Year 6

So i have just re-read year 5.  I started writing it last year and could never quite summon the determination to finish it.  Whilst writing i started to have the realisation that all of my writing now relates more to my life with our beautiful children and less so about you and me and this blog is after all meant to be about you and your illness.

Initially i continued to write as i found it helpful, then following comments left i thought maybe i was helping others and then year 5 i hit a wall.  It wasn’t helping me, i didn’t have the energy or ego to think i was helping others, so i abandoned and didn’t post.  Not much has changed since last year.  I smiled reading the stories of our children, one year on their temperaments and interests remain exactly the same.  Charlie is a good kind boy who is desperate to have known you and Isla is gobby like her mother, both are outgoing and full of energy!  However this year i have been through a large phase of struggling, not all of the time and not badly, but enough to recognise the grief i was waiting for is finally catching up, crazy 6 years on i have times i feel the hurt so much more.  That gut wrenching loss deep in the stomach and the humungous ache over the heart. What stops me from writing is the thought people who love and know me well will read this, will not have known this and will feel bad for me, guilty they didn’t know, wonder why i haven’t mentioned anything.  I have no answer for this, but have decided to brave it and hope that people will appreciate this is the way they will know and writing this should help me.  I am fine, just experiencing normal emotion!

I still miss you, i still think of you every single day! Does that ever stop? Who knows.  I love thinking of you, i love the memories and the thoughts of you, but i am mad.  I am mad at myself and i am mad at you for not being here.  I miss being part of a complete family (though with some of the stories from friends and family, god knows why!) Day trips out with the kids, family holidays, popping to the shop, its all bloody tough without you here.  I am cross with myself as i chose to have our children knowing you would never be here (i would never change this), but i feel guilty they miss out on knowing you, having normal family holidays and days out and day to day life.  I am mad as i am now that woman living always in the past, not knowing how to move forward past you and i am mad because it is constant unrelenting hard work and i am quite frankly knackered. Where the frick are you you bastard?!

All that said, i am sad.  I am sad you are not here, i am sad for you that you miss out on the joy of our life and i am sad that you had such a devastatingly horrible and hard end to your short life.  For the first time ever recently i started to think why you, why me?  The question most people ask.  I have not felt it until now and what confuses me a little is how it has taken me so long to get to this point.  I want to move on, move forward from this point, but i don’t know how to do it.  I feel the shortness of life and i want to live it, i want more for me and my family, but i don’t know how to move you over to make way for that.

I frequently find myself thinking of the juxtaposition of my life, so blessed and yet so cursed. I found my true love, it will be eternal. We were happy, our memories frozen in time.  I now understand more than ever the line in the remembrance poem, “age shall not weary them.” We had a happy marriage, that will never change, i have eternal love, it won’t be destroyed, but yet i am left with you, just not in body.  Every person to enter my life will be compared to you.  We have had and continue to have, so many fortunate experiences, because of you, lovely home, our children, financial security for our kids. Invites to special events, contact with people in similar situations, on going contact with many of your wonderful friends and family…..But we don’t have you and you weren’t small so frankly thats a pretty big hole you left!

One part of my life is stuck and i don’t know how to kick start it, i don’t know how to kick you in to touch, not forget you, just make room alongside you.  So how have 6 years without you been? Blessed, rich, emotional, fantastic and shit all rolled into one.  I keep wishing you will come back to me….just in a different disguise.  So for anyone reading this who thinks i am amazing and inspiring, do you know what, i have decided,  i bloody well am, but i am also just normal and still grieving for, in my eyes, the best man to have ever walked the earth, (the title now shared with my gorgeous, pain in the bum, beautiful, happy and gorgeous natured son!) I will continue to see the positives as they far outweigh the negatives and i know i am so lucky to have all i do, but sometimes i just want you!