I have felt like I have been wearing a skin of nerves; so I haven’t written in a while. Everything was just too raw and it didn’t make sense. Thinking hurt too much and so I avoided it, still feeling it all like I was stuck in a state of being I couldn’t see a way out of; then it changed.
After the first couple of months of holding Seb as close to us as I could, I just had to stop. It was too much. So many things to remember him by with a great hole in the centre of it all- like a polo mint; funny that the Americans call them Lifesavers.
So as I struggled to remember the good and the relationship that we had; I focussed on the flaws, the things that made me miss him a little less. The portrait of a disgruntled housewife in rollers and a hairnet, complaining about ‘him indoors’. The tales I would trade with my girlfriends as we consoled each other over the fact that we couldn’t just go off and do our own thing in the same way that our husbands seemed to manage with aplomb.
The memory of the best of us was just pain after he died, the disappointment of missing out on the grand prize playing on a loop each and every hour. I was wearied by my own mind- I felt washed out by it all.
Grief hates the body and makes you feel a million years old. It is exhausting to be a person. When things are really bad I am so sensitive to touch that I fight the urge to shrink away from LP when she goes for a hug; then it just recedes and I am fine again- cuddles galore. Grief ruins your appetite but makes you desperately hungry. Grief gives you that feeling you get when you think you’re coming down with something until you remember that it is just sorrow. While all of this is going on I am trying to work, remembering to put the washing on, painting the walls, sketching ideas for the garden and trying to make something of tomorrow before I have got there. I go to sleep and I struggle to wake up, but I have stopped putting sugar in my tea- little steps.
LP is my daily Seb reminder. She misses him and will tell me without fear. When we talk she says what she misses most is the ‘silly games’. The same thing that draws her to her grandad when the almost daily opportunity arises; the bond between them is a joy to witness.
I thought that perhaps now I am accustomed to the pain of happy memories I would be able to write them down here- but I can’t. When I attempt to draw them with my words, they come out with a fraction of the warmth with which they should be remembered; so I will just have to keep them in for now. I trust that there will be a time when the marriage will be a storybook of anecdotes that will flow faster than I can type. For now it’s a game of hide and seek.