Six months on, I’m still carrying the cardboard box.

Still putting things in it.

Still keeping it closed so I can’t look in it.

It’s getting heavy.

I want to put it down but I don’t know how to, not properly.  I don’t know where to put it or what to do with the things inside it.

Sometimes I can put it down for short amounts of time.  When the load becomes too much to bear and I need to lighten myself, I place it very gently and carefully at my feet, so it’s still near me and I’m still touching it, but so my arms and back and shoulders aren’t straining quite so hard from the weight of it.

I find I can put it down while I’m fully present with my girls.  Or with my husband – watching one of our favourite TV shows, getting lost in someone else’s life for a while.  Or with my clients – working out the problem pattern and just how their unconscious thinks it’s the right thing for them to be doing to protect them from whatever it is it’s trying to protect them from.  I can’t quite see that clearly for myself yet.

And I can put it down when I’m taking photos, almost obsessively capturing the tiny details within the moments of time – the way their hair falls in their eyes, the curve of their spine, their laugh.  The quiet moments.  The crazy moments.  The wonderous beauty of nature.  I want to remember it all.  I don’t ever want to forget anything.  I have to document it.  I put down the box and I pick up my camera.  And I’m beginning to see how the two are inextricably linked.  I have a feeling that my camera might be the means with which I heal myself.

But then I pick the box up again and I am reminded.

It’s been six months now.  Six months today since his last breath.  Six months since I got the 7am phone call saying that he’d gone.

Grief is a strange thing.

In some ways I’d been mentally preparing myself for his death for years.  He’d always had his demons – his smoking, his drinking, his depression.  I think deep down I always knew one of them would kill him, I just didn’t know which one.  Or when.

He’d had them since before I was born and they continued throughout my childhood, though of course I was oblivious to them as I was growing up.  To me they were part of what made him my Dad.  It wasn’t until I encountered my own demons that I was able to recognise his.  Seeing our reflections of the darkest parts of ourselves in each other drove us apart for a very long time.  I was too consumed in mine and he didn’t know what to do to help me because he was still battling his own.

In the eighteen months leading up to his death I’d been working hard internally on making peace with the fact that he’d never change, even though I’d been able to.  We started talking again after he reached out to me and we had real, deep conversations about life and love and family.  And yes, demons too.  Conversations that will stay etched in my mind forever.

I did make that peace, with him and with myself.  I came to terms with it all.  I forgave him, even though there was nothing to forgive because he was simply a fellow struggler.  I forgave myself for being so hard on him.  I let it all go.

He didn’t though.  At my wedding he requested that the DJ play this song:

And he pulled me onto the dance floor and sang it to me.

It was his way of apologising for all of the things that he thought he needed to say sorry for, even though I’d told him a hundred thousand times that he didn’t need to apologise.

And then he died.

And even though I’d been preparing my whole life for that moment, when the call came that he was very sick and wouldn’t make it through the night, it was so sudden and so completely out of the blue that I didn’t know what to do with it.  I couldn’t breathe.  I cried and screamed and shook and sobbed, my mind simultaneously racing with thoughts and shutting down into total numbness.

I stayed up until 1am that night, not wanting to go to bed because I knew that when I woke up in the morning he would be gone.  Eventually, sleep took me and a dream-filled, fitful night ensued.  I jolted awake at 6am and checked my phone.  Nothing.  I lay there, my heart racing, just waiting.  Eventually, at 7am, his name flashed up on my phone and I knew.  Annie broke the news, I cried some more and then I got in the shower and howled at the unfairness of it all.

The rest of the day passed in a blur of phone calls and tears.  Family, friends, Annie several more times.  The funeral directors.  The hospital.  And then suddenly it was over and night-time came around once more.  I didn’t want to go to bed.

Six months later I still don’t want to go to bed.  It took me a while to figure out why.  It’s my unconscious trying to protect me – “don’t go to bed because if you do when you wake up in the morning someone you love might have died”.  Looking back, my Dad’s death is just one of several similar incidents – I got the phone call about my Nana passing away first thing in the morning.  And I remember my Mum waking me up early one morning before school to tell me that our beloved cat had died in the night.

So this is my current coping behaviour.  Not sleeping.  Going to bed as late as possible in an attempt to keep people alive.  Surviving on very little sleep.  It’s not what I expected.  I wondered if the eating disorder might try and put in an appearance.  It didn’t.  I lost my appetite for the first week after Dad’s death, but ate anyway because I knew I had to.

I thought that when it happened I would just stop functioning, that I’d lie in bed and not want to get up.  That I’d cry and not eat and need time off work.  But that’s not what’s happened at all.

I’m still functioning.  Still living my life.  Still eating and working and doing things I enjoy. Only crying occasionally at completely unexpected moments like in the supermarket when I see his favourite jam on the shelf, or on the train when a song comes on my Ipod that reminds me of him.   I’m just not sleeping.

And I’m still carrying that cardboard box.

It’s looking a bit more crumpled now.  Six months of being carried and bumped has made the edges softer, the base starting to sag from the weight of all the memories inside, the top starting to sink down inside itself.

I still don’t know when I’ll be able to put it down completely.  Maybe I never will.  Maybe one day I’ll find the courage within myself to look inside it  and examine the contents.  But not yet.

For now I need to be ok with carrying it around for a little longer.

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