Try a little patience.....

Well it's a couple of weeks since I last blogged. Seems like longer as Emma and I have jumped through lots of hoops and been riding the rollercoaster of emotions at an even more terrifying speed! Somehow when I was in the early days immediately after Dave died the predominant emotions were ones of numbness and shock (even though I had known he was going to die, it was still a shock when he actually did). The brain seems to be very clever and somehow protects you to a degree from feeling the terrible pain when you are on your knees and waits till you have recovered a little and then on a regular basis allows very painful emotions to surface at times when you are better equipped to deal with them. The predominant emotion for me currently is just an overwhelming feeling of sadness and loss and an almost constant feeling of missing Dave. As a consequence of this, there have been a lot more tears. Emma has also been very sad and this has resulted in a feeling of powerlessness for me as as a parent all I want to do is make things all right for and this is one I cannot solve. Her "journey" through this will be her own as will mine and there is little that I can do other than be open and available to listen.

I have still been keeping myself busy and fighting any hermit-like tendencies. There are still quite a lot of things to sort out with regards to Dave's affairs and I have also been de-cluttering the house, although at this stage I still cannot bear to throw out any of Dave's clothes and personal things as it just doesn't feel right yet. I have also been sorting out the interrment of Dave's ashes which is taking place in June ( our wedding anniversary). If you ever want a sobering experience, go and put yourself eye to eye with your husband and best friend's ashes when they have been cremated. I did this the other day at the undertakers. Viewing the most important person to have ever been in my life so far as a pile of ashes in a brown plastic jar really brings home the fragility of life. I would love to be able to show them to anyone who thinks they are oh so important or significant or takes themselves far too seriously!

I have also been reading a lot to try to make some sense of what has happened although I am not sure whether that will ever be possible! This week I have been reading an excellent book called "Life lessons: how our mortality can teach us about life and living" by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler. The authors have worked with people who are dying in hospitals and hospices all their lives and have written some very interesting books on the dying process and the grieving process. This book, however, is different as it is all about the lessons they have learnt about living life from working with people who are dying. One of the most interesting things I found in the book is a part where they talk about how there is a tendency for people to only want the "rosy" side of life, for only good things to happen. Yet if you reflect back on your life it is sometimes the saddest and most difficult things in your life that have taught you the most and shaped you as a person. The message being that not all lessons in life are enjoyable to learn, but they do enrich the texture of life. Most people are just thrown to avoiding the difficult stuff and playing safe, but it is only in facing huge challenges that we grow. I know this to be true and have a feeling all this difficult stuff I am facing is leading to a life I would never have imagined before, although what that life is currently eludes me!

Related to this future, one of my biggest challenges at the moment is in facing what David Kessler and Elisabeth Kubker-Ross call the lesson of patience. I have never been a particularly patient person. I have always been pretty smart and got annoyed with people who were not as quick on the uptake as me. One of the things that has happened to me since Dave died is that a lot of negative feelings have been surfacing: sadness, pain, loneliness, anger, frustration, annoyance at other people etc etc. This is very hard to be with for someone who is normally relentlessly cheerful and upbeat, who cannot stand people who moan all the time and for someone who normally breezes through the things in life that others find difficult. I am also well known for being (as my friend Helen always puts it) "totally irreverent" and unserious about life. I know that both Dave and I have, in the past, probably really annoyed certain people on a number of occasions by simply not taking them seriously enough or attaching the right amount of "gravitas" in dealing with them. So now I find myself having to, as I put it, "wade through treacle", life most of the time is very significant and it really isn't much fun! I find myself wanting to breeze through this "grieving thing" but it does not seem to be something that you can just breeze through (not without causing yourself some permanent long term damage anyway). So, here I am being taught my particular lesson of patience. There is nowhere to get to, nothing that can be done to fix the situation and so I have to sit in amongst all these negative emotions and just dwell there in my very significant life! Waiting and wondering what course or path life is going to take next. So, as a discipline, I am inventing "the possibility of being curious" about all of these difficult emotions which are surfacing and enquiring in to what the universe is trying to teach me.

And in doing all of this, I will bear in mind another quote from the book from someone called Ronnie Kaye, a two time breast cancer survivor who said "In life when one door closes, another door always opens.......but the hallways are a BITCH!"