Goodbye

This day five years ago was the last conversation I had with a husband who knew who I was.

Of course, I didn’t know that it would be.

The anniversaries of these things are perhaps a little weirder this year because the dates and days match up. Today, the calendar date that he last recognised me and we had an interaction that was meaningful to him in some capacity, is also Bank Holiday Monday, as it was when it was happening. So I guess there’s that, though I’m not altogether sure yet what I’m supposed to do with it.

I’m not stuck in the flashbacks of the early deathiversaries and I do not miss them.

But to know it is five years this date and this day has it’s own quiet significance, and also, in a way, doesn’t.

It was a day of a goodbye that I didn’t know I was saying.

I cannot imagine the shock and pain of losing someone to sudden death. Of life being normal until a knock on the door or tone of a phonecall shatters everything in a moment. To not have had the opportunity to say what you might have wanted to. The fight for peace in having to believe that they knew everything that you would have wanted to say already.

I am grateful for the chance to have said those things.

But death to terminal illness isn’t like they show it on the movies.

Watching someone have to say a final goodbye every time they leave a group of people for months and seeing the toll that takes on them, to the point they stop wanting to see people at all.

Wondering whether your goodbye is the last one every time you leave a room.

Realising that when you had your last goodbye, you didn’t really think that was it.

Because you think this time of dying is going to have this gravity to it. That you will know the end is the end, that there will be a sign or that something inside you will give you that gut reaction. That it will be clearer that now is the time to make the changes.

But nobody actually knows. The nurses tell you when you see decline over a week your person has weeks left, and when you see decline over a day, it is more likely only days. And that’s helpful. But weeks and days is still nebulous. How much of life do you stop not knowing how many weeks “weeks” is and the bills still need paying? How much of normality do you keep going and which one do you outsource, the caring for the dying or the caring for the ones who will still be living?

When will a “see you later” become a “goodbye”?

This day five years ago we spent most of the afternoon waiting in the barbers to get the boys’ hair cut, because we hadn’t had time before and they were looking like bush people and who knew when we were going to be able to go if not then. A friend was able to sit with Steve and talk to him about football so that we could leave the house, because we had decided two days previously that he now couldn’t be left alone. I made dinner, supervised homework, did all the things that needed doing, took up strawberries and lollipops which were the only things Steve wanted to eat, helped him to the bathroom, popped children in our bed for a rotating set of bedtime stories as reading out loud was still something he could do without losing words, did the morphine. All much as we had the days previously. If I had know then what I know now, would that day have been different? I probably would have been less bothered by the bush people hair, to be fair. And maybe ordered delivery food.

But while we had signs of daily decline, mainly mobility and mental capacity, while it felt nearer to the end, there wasn’t any indication that it was as imminent as it was. Or if there was, I missed it.

I wasn’t extra kind, extra attentive. I didn’t stop everything and give him my full attention all day. There were no speeches, no last words of enduring love. Life powered on, with three children needing to feel life around them as strongly as they felt the shadow of death.

A whispered goodnight at the 11pm morphine turned out to be goodbye.

When he was asleep at the 3am morphine, I took that as a good sign that he was finally getting some rest without being in pain or discomfort from his body failing and filling up with toxins from the failure causing him to feel even worse. I didn’t know that it was because those toxins were irrevocably affecting his brain and that the next time his eyes opened they would be filled with fear because he would have no idea who he was, who I was, what was going on, and the chance for meaningful goodbye had passed.

Once he was asleep children were ushered in to say a goodbye to someone who in reality was already gone, knowing he wouldn’t be here when they returned home from school. Consciously orchestrating that for your small children is a part of parenting I wasn’t expecting.

Those are but some of the events of today and tomorrow five years ago. I don’t need to recount the finer details or make myself recapture the trauma for posterity. I know what happened. I’m grateful in some ways that he didn’t. An experience I can now almost envisage as a fly on the wall of the bedroom I redecorated as part of reclamation. An experience it now almost seems incomprehensible that I went through.

In the hospice we told him he could go now, although in all honesty, he pretty much already had.

