‘I have of late but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth’. So says Withnail, so says the Dane and so say I.
Withnail’s emptiness comes from the disappointment of failing, the sudden loss of a close friend and is tinged with the jealousy of that friend’s success.
Hamlet’s melancholy is brought on by the sudden death of his father, the suspicion his uncle is responsible and the shock of his mother marrying the same man.
My inability to find happiness is also the result of the death of a parent, my mother, who succumbed to alcoholism and drank herself to death long before her time in 2017. She seemed to spiral out of control when her father, my beloved Grandpa, died quite suddenly albeit at the grand old age of 96. Quite bizarrely, her second husband appears to now be in a relationship with my Grandpa’s second wife. Hamlet and I suspect much; foul play enters my mind in my darker moments.
I, like Withnail, have also failed. I have failed as a father; I have failed as a husband. I have lost the ability to have fun, even with my delightful children who want for nothing than their father’s attention and love.
I have ceased to support my wife as I battle this constant mental fight. Her descent into despair should affect me more than it does; I simply withdraw back to the bottle and pray that tomorrow, when I wake, this emptiness has vanished like ‘the foul and pestilent congregation of vapours’ that Hamlet witnesses and that fog my mind, making me dull, like a once-true blade left out to rust.