It's just over a year since I found out mum was sick, and as you'd expect, I am not doing very well. I'm haunted by frequent and vivid flashbacks in which I am mixing milk powder into full fat milk for my mum. It was all she could manage in the last week of her life. I can see myself measuring it out, feeling utterly pathetic and hopeless at the good it will do her. Then I can see her hands shaking as she tries to drink it and the floodgates open. This crying is like nothing I've experienced before. It hurts, and it makes me breathless. I bellow into cushions or the empty flat and worry that I am going insane.
It's going to be a tough Christmas.
1 comment:
Christmas, as an institution, is a bit of a serious gamble that way. As soon as life gets in any way horrific, it just poses an almost threatening level of mandatory happiness that in many cases really just serves as a way of putting your misery into even more solid context. In my experience, there's nothing worse than being sad amongst happy people. You start to believe in a kind of evil version of fate.
So sorry about your mum. If it helps, feel the fact that the love you have for her is still as much alive right now as it was when she was alive. That, at least, hasn't changed.
It'll get better, just try to hold on until it does.
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