High days and holidays.

It is a bank holiday weekend here. The sun has been shining and FB and the media are full of pictures of people enjoying themselves on the beach, in the park and at BBQs. Last night I had to shut the windows despite the heat to reduce the noise from the loud music being played at the local pub and the fireworks possibly the same place, although they seemed to be in a different direction. 

I have tried valiantly to keep a smile on my face and up until an hour ago I wasn't doing too badly. I went outside to see how hot it was and the smells of other people cooking and their party music playing just hit a nerve. I realised that this is how it is going to be until the day I die, unless I do something to change it. For some people every day is the same as the last, I don't want special days to become just another day. I want to have fun, rejoice, celebrate and have parties. I want life to have meaning and purpose. I also want others to actually think about me too. I have become the parent who is always there when needed, "so we don't have to bother making an effort with her." 

I don't have any answers today. I do know it is seventeen weeks until Christmas, ages away I hear you say. Well I am not spending it alone. My children have until the end of September to tell me their plans and if they don't include me, then I'm going to make my own plans!

Oops I did it again.

I realise that this poor blog appears to be little more than a moaning Minnie's diary of disaster, I did say I wouldn't got back and change or remove posts, so for now it is what it is. It will get better, I promise (fingers crossed!)

I read my last entry this morning, and I depressed myself. Yes, for now things are tough  financially. Things will get better. I will sort out my mental health issues and get a job, and ironically be able to call the various suppliers and streamline my costs. I can't do much about the new gas pipes, they have already started to make holes in the pavement across the road. I do need ear defenders though, my anxiety seems to enhance my hearing where noise is concerned.  Toni isn't very keen either, so we hide together. 

This is probably as good a place as any to mention an up and coming plan for September. My son's girlfriend A. was saying via Whatsapp that she wanted to tone up before her holiday in three weeks, so she had joined the gym. We had a bit of a conversation and then I suggested that when she gets back from the holiday we both spend the twelve weeks until Christmas eating healthily and going to the gym to tone up. She thinks it is a great idea, so we have a plan. She did suggest I start Sunday, but I said as I was still trying to do meat free August, my brain couldn't cope with anything else, so September 1st is when my food choices will be rethought. Please note, at no point have I used the 'D' word, just healthy choices all the way. I may or may not share what happens here. 


 

All too much.

They say when the going gets tough, the tough get going. I'm definitely not very tough at the moment. I received a letter this morning from the company that is responsible for the maintenance of the pipes that supply gas. They need to replace the mains gas supply pipe and possibly the pipes to properties. I know it shouldn't upset me, but the thought of them digging up my garden and having to be without gas has me in a complete panic. If Mike was here I know what he would say, but he isn't, and I have to cope alone. I can't do it. I can't do anything much these days. I am scared of everything, and no one understands when I try to explain why. It doesn't make sense to anyone except those who have also lost their partner. 

It comes on top of a whole series of small, stupid things that I should just be able to laugh off, but can't. Instead of having my sensible head on, I have one that sees danger and disappointment at every turn. I am trying, I truly am, but even the telephone counselling, the first option where I live, has turned out to be wrong for me. After the first telephone call, which I struggled through despite my anxiety, I was sent a booklet and told to keep an hourly diary of my anxiety. I can't remember to put the milk in the fridge not the cupboard, never mind try and analyse why I am anxious and then say what I could do to stop it. "What stresses do you have in your life right now?" I have f***ing lost my soulmate, I'm living off less money than the mortgage payment so that's in arrears and I have no one to help me with it all. 

I want to be a tough cookie, but instead I'm a digestive at the bottom of a tea cup. 

Three months

Dear Tall

I couldn't let the day go without marking the fact it is three months since you died. I miss your body next to mine in the best bed in the world, the one you insisted we needed. I miss your hand holding mine as I go to the shop. I miss you walking up behind me when I am doing the washing-up, when you would wrap your arms around my waist and hug me. I miss having you to bicker with, knowing that when the tiff was over neither of us would hold a grudge and the matter would be forgotten. I miss all the little things that others right now are taking for granted. 

Before you went you were convinced I would be okay, you had great plans for what I should achieve in the future. Three months on, and have yet to do any of the things you had wanted. We couldn't predict how long it would take me to grieve, no one knows how long their grief will take to scar over, and no one knows how long it will take another. I am trying to move forward as you had wished, it isn't easy without you by my side.

I tried to explain to someone after you had gone, that the love we shared was rare. I had "loved" before, or I thought I had. The second I met you I knew we had a connection. It wasn't sexual, it was just the easiness of it all. We talked for hours and not once did I feel awkward. We became great friends before we became lovers. I guess that is what I miss most, your friendship.

I will never stop loving you my dearest darling friend.

Good Cheer Pixie x x x

So alone.

Another weekend, even though they weren't ever any different to the rest of the days when Tall was still alive, they now bring an extra loneliness. I think it is less to do with Tall not being here and more to do with the fact that it is only now he has gone that I really notice all my children have gone, along with all the frantic activity that occurred around their days off school. I miss Tall every day, weekends I miss everyone. 

