These last few weeks have felt incredibly difficult.  Triggers of memories, good and bad, seem to be everywhere.  I’ve cried more in the last three weeks than I have done in the twelve months that have passed.  Mostly in my car.  Or when I’m out walking on my own.  Sometimes on the train, much to the discomfort of my fellow passengers who choose to turn their faces away from my distress.  A few times I have fallen asleep at night with my face pressed into a soaking wet pillow.  Rarely do I cry in the company of my husband and children – a couple of solitary tears occasionally unexpectedly squeezing their way out of the corners of my eyes with no warning and dropping with alarming ferocity onto my chest.   Those ones I angrily wipe away, scrubbing my face with my hands in a bid to disperse them before they are seen.  They must not see me cry.  But no matter where I am or who I’m with, the tears are silent.  No sound, no sob, no wail escapes my lips.

I always knew that the first anniversary of my Dad’s death would be the hardest.  In many, many ways it still doesn’t feel real.  Perhaps I’m still in denial that he’s gone.  Only once, several months ago now, have I allowed myself to get angry, and even then I raged a silent tirade in my head about how unfair it all is.  No-one on the outside knew.

Mostly though, I just feel simply and indescribably sad.  Everything is still being carefully carried around in my cardboard box, my hands gentle but strong, my arms encircling it and supporting it.  Every new thing I learn about him gets added to the box.  Every piece of memory I own that shows itself to me gets added to the box.  I don’t examine any of them, they simply get placed inside on top of the ever-growing pile.

Nothing and everything has changed.

After a month or so, the texts and phonecalls asking me how I’m doing stopped.  People (quite rightly) went back to their lives and I am left still trying to untangle my thoughts and feelings about the man who is half of me.  I am no closer to figuring that out.  It’s not the right time to go through the cardboard box yet.  I’m doing my best to trust that I know when that time will be.

People say that it will get easier with time and I do believe them.  But right now it doesn’t feel like it.  Right now, when I allow myself to briefly peek inside the box, the pain is so raw and intense that I can only stay there for a second before I use every distraction technique I know to switch off.  To stop feeling.  To go numb.  To turn my eyes away and firmly slam the lid closed again.

The memory of my last conversation with him echoes in my head on a daily basis, and the events of the night of the 6th February 2015 and the morning after when I woke in the early hours after a too-short, fitful and restless sleep to be told the news, still regularly haunt my dreams.  I still don’t want to go to bed most nights, in case someone I love dies while I’m asleep.  I replay the scenes, the conversations, the facts over and over and over in my head, desperately wishing for an alternative outcome.

But there isn’t one.  He is gone.

And I feel like a little bit of me has died with him.

_____

Between Christmas and New Year I went to visit Annie, my Dad’s wife, at their flat.  It was the first time I had seen her since the funeral ten months before.  I had plenty of time to run through all the possible scenarios of how the day might go in my head on the three-and-a-half-hour journey down to Marlborough, comprising three different trains and a taxi.  I was nervous.  When I arrived I could tell that she was too – her hands were shaking as she opened the door to greet me.

We talked and talked.  And then we went out for coffee and talked some more.  I learned a lot about my Dad that day – things I never knew.  I’m still processing them and this isn’t the right place to share them, but needless to say these insights into his world helped me understand him a little bit more.  And also made me realise how little I actually knew him.

I was determined not to cry.  I spent time gazing the many, many photos of him that adorn the surfaces of their home.  The final one I looked at completely and unexpectedly undid me – a picture of him from a time before I even existed.  And I sobbed.  I stood by the container that holds his ashes and I wept for all the conversations we never got to have, the questions I’ll never be able to ask, and the fact that he’ll never know his granddaughters and they’ll never know him.

I travelled home that day in utter silence, my head full and my heart numb.

_____

I usually try to finish my posts with a lesson, a question to make you think, some inspiration or some positivity.

I don’t feel I can do that with this one.  Sometimes there is no learning to be taken and no questions can be asked.  There is no message to be passed on and no hope to be offered.  Because sometimes shitty things happen and there is nothing any of us can do about it except try our best in the aftermath to hold our broken pieces together and make different choices.  Choices that change the way we live our lives.  Choices that mean we do what makes our soul happy instead of what we think will make everyone else happy.  These things are slowly beginning to happen.

But for today I just needed to describe how I’m feeling.  To let out the words that I’ve been carrying around with me for so long now.  To actually let myself feel and show others how I’m feeling.

I’m trusting that it’s part of the process.  I don’t think grief ever leaves us completely – the people we have loved and lost are too important for those feelings to just disappear.  I don’t believe there is an end point.  But there is a continuum along which we travel.  Mostly going forwards and occasionally being pulled backwards like a wave ebbs and flows it’s way along the shore, gently eroding those grains of ourselves that we don’t need any more and rebuilding us in exactly the right place to welcome the next wave.

Thank you for reading.

 

2 Comments for: One Year

Chloe

Oh Jess thank you. That does help. I wrote this post engulfed in emotion in the early hours of the morning of the anniversary. As it turns out, the rest of the day was ok (possibly because I kept myself distracted). My family have seen me cry many times about many things. I think I’m just not ready to talk about or explain this one yet. I’ll get there. Thank you for your support. And keep looking after you. You matter.

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