Dates
Our Grief Season is upon us. Last Saturday I took out my phone to make some sense of the dates - I refused to write them down but every year having promised myself I’ll just let them be dates, I go back to check that I have it right. And it’s there, clear as day in my photos. I went to the beach that night for a full moon gathering. When I got home the kids told me John had taken himself to the out of hours doctor for the pain in his arm. He didn’t want me disturbed at my thing, so had asked the kids not to say till I got home.
Time does funny things with the grief. Three years on, even with the familiar lurching of my stomach when I remember, I look back with that feeling and find myself so full of love and compassion for us all as we headed into the nightmare that unfolded. These days, this week three years ago was a horrible in between time when we’d been told by one doctor that he had cancer, but reassured by another that we should wait for biopsy and consult before assuming that correct. We knew. We didn’t want to know. We wanted it to be wrong. We decided not to say anything to the kids until we knew for sure and we fell through those days in a haze of blood thinner injections and confusion. It was difficult but at the same time we had an unspoken sense of how precious that time was too.
Three years ago. It was sadly, a different lifetime now. I can still remember his laughter, the way he said my name, his smell. I can remember like it was yesterday how tired he was, how we tried to hide our worry from each other and how we made the most of the days even though he felt so wiped out. Three years ago today I remember having a really ordinary morning at home, though Spud did something unusual and parked work for a few hours so we could hang out. Nothing earth shattering or important, just the two of us spending time together. A beautiful memory, time stamped on our lucky date, the 13th.
Every year lands differently. In between I feel like I give living my all and I carry all of it as the part of me it so rightly is. I have changed. It took a lot that no one sees like sharp edges and things that don’t matter which is good, but also surprising or sad things like people and chunks of life that were only there because of John. I find a lot of the things both lost and found are difficult to verbalise or explain out loud. It took my faith that “everything will be okay” can be a valid or trustworthy statement. When I think about how that always made me feel better when John would put an arm around me and say it, I’m amazed at how much power it held. It certainly wasn’t the case for John or for us. It isn’t okay, but we carry on regardless so it could be said that actually we are okay. And it looks that way I know. We are not okay. We are. The two things are true. But everything can never be okay.
The axis our world spun on shifted. Everything changed. My world since feels jumbled. You know that feeling when you step out of a matinee at the cinema and it’s bright and you have to reorient yourself to reality? It’s like that, but permanent. A daily relearning. Sometimes you just want to turn heel and return to the cinema for an alternate reality for a while. The dates on the calendar are my ticket now.
❤️
🫂 🤗 👐