I find myself scouring social media in order to live my life voraciously. I want people to tell me all the normal boring stuff they have been doing. I want to see their knitting projects or their photographs of sunsets. I want to know there is still life out there, even if for now I can only watch it from a window. 

I have tried asking people around  for a cuppa, but they don't take me up on my invitation. May be the house smells of dog and they are too polite to say. May be it is too messy and they are too polite to say. May be I make an awful cup of tea and they are too polite to say. I wish they would tell me why. Tall always said it was the people that made a home, not the house. His mother was a hoarder and so he was used to the organised chaos, he was quite good at creating his own sometimes. We were so happy amongst the piles.

So dear readers, if you ever feel the urge to say something, anything, you are very welcome to leave a comment, doesn't even have to be about the post!

The Atlantic Ocean

I am as guilty as anyone else for thinking in the past that grief and bereavement are linear. That you start out in the middle of the Atlantic (other oceans are available) with waves crashing over your head. The storm so fierce you fear for your life. Slowly you make your way to land, hopefully under your own steam / sails but if not with help from the RNLI. Once you have landed the odd small wave might wet your trouser leg, but it's all under control. 

The reality is that grief is nothing like that. Instead the ocean is full of rip tides, that pull you back into that storm. The patches of what you think are calm water are just you riding the top of a very large wave that hasn't yet broken and when it does you fall so fast you can't catch your breath. The journey to a safe harbour isn't a quick one, it can take years. Your too far out for the RNLI to pull you in, it is too dangerous for them to risk their lives. 

 May be the worse part of it when you have lost your soulmate is that you have to sail alone. When a sibling, parent or even a child dies we have our soulmate to cling to. Another pair of hands to help batten down hatches, move the sails, fix the engine. When your soulmate dies, there's no one. Distress signals are sent, but friends and family can do little more than radio back "you'll be alright, see you soon."
 

Quicksand

Apart from the football score incident I thought I was doing okay. Not all singing and dancing okay, but getting out of bed and not crying all day okay. That was until yesterday. A "simple" phone call* and that was me done for. I was strolling along at my own pace with my little dog and suddenly it was like stepping in quicksand. I started to sink, I reached out for Tall's hand so he could help me out, but of course he isn't here to help. I tried my usual coping tactics, but the quicksand seemed to keep pulling me down. My sleep was disturbed by dreams where I ended up crying and I was woken by my own sobbing several times. 

This morning I have woken up still stuck, but I realise that the only way out is to not panic, try and lie flat and float and wait for help to come.  In the past Tall would hold me tight and I would sob, he would listen to my rants without offering an opinion unless I asked for it and he would pull me out. All I can do now it imagine his arms around me. 

*As the person who made the phone call doesn't read this blog and in fact neither he or his wife are friends on FB I am going to have a good rant here. There will be some readers who do know him, I hope they will keep my secret. 

Yesterday Mike C. called. The pretence was to ask how I was, but the conversation soon took a different direction. He started lecturing me on how I need to have a plan. How I need to talk to people about what I can do in the future to make money, I pointed out that I didn't have many friends, he said "no talk to other people, strangers online"! 
"You should rent out your house on AirBnB and live out of a suitcase."  
"You should do B&B and offer an evening meal at an extra cost." 
"You can't waste your time like I wasted four years."
Of course Mike, you wasted four years grieving for your wife and then decided that marrying a girl 37 years younger from a foreign country was the way to go. Even after marrying her you were so ill in 2016 that Tall had to rescue you and you lived here for a month while we tried to sort out your mental health and physical problems, your skin was so infected it smelt of death. Your married life consists of her working all day in a care home, you working all night driving taxis and her spending all her holidays and free time with her Thai and Filipino friends.  
"Next year all my pensions come through so we are thinking of changing direction. We're going to become foster carers with a private agency that pays much more than the local authority. It is £450 per child per week and you usual have to take two. Joy can earn more than working in the care home."
So the private agency takes money off the local authority and gives you some of it, keeping the rest for themselves. Does the private agency have slightly less rigourous  checks I wonder? It beggars belief, it really does.

So why did that conversation upset me so much? I don't know. It just left me feeling angry and even more alone. I suppose in the past Tall and I would have had a good moan together about his strangeness and now I can't talk to him and actually get an answer. 

Keep calm, lie flat and try to float.

The little things.

On the whole I haven't been feeling too bad recently, that was until I heard the football results yesterday evening. West Bromwich Albion won their first match of the season and that set me off for an evening of sobbing. There were tears for my darling Tall who would have been so happy with the result. There were tears that I will never go to a match with him again. There were tears that our Boxing Day ritual of going to the football if it was a home match is gone forever. A few seconds of "news" and my world collapsed. 

It's the silly little things that get me.

I have to be honest, I haven't a clue what our beloved football club have been up to over the summer, I don't know who we have sold, who we have bought, who has come or who has gone. They are my club, the club that I fell in love with as they were beaten by Spurs. But more importantly it is Tall's club, and just thinking about it makes me cry and so I have shut it away in a cupboard to be dealt with at some other time. 

I'm sorry Tall.