The last six weeks have been… strange.

I guess that’s normal?  Whatever ‘normal’ is anyway.

When someone dies there is no normal.  Normal goes out the window.

After the initial shock wears off and the funeral is over you have to return to real life and carry on as if nothing has changed.  People expect you to behave as you always have done.  Emails contain sentences like “I hope that things are getting back to normal now”.

No.  Things will not return to normal.  Because he’s not here any more.  Nothing will ever be normal again.  At least, the kind of normal that I had before when he was here and he was well and I could talk to him.

I’m going to have to get used to a new kind of normal.

At the moment, normal for me feels like this:

Everything I once thought was steady and dependable suddenly feels wobbly and unsure.  People are still surprised when I don’t seem quite like myself.  I go for days, maybe even a week or two, without shedding any tears and then all of a sudden for no reason at all I am sobbing silently, the sadness pouring out of me uncontrollably.

Sometimes I worry that I’m not crying enough, so I listen to the music that reminds me of him.  I inhale deeply when someone in the street lights up a cigarette near me, breathing in his familiar smell.  And I try and conjure up his voice and his laugh inside my head, hoping to be triggered into a memory that might bring forth some emotion.

It doesn’t work.

Paradoxically, I still can’t look at pictures of him because seeing him gazing back out at me feels like being punched in the stomach.  I can’t read any of the birthday cards that he sent me that I’ve kept over the years – seeing his curvy scrawl and reading the words that he gave to me might tip me over the edge.  I can’t think about him for more than half a second – I have to quickly direct my attention elsewhere for fear of becoming completely overwhelmed with missing him.

I’m questioning all of my decisions, about everything.  Small choices (like what to have for dinner) involve just as much to-ing and fro-ing as big decisions (like whether now is the right time to move house, or if I want to change direction in my career, or if we can afford to go on holiday this year).

I was trying to describe how I feel to a friend of mine and the best I could come up with was that I feel like a dandelion clock – thousands of tiny pieces of me being taken by the wind and twirled into the unknown.

Scattered.

She thought for a minute and came up with the most beautiful reframe.  I dismissed it at the time because I was stuck in a moment of fear, but now, having had a few days to think about it, it actually feels naturally and perfectly right.

She said that from those scattered pieces new things would grow.

So simply and delicately put.

And she’s absolutely right.

Each of the pieces of me that feel broken and disconnected and lost will eventually settle somewhere, where they are meant to be.  And they will be the beginnings of something new.  Something whole.  Something beautiful.

And it’s ok to not know yet where those places will end up being and precisely what those scattered wishes will grow into.  I just have to trust where the wind takes me.

 

Kirsty – thank you.  Your words are the start of being the difference that might make the difference.