Monday 29 June 2015

All Cogs & Spirals Within A Wheel

Not sure how to start tonight.  It has been a tough few days.  Prepare yourself for a shock. If you are of a sensitive nature, it might be an idea to sit down.  My old mum has passed away.  It happened very suddenly last Thursday night.  And even though she has been in a nursing home for three years, even though we have been expecting it, even though we knew it would happen one day, it has still come as a terrible shock.

How long does one take to recover from such news?  How long before you stop feeling guilty if you catch yourself smiling about something totally unconnected, before you wish you could have - and feel you should have - done more? How long before the weight lifts?  Does it ever really?  Lift, I mean?  Or do we just get better at hiding it as time goes by?

People lose people every minute of every day and yet - yet when it is you - it feels as if nobody anywhere can ever understand how you feel!  Why is that?  Obviously everyone bears grief in their own way.  But no matter how close knit a family you come from, how loving and supportive your partner is, how kind and thoughtful your friends and colleagues are in what they say and what they do, you still find yourself completely and utterly alone at some point.  That point hit me this evening when Steve had to go back to work after being at my side every second since that phone call came in.

So now there is just me.  And my thoughts.  And my laptop.  And me pouring my heart out to people I can't see and don't really know because I do not want to further burden any of those I love so dearly each of whom is having to cope with their own grief in the wake of this terrible loss.

I can't seem to cry.  My heart feels like dried up wrinkled old prune and I can't let go.  I am doing everything on automation.  Everything I normally do, I am doing.  All the things I usually say, I am saying.  But it is all as if that busy, efficient, bustling activity is being done by someone else - someone little and frightened and cornered.  I am a robot.  I am Johnny5.  I am C3PO.  I am not 
Jilly.  Not right now.

I know it will pass.  I still have writing to do.  My young writers penultimate session before the summer break falls this Saturday.  And somewhere in all this confusion, this anger, this pathetic self-pity, I will eventually find myself again.

Thank you for putting up with my rant.  Maybe it is just as well I can't see and don't really know you.

It is definitely just as well, at this moment,  that you can't see and don't really know me!  Because right now I don't really know me either.

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