Terminal illness messes with goodbyes.

In some ways we had been saying goodbye to him for weeks. As he stopped being able to do things, remember things, be part of things. As our relationship transitioned from husband and wife to patient and carer. As we did things for the last time without knowing they would be the last time we did them.

In some ways we never said goodbye at all, because he’d lost the ability to hear by the time we knew he was going.

But in theory, five years ago was the day that we said it to a person who understood it. I wonder whether that should feel more than it does, but it’s been five years and perhaps through time, perhaps through the trauma, many of the details of the day have not been consigned to memory. I think that’s OK.

All in all, I guess the next right thing is to remember to make every departure one you can live with. To keep shouting “have a good day I love you” when the teen leaves late for school even knowing it will meet no response. To hug those who still consent to be hugged. To tell people why they matter even if there is surface discomfort.

Because I don’t think I do regret the barbers, even if I might not have been there if I had known five years ago what I know today. I didn’t know. And the boys needed hair cuts. And we lived lives where everything didn’t need saying at the goodbye, because it was said all the time.

Which is a good job really, since I didn’t know when it came, even though we knew it was coming.

If

Once upon a time, when the years had only just started beginning with a 2, I was at uni and my parents came to visit for the weekend. Which always meant a very good lunch and a reminder that life went on outside of the bubble of higher education where everyone is your age, social occasions happen on a whim, and academia seems really important. On one of those weekends, my dad noticed a poster up near some marginally recognised stairs, for a masters exchange programme which was essentially a fully paid year in the States and a postgraduate degree at the end of it. I had already looked at the poster, been on the website (back when going on a website was borderline new and usually exciting and involved going to the IT suite to do it) and decided not to apply because I would be an English graduate and there was no English MA programme. My dad wondered whether I could blag my way into a different humanities based course because I’d done one of my specialist papers on American literature and suggested I didn’t lose anything by putting in an application but wouldn’t it be an experience if I managed to get it?

If my parents hadn’t visited on that weekend I probably never would have applied for an American Studies MA, which was a totally fascinating course, and developed my love for the history, country, and all things Stateside, not to mention gave me a lifelong friend or two.

At the end of that year on the East Coast, maximising every opportunity that came my way and finding myself afresh in a different vein to how I had at university number one, I wasn’t sure I wanted to come home yet, so I applied for a job. It was part writing, part archiving, part research, quite niche, totally fascinating. I interviewed and got down to the last two. The second interview was in a restaurant in the more business-looking part of the city, around the corner from the seafront, and I felt like I was making it as we talked culture and identity and historical objects and literature over fancy salads and sourdough long before everyone did it. In the end my CV wasn’t stand-out enough to justify employing a non-citizen over a citizen, which you have to be able to do for the visa paperwork in the US, so they went with the American.

If I had got that job, had a better CV, not been up against my equal-on-paper who didn’t need to apply for residency, I probably would have stayed out there for at least a couple of years, if not longer. I probably would have taken my career in a totally different direction.

Not getting the job meant coming home, but since my time to explore had been shortened to when my visa expired rather than over weekends while I stayed there employed, this necessitated a very full on road trip with a uni bestie who has since emigrated to the other side of the world herself. We covered a lot of the North East, stopping in roadside motels on our way which we priced up to choose by picking up the tourist guides attached to the maps at gas stations because smart phones weren’t a thing and internet cafes were pricey. We did the Skyline Drive, and the Hudson Valley, I made her accompany me to Salem and Walden Pond because I had not yet fully discarded my American Studies postgrad persona. We hit DC and NYC and Boston and stayed in borderline grim hostels trying to make our money last. We Greyhounded, because Amtrak was not in the budget and shared coffees in Starbucks for a breakfast stop. Needless to say, I loved it.

If I hadn’t made that road trip, I would be sat here now wishing I had, and I probably would never have developed the sense of travel adventure that took me to so many amazing and off-the-tourist track places in the years that followed, knowing that I would be OK even if the plan didn’t quite work out. I probably would, however, have had slightly more money to keep me going when I came home and perhaps wouldn’