I think even in the good old days, long before life got hard, January could always seem a bit of a long bleak month. Today though has, quite honestly seemed longer and bleaker than ever and where the hell that snuck up from nobody knows! Christmas Eve deja Vu!
I have had the blessing though of lots of WhatsApp activity from my friend who coincidentally turned out to be studying at the same college as me in London, and she had been stuck in a death by powerpoint lecture all day! LG you are an angel and your WhatsApp really helped me through.
My intentions for the day started so well, as ever, outside in the spiritually peaceful place that is ‘Mynzies’ back garden. Always such a beautiful start to the day but it sort of went very quickly downhill after that. Damn Van Morrison, he started his heart tuggingly sorrowful singing of “Reminds me of you”… a song laden with meaning for when Alistair and I first met. Ive listened to this countless times over the past year but today for some reason it set off a stream of pain inside me that has yet to be quenched all these hours later.
Im pretty good usually at satiating the emotional beast within when she wakes! Not today. I broke with protocol and blubbed when a friend phoned.. hanging up did cross my mind but then Im learning to make myself a little more vulnerable in some circumstances and this seemed to be one of them. It helped, a lot. Note to all people talking to people in my situation..don’t offer platitudes, don’t try and fix and don’t ever say “oh don’t cry”! Thank you for holding me in that painful space so kindly my friend, you did good.
My plans to get my head stuck into my books to satisfy my study schedule went out of the window and I took myself off to Burwash Manor in Cambridge. Two things help I feel in such dire emotional situations; spending money and eating cake!!!! Still healthier than my old go to vices; 20 Sobranie Cocktails and several double Jack Daniels!
Candace caught up with me on the phone whilst at said venue, oh god, the protocol went even further out of the window..tears in the shop! What the fuck!!!! Well swerved though Pippin and well held too. Thank you. I can only remember not being able to hold it together to this extent once before, 5 days before Alistair died. We had had the most awful row, so unusual for us but you can imagine the tension was way up there and it wasn’t helped by the morphine either. I was done in, frazzled, completely finished, didn’t want to go home but didn’t want to not be there either and I was trying to order a Chinese takeaway in the local restaurant. God only knows what they must have thought, I was a complete wreck in there!
And I think that the awful horror of what I went through for the last 10 months of Alistair’s life has somewhat cushioned me over the past year. It was so truly horrific, so stressful, so knackering, so emotional, so desperately hard that when he died it was such a relief. As much as I missed him, there was no more struggle, for either of us.
In time though, the pain of those memories has dimmed, as it surely must. We are not geared up to remember pain, it doesn’t do us any good and as that pain has moved into the background the enormity of living without Alistair has surfaced today. What a bloody swizz!
I don’t plan to be snivelling my way through this year but over the past few days I have been missing things that previously I hadn’t considered. The little things that came with being in a relationship, Alistair meeting me at the station after a long weekend at college, having him open the door when I got home from work, smelling the incense that he’d lit in anticipation of my arrival home. And then of course, as I have mentioned in previous posts, the physical side of our relationship. I miss him, I miss his arms around me, I miss our intimacy. And I miss that he was the one person I only ever really trusted with my raw emotion.
And then of course I have a “doing it list”. And I will do the things on my doing it list, every damn one of them, I will do things that I would perhaps rather not be doing because I have to, I have to create a meaningful life for myself, over and above the beautiful meaning that Candace and Kirt and my close family and friends bring. BUT, today, the thought of doing those things makes me feels so lonely, Im only doing them because Alistair died. I say today because most likely tomorrow will bring a totally different vibe, I hope that my joyful spirit will be reinstated and i will be once again be looking forward to the weird wild and wonderful things I have planned for myself.
So a tough day, don’t panic, Im not, nobody ever died of a bunch of feelings, its what we do to keep away from them that causes the damage and Im always willing to feel them, Im also a tough old bird.
And now the feelings are quenched, peace is descending, my blog, my children and my friends have worked their magic
Namaste x
Living With Gladys Full Time 