When you look back on a period in your life, you often see so much more than you could at the time.
Sometimes with regret, sometimes with gratitude, or maybe even both.
I know this is an old cliché, but if it wasn’t for some very dear and genuinely concerned friends who I know love me, my family and my late wife, I probably wouldn’t be here now.
Perspectives
I sometimes try and imagine what they saw when they looked at me in the moments, hours, days and months after my wife died.
I am sure it was at times like looking at a wild animal trapped in a cage, eyes wide and darting around, trying desperately to make sense of what was happening to it.
Sometimes a seething mass of rage, anger, disappointment.
At other times a comatose mess of non-activity, a wall of sadness, or an abject lack of humanness.
I know what they saw would have constantly changed and how they dealt with it would needed to have changed accordingly.
Gratitude
That they did continue to deal with me/it and have NOT given up so far, is something for which I will forever be grateful, more than they could ever know.
I know too, that I am very fortunate to be surrounded by friends like this, because some going through similar experiences are not and I don’t know how they carry on.
It is not at all British to do so, but if any of my friends ever read this, I would want them to know just how much I love them, more than words can express!
Often in grief, you don’t say or do the things you really feel. In fact, many times what you put out there to the world is the opposite of what you want or intend to. By this, you can sometimes hurt the ones you love or who love you.
And I did not have the capacity to change or filter what I said or did, because I was/am simply using every atom I possess to survive the moment, to the exclusion of all else.
If friends still love and support you after that, they are real friends, tried and true, to be cherished more than fine gold!
As Polonius said to his son Laertes before he went off abroad on his own in Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’;