A Summer Evening Elsewhere

I have come to dread people asking me how I am. I don't know how to respond, to come even remotely close to articulating in a few passing words the confused, powerful and often contradictory emotions swirling around within me, to describe the deep lows, the occasional highs and the almost ever present and all encompassing dull void. If I had several hours, a good thesaurus and a skilled counsellor to help me give form to my thoughts I might be able to come close. In the absence of such resources I usually settle for 'as good as could reasonably be expected in the circumstances'. 

Putting Myself in the Dock

Bereavement is almost always accompanied by a sense of responsibility and guilt on the part of those left behind. The relatives of people who have died of cancer agonise over whether they should have encouraged them to seek medical advice earlier or pressed for a different form of treatment, those who lost somebody in an accident find themselves wishing they had delayed them leaving the house that morning until the car with the drunken driver was safely elsewhere, or conversely, perhaps, not delayed them. The partners of heart attack victims spend the rest of their lives regretting that stressful argument they had the previous day. But the scope for guilt seems to loom even larger where the cause of death is suicide because, superficially at least, it seems so avoidable. This was an act of Man rather than God and thus it must follow that either in some way we were responsible for it ourselves or it was within our gift to prevent it.

Fighting Back........Sometimes

Its very easy, and in many senses comfortable and rewarding, to assume the role of victim that society wants to assign to me. I receive sympathy, favours and have few expectations placed upon me. I barely need to make it out of my front door fully dressed to be praised for my strength and bravery. This can be very gratifying and rewarding. There are times when I genuinely need those allowances and favours and that sympathy, times when I want to pour my heart out to the stranger on the other end of the phone line, or to the supermarket cashier or the hairdresser. Times when I need to tell them that my wife has died and I am broken and to receive their support and understanding, or at least soothing noises which I optimistically choose to interpret as understanding. 

The Post Mortem; To Know or Not to Know

Death brings with it a succession of intensely painful ceremonies and events which have to be endured before we are finally left alone to grieve in peace; the farewell visit to the undertakers, the funeral, the memorial service (two in Louise's case), the scattering of the ashes. Now, after months of frustrating delay the very last of these hurdles is finally in sight; the inquest. This presents me with possibly the biggest and most distressing dilemma of all. How much do I want to know about the way Louise died?

Understanding the Beginning

Grief has an uncanny way of catching out the unwary or the overconfident. I've astonished myself at how well I've been coping in recent weeks. Of course the underlying sadness, bewilderment and sense of loss is ever present but I've been conscious, 4 1/2 months in, of a steadying of the emotions and at least a partial re-engagement with the world. My concentration levels at work are much improved. I enjoyed an evening at the cricket with friends without feeling the need to constantly talk about Louise. Some sort of routine, empty though it may be, has begun to emerge. For the first time in 133 days I even went a whole 24 hours without crying. But my pride in my resilience was misplaced. This week marks the fifth anniversary of Louise entering my life and it has completely floored me.

A Thousand Deaths

I've decided that I need to take the sympathy cards down. They started arriving within 24 hours of Louise's death in the darkness of midwinter and were soon overflowing from the shelves on to the dining room table. Meals were eaten next to a forest of sorrowful messages and tributes, bottles of ketchup jostling for table space with 'thinking of you at this sad time' cards until space was cleared in the conservatory to absorb the excess. Now, two seasons on in full summer, it seems to be time to pack the cards away in a memory box, if only to preserve them from damage. They will come down together with our last Valentines cards to each other. (Louise died three weeks before Valentines Day but I found her card to me, unwritten,  in her bedside drawer). It could be interpreted as a step forward. A sign, to use that ugly phrase beloved of the non bereaved but rarely used by those who have suffered real loss, of 'moving on'. Maybe it is. But for me it also feels like a step away, a further break in my bonds with Louise and one less sign of her presence within the house.

The Little Things

Its times like tonight when I miss Louise the most. Of course I miss her all the time. I feel constantly incomplete, almost physically so, as if one of my limbs has been amputated. There is a void where she should be. But its often in the most mundane moments of life that her absence is most deeply felt. Like coming home from work.

Faith, Hope and the Unknown

Whenever I am asked to identify my faith for official purposes I always hesitate over the box labelled 'Agnostic' before eventually ticking the one marked 'Christian'. Of course to describe myself as Christian is anything but a simple and unambiguous statement because its interpretation will vary enormously depending upon your own faith, or lack thereof. I should therefore be clear that I do not come from the same Christian tradition as Louise, one where belief and worship and the word of scripture are not just central to life but the very meaning for life. I respect it but I am not part of it.

The Relief of Numbness

'Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.'

I never swear. Ever. Well, hardly ever. I swear so infrequently that I feel incredibly self conscious whenever I do so. When I used to read to Louise as we lay in bed, my left arm always curled around her, holding up the book in my right hand, she would be amused whenever the dialogue demanded that I use industrial language, enjoying the novelty value of hearing me utter profanities, even if they were in the voice of another. David Nicholls provided her with much more of this form of entertainment than Dickens. 

All My Trials Lord

I've been doing well this week. Fortified by numbness and that familiar sense of incomprehension and disbelief, I have at times come close to some kind of normal function. The hammering of grief in my head and heart has been reduced to a low pitched hum, ever present but not disabling. The stream of tears has slowed to a trickle and I have been waking each morning in the near sure - if always mistaken - expectation that the coming day would be my first without crying since 23rd January.

Learning from Louise

As we go through life we all inevitably find ourselves marked by our experiences. We collect and carry our scars, whether they be of disappointment, disillusionment, failure, betrayal, trauma or tragedy. And these experiences in turn help to make us the person that we are, for better or worse.

Living a Lie

People think that I'm strong, that I'm getting through. They ask me if things are a little easier now. I can see why. I look and sound normal. I get up on a morning (usually), go to work, do the shopping. Sometimes I bring myself to talk about other things. Occasionally I smile. Once or twice I have even laughed. Sometimes I manage to fool myself. I think that I am making progress, that I can do this, that there is still a life worth living even if it is diminished. Sometimes I am even rather proud of the way in which I am managing things. 

Surviving Louise's Birthday

The only predictable thing about grief, it seems, is its unpredictability. Yesterday would have been (or should that be 'was'?) Louise's 41st birthday. I have been steeling myself for this moment almost ever since Louise died, conscious that many of my fellow widows and widowers who form such  a valuable online self help community report significant anniversaries to be particularly difficult occasions. This was the first, and one of the most important, of those anniversaries and I expected it to be one of my biggest challenges to date. So too, it seems, did family, friends and colleagues who got in touch to wish me well in large numbers.

Cutting Through the Grief

Today was a numb day. That's good because disbelief and not feeling is better than the alternative of understanding and despair. And its especially good because it was a Bank Holiday, and I have already found them to be difficult days to navigate  - everybody appears to be out and about enjoying themselves whereas my day is empty and I can't stop thinking about what Louise and I would be doing in normal circumstances. I resent the holiday mood because it jars so much with my own.

Resisting the Domino Effect

There is often panicked talk in the media about suicide clusters. This usually concentrates on young people and the possibility of copycat deaths, vulnerable and depressive teenagers following the example set by a peer to take a way out. But the contagion of suicide can also manifest itself when the intensity of despair over the loss of a loved one leads a member of their family or a friend, to take the same course of action themselves shortly afterwards. Only today I learned of such a case locally and Louise herself took her life just three months after her father did the same, although with Louise the relationship between the two incidents was a little less direct. Her father's death didn't make her own inevitable but it created the conditions in which it became possible. 

Humbled

After 4 1/2 years together and three months since her death, I thought that I knew everything there was to know about Louise. But this afternoon I discovered another aspect of her life which I had previously only briefly glimpsed.

Piercing My Soul

Since Louse's death my laptop has barely left my side. It has become my constant travelling companion. Even when away from home it has been the first thing that I have packed. I have long since discovered that the only effective balm that can applied to my wounds when they are at their most raw is writing about them. Whenever my emotions overwhelm me I therefore reach for my laptop and write, either in my private diary or here on this blog. Indeed it is the very reason for the existence of the blog. Somehow the discipline and structure that writing requires of me helps both to process my thoughts and to calm me. And this evening, sitting in a hotel room in Stockport after a family wedding party, I really needed to be calmed.

Crying Time

I've now cried on 90 consecutive days. I never imagined that I would come to know the experience of crying so intimately, to recognise so well the sensation, the distinctive noise, the smell and the taste of the tears themselves and the burning sensation that they leave in my eyes. All now are as familiar to me as breathing.

Spring Blues

(For Philippe - may the Swallows bring peaceful days with them)

Its 12 weeks today since Louise died. I've stopped counting the individual days but the number of weeks which have passed still comes to me as naturally as breathing. Its become a mark of my identity. I'm not alone. I've noticed that whenever people who are recently widowed gather together in support groups, whether online or in the real world, the passage of time since the loss of our partner is one of our first self descriptors,  handy shorthand for the condition we currently find ourselves in, not dissimilar to women in pregnancy. 'I'm at 6/10/12/15 weeks' is often enough to tell others much about our current mental state and ability to deal with the world.

Living with Uncertainty

The night that Louise died about the only thing that I grasped straight away was that my life had just been turned upside down. Nothing would ever be the same again. All the certainties were gone.