{emerging}

Slowly but surely I am coming back to some kind of equilibrium. It's been a hard slog these past few weeks. A lot of tears and a lot of pain, and the deepest sense of loss. I miss my boy so much. I don't feel like life will ever be the same. And I guess it probably won't. But I'm sure time will work its healing magic.

Life is finally starting to settle down again. The new house is unpacked and starting to feel like home. Some dramas with our former landlord have now been resolved, in our favour too.

Generally I think we are over the humps of the last 12 months with the potential for a period of smooth sailing. I hope so.

Enjoy the weekend peeps. I'll be back with some {sunday snippets} as I have a fabulous weekend planned.

{i thought i knew grief}

Having experienced considerable grief throughout my life I thought that I was well prepared for saying goodbye to Holden. But nothing in my life to date has prepared me for how I’ve been feeling since we said goodbye.

There is a quiet, dull, aching emptiness in my soul that won’t be soothed. It seems driven by the absence of Holden’s actual physical presence in my life. I’m amazed at how tangible it feels.  And I think made so much worse by the fact that we’ve just moved house and there are no memories of him in our new and unfamiliar space.

I have so much compassion for people who have lost a close loved one, like my Aunt who recently lost her partner of 25 years. I can’t even imagine what that absence feels like and how she makes her way through her days. Or people who lose a child. How do they ever move forward with their lives? It takes so much courage and strength to live with grief.

On some level I thought that because we made a conscious decision to end his life {and his suffering} that it would be easier. But in truth the decision has tormented me. In the depths of my grief it has felt like something I have brought on myself and something that I desperately want to be able to undo. My mind has played terrible tricks on me with questions about how sick he really was and whether the timing was right. The hard truth is that he was dying, perhaps slowly, but inevitably. Another truth is that he was suffering, how much we don’t really know. And surely another truth is that we did the most humane thing.

I know that I don’t need to question myself, and I’m not doing it on purpose. It’s just part of the impact that making this decision has had on me.

Mostly though I’m just incredibly sad.

I dreamt of my sweet boy a couple of nights ago. It was such a relief and a comfort to see him. In fact, it was probably the first point at which I started to feel somewhat OK. Before that it felt like he had just completely disappeared from my life, which was causing me so much pain. At least in dreams we can still hang out together every now and then. And who is to say whether the substance of dreams are imagined or really about finding each other in some other realm.

To live the rest of my days without him in my life is simply too much to bear.

{vehicle:circles}

It was like simply wanting to give up at last,

the saying fifty times a day, not quite to yourself,

"I'm tired, so tired of this, of everything",

until you'd forgotten somehow what you were tired of,

and realised, unavailingly, hopelessly,

that saying it meant something else, to you, to life,

something closer to the "Help me! Please!" you used to

want to cry out, aloud, again, to no one,

for no reason,

for simply being there, here, baffled

by these quantities of need and groundless sorrow...

How could you have gone past that,

only to arrive at this,

this about which there is nothing whatsoever you can feel

except the certainty of knowing that you're doing what you're doing to yourself,

but why?

And if you pass this, what will that have meant,

what will it have cost to accomplish this undoing?

                                                                 C.K.Williams

{life goes on}

As hard as it feels, it's true. As much as I've wanted time to stand still, to sit with my grief, to take time to remember and honour my boy's memory.

In spite of all that, time kept going. We moved house. I went back to work. I unpacked boxes, made lunches and dinners, did washing.

And part of me knows that this is a good thing. That I need to keep moving, even though the urge to lie very, very still seems so compelling.

One foot in front of the other. Life goes on. Yes it does.

{farewell little lion man}

BigCat

aka Holden, H, The Studio Assistant, My Beautiful Boy

11.9.1996 ~ 5.3.2014

You captured my heart and soul little man, and you have both forever. You are one of the greatest joys of my life and my best friend . I will miss you more than any words can ever express.

Rest in peace sweet soul.

*****

I'll be back in a while. We're moving to our new house on Friday and without internet for a week or so.

But I will be back soon.