Every day I wake up and every day its the same. Louise is still dead.
I can't get my head around the concept. I genuinely find it baffling. There are large chunks of the day when I get by. When I'm feeling a general sadness but I'm not on the verge of tears. I can function. But I know that is because the reality of what has happened, the sheer hugeness of it all, the tragedy of it all, and the permanence of the loss, hasn't remotely sunk in. Every time something pierces that veneer of protection I sit bewildered, and try to come to terms with the reality all over again, struggling to take in the enormity and to understand what it means. It's almost as if the news that Louise has died is broken to me afresh several times a day.
In a sense my brain is working on two levels. It understands the fact that Louise has died. It has to accept the evidence. My memories of that night, of finding Louise hanging from the bannisters, seeing her in the chapel of rest, the committal at the crematorium, the memorial service, her absence from the house, the lack of text messages from her. So I know all this. And yet I can't absorb it. Don't understand it.
I get frustrated by my inability to process what has happened. I feel as though I'm being stupid for not grasping it. Yet its actually better this way. It helps me absorb the shock, to continue to cope. It holds me up off the floor. Sometimes. Until something breaks through the protective layer, as it does several times a day. Just like now.
I've just picked up the post and found that the bank have sent me a new cheque book. It only has my name on the account. A further piece of evidence of Louise's existence, and of our union, is removed. Louise takes another step backwards into the past. As does my marriage. the relentless and inevitable efficiency of bureaucracy moves things on at its own pace, not mine. I can control the speed with which the process of saying goodbye to Louise takes place in my house - whether and when to move this item out of sight or to throw that item away. But I can't do anything to slow down the outside world and its apparent desire to rearrange things in the new correct order as quickly as possible, before I am ready for it.
I wept all over again. I've now been crying for 30 days.
I can totally relate to picking up the post... I've experienced both what you describe (when there's some erasure of my husband's presence), but just last week (9 months later) the state sent a reminder to my husband to register to vote. It was postmarked just to him, at an address he never actually lived at. Don't you think the government would KNOW?
ReplyDeleteHi. I'm very sorry for your loss.To receive post at an address your husband never lived at seems bizarre. At the moment I take comfort from mail addressed to Louise. Its almost all junk mail now - catalogues, charity circulars and the like. She has been removed from all the official correspondence. But anything that comes through in her name makes things feel just that little more normal, as if a part of Louise was still alive.
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