Like the song says, a day, 24 little hours, can make all the difference.
Even one second to the next. It is something we all know, but that we rarely acknowledge until we are forced to.
I feel this makes us take things for granted, until they are taken away from us.
Sliding Doors
There is a version of me that existed in blissful ignorance of the pain and torment every day now starts and ends with.
A version of me that had no idea what loneliness and sorrow really means.
A version of me that knew constant love, although not expressed daily, but felt in thousands of shared moments and the satisfaction of living life with the one person you were meant to share it with.
That version of me died when my wife did.
Shifting Perspectives
Since that moment, the importance of everything else has been minimised in my mind.
Some things I no longer find of any interest, such as the hamster wheel of work until we are allowed to retire with a pittance to support us at 67 (probably 69 by the time I get there).
It is important for me to provide, for myself and my children and that will continue, but the rest of it I just don’t care for at the moment.
Projections for the next 5 years, fiscal overspends, project deliverables, customer satisfaction trends, redundancies, Janet’s missing lunch, meetings to discuss what we’re going to say in another meeting, emails expecting an immediate response, and the thousand other minutia of daily office working, fill me with such indifference that I hate to even list them!
I just want to stand up and scream, “NONE OF THIS MATTERS!!!!”.
But, of course, it does matter, sometimes very much. Just not to me.
Am I Crazy?
The other people in the room don’t understand what is going on in my head. The intrusive thoughts I am fighting off. The way that every morning begins with a re-run of that day in hospital because, as I have already posted, my grief brain hates me.
And all of this before even getting out of bed! I am exhausted by the time I even start to think about work.
The thoughts don’t stop as I leave the house either. I drive past the salon where J had her hair done and I remember that day she came home but I didn’t notice because I was too wrapped up in a management crisis at work. This starts me, quite rightly, on a guilt trip about how she must have felt and how I didn’t make her feel like the beautiful woman that she was.
And then my brain helpfully reminds me of all the other times I probably didn’t respond correctly and failed to make my beautiful wife feel loved. How she didn’t deserve to feel like this because she was the most fun, caring and fiercely protective wife and mother I could have hoped for – and I took her for granted.
I might be fortunate and drive past a place with a happy memory, for example her old family home where she lived when we dated. I smile and revel in the memory of those exciting, heady times when you grow to love the one you know, without a shadow of a doubt, you will spend the rest of your life with.
That wonderful memory then stabs you through the chest with the knife of loss and a denied future together. It weirdly, ruins your day with its happiness. Because you are not allowed to be happy. She is not here to enjoy it with you.
This is just part of what ‘Grief’ means to me.