A curious case of the "what ifs"......

In response to my last post regarding whether I should continue with the blog, I had quite a large number of emails from people saying that I shouldn't continue if I didn't want to, but that they did find the blog really interesting and inspirational. The overwhelming feeling seem to be that people appreciate my honesty and the insights about life they can gain from my posts, even if by the nature of the situation it is not always a barrel of laughs. So for now I will continue, although I plan to only post when I feel that I have something useful to say so there may be slightly bigger gaps between posts.

The last few weeks have been really busy. I have managed to get from working part-time to full-time in 4 weeks which I feel is something of an achievement. I have also been busy with visitors and this weekend a camping weekend in Rosedale on the North York Moors with a big group of friends which Emma and I both really enjoyed.

As with the occasional instances of enjoying ourselves that we currently have you sometimes come back down to earth with a bump. Emma is buzzing with teenage hormones and stopping school has given her more time to think about her Dad and feel really sad. I have gone back to seriously sleepless nights and a constantly restless mind. People who are "experts" on grief do talk about a 6 month dip occurring (we will be at our 6 month "sadiversary" on the 9th August)so perhaps this is part of that.

As well as a restless mind, I have also been present to a new phenomenon, a curious case of the "what ifs". This is very unusual for me as I pride myself on having a stand to have no regrets in life in normal circumstances. The only serious regret I have ever experienced up until now has been being far too serious in my early 20s and settling down straight after university in to full-time work. Both Dave and I often wished that we had not been so intense and that we had just bummed around the world for a couple of years after uni and experienced the world a bit more before settling down in to domesticity. But leaving that regret aside which has never been a massive deal for either of us, there have been no others. Even the difficulties we experienced with miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies which meant that we did not have as big a family as we planned, we accepted as fate.

During Dave's illness and his death I have never gone down the route of "it's not fair" as I see that as a complete waste of time conversation. You only have to look around the world to see that life is clearly not fair and anyone who tells their kids that it is, is in my world very misguided and setting up their kids to be very upset later in life! Thinking "it's not fair" to my mind saps your energy and drains you so I don't go there. Life isn't fair but anyone who has the expectation that it will be is, to my mind, a bit deluded, and probably ends up very angry and bitter for most of their life.

What I have been experiencing a lot of though in the last couple of weeks is the "what ifs", those imponderables that will never be answered. What if Dave had not been such a bloke about his illness and gone to the doctors sooner? What if we had tried more of the alternative treatments like the grape juice fast? What if certain drugs like Avastin had been available on the NHS? What if we had been able to travel to Brazil and see the man who is claiming to be the Son of God and healing people? What if I had given up work sooner? What if we have been less generous with the time we gave to visiting family and friends and saved it for us as a family? Did Emma get to see her Dad enough when he went to the hospice? Did we do things "right"? A million and one things have been going round in my head and I wonder if this is part of "processing" what has happened.

The thing about terminal illness in my experience though is this. You make the best decisions you can at every point during the illness according to the information you have available at the time. And, at times, especially towards the end when things are absolutely hairraising you make the decisions in the midst of chaos and total upset and trauma. You basically have to do the best you can.

I remember with my mum's cancer that we were told in February 2003 she would probably live for 12-18 months. I travelled the 450 mile round trip at least every other weekend and sometimes more frequently to spend time with her in her nursing home in Oxfordshire. When it got to July she seemed to be doing relatively okay so I decided to take a holiday with Dave and Emma in Devon as I felt I should have some "quality" time with them if I was going to need to spend a lot of time away from home with my mum in the following few months. What actually happened was that my mum deteriorated rapidly whilst I was away and died approximately a fortnight after I had returned from the holiday. When somebody is terminally ill predictions are often wildly inaccurate and you are always in the situation of not knowing how long you will need to keep going and sustain yourself.

With Dave at the point where the doctors discovered the cancer had returned in November 2007, Dr Last predicted that he would live for between one and three years with chemo, possibly even longer as he was so young to get this form of cancer. In reality, he lived for just short of 15 months after that. During the last 3 months of his life the deterioration was frighteningly fast and we lived in chaos. There are parts of that time which I cannot actually remember as they were so very traumatic, I seem to have blanked them out of my mind for now. We talked and reviewed things constantly involving Emma as much as possible in all our decisions and in my head I really do know that we all did the best we could at the time. But knowing this doesn't seem to stop you thinking about the "what ifs".

The trouble is the more I try to put the lid on the "what ifs" the more they seem to breed and multiply so what can I do? My feeling is that I just need to let them arise and fall and not try to change them or alter them in any way. I know in my heart that we really did do the best we could at the time and without the benefit of hindsight. I also need to remember the acknowledgements we have received in the past from people who know about how we handled the whole adventure of Dave's illness.

Only this week my counsellor at the hospice was commending me on how much I/we have given Emma in the way we jointly approached Dave's illness and how I have subsequently given Emma so many gifts in my approach since Dave's death. Apparently the openness I/we have shown is rare amongst the families she deals with. I can see that some of things I have done like allowing Emma to spend time with her dad after he died, allowing her to help in organising the funeral and letting her choose the plot in the cemetery where the ashes are interred have all helped. I also think that our openness in talking about what has happened and is happening to us both now is a big testament to the relationship that we created as a family together with Dave. However, this does not stop it hurting like hell when she is so very upset. It can also tear you apart as a mother when your natural instinct is to try to "make everything better". Unfortunately, intellectually I do know that I can't solve this one for her but it doesn't stop me wanting to try.