. To destroy entire cities with a thought. To hold countries ransom to my whims.
Pure power.
No responsibility.
Absolute. Power

© Wajahat Mahmood, 2015. See the original post here.

Do psychopaths dream?

Sweet dreams

It is a question that is often posed by the victims of psychopaths, by people who have known them, and just by the curious. In fact, when you type “do psychopaths” into Google, the search suggestions are as follows:

1. do psychopaths cry?
2. do psychopaths feel fear?
3. do psychopaths yawn?
4. do psychopaths love?
5. do psychopaths dream?

The first four are boring questions, and very easy to answer by anyone who ever gave them any thought:

1. Rarely
2. Yes, but hardly. Fearlessness is one of the main criteria in the PCL-R
3. You might as well ask, “do psychopaths need to breathe?” Yes, we yawn when we’re tired, just like you!
4. Nah

But the fifth question is interesting. Its answer isn’t immediately obvious a priori and it tries to delve into the inner worlds of psychopaths in a clever way. What’s more, it’s one question to which, despite its popularity among inquisitive souls, is difficult to find a satisfactory answer, amid tedious conversations that go nowhere, and threads where everyone says equally plausible but mutually contradictory things.

Well look no further, because I am a psychopath, and I can confirm that yes, I dream. I don’t dream very often (or at least I don’t often remember my dreams), in fact more often than not I have the stereotypical “death sleep” of a vampire, unburdened by thoughts and concerns from the day. I don’t have sleepless or disturbed nights because of stress, and I don’t lie awake mulling over ‘bad’ things I’ve done. But I do, on occasion, dream. My dreams tend to be fairly weird, though nothing so surreal as to inspire artwork.

One recent dream I had, there was a bird trapped inside my room, beating its wings pointlessly against the closed window. As I walked over to open the window and free it, it seemed to panic and fly at me, so I hit it to stop it pecking me and it fell to the floor, dead. A couple of nights ago, I dreamt the house next door was on fire. The family that lives there has three children and two dogs, and they were also trapped upstairs (noticing a pattern yet?) I dialled for the emergency services, but when the fire brigade arrived, they had brought the police and accused me of setting the fire, which as far as I can recall, I hadn’t. In both dreams, I tried to do the decent thing, but the other ‘characters’ in the dream had other ideas and did their best to throw my help back in my face. I’m not really into dream interpretation, but if anyone wants to have a go at figuring these ones out, be my guest.

Most commonly, I’m not even in my own dreams. Or rather, I’m like a static observer or an omniscient narrator, and the other people in the dream are acting out a story in front of me. Usually they’re not people that I know in real life, just ‘characters’ that inhabit the dream world. Sometimes I can go in and out of different people and take control of them for a while, make them do what I want to do, see the dream from their perspective, and then fly out and go back to watching again. These dreams tend to be violent, and seem to be set predominantly in horror movies or wars, but there’s not really any emotional content to them or consequences for being in them. Like I said, I’m more of a bystander watching things happen. Even when I ‘take over’ the characters, what happens to them doesn’t really end up affecting me. If the person I’m inhabiting gets hacked to death, then I just fly out of them and look down on their mutilated corpse with detached interest.

are made of this

Very occasionally I dream of people close to me dying. In real life, this sort of event doesn’t cause much emotion in me. If I liked the person, I am sorry they’re no longer around for me to enjoy them, but the idea of crying about it is utterly foreign. However, in these dreams, I’m very upset, grief-stricken even, in a way I have never been in my waking life. I seem to imagine myself as an ordinary, empathetic person, crying about the death of someone I love, just like I’ve seen other people be around death, and being really cut up about their loss. Unlike the previous two types of dream, these are closer to what I would think of as a nightmare, in that they’re actually unpleasant to experience. I don’t enjoy feeling those emotions, or at least dreaming that I am feeling them, and I especially don’t enjoy losing control of myself. Then, when I wake up, I’m back to normal. My pillow is sometimes wet; whether with tears or sweat, I don’t know. But I just think “huh, that was weird”, and go about my day.

 

I have no idea if these dreams bear any resemblance to the sorts of dreams other people have. I’d be interested to hear from you.

Art credit goes to the extremely creative, extremely talented and extremely dead Zdzisław Beksiński.

I wonder if he’s living his dreams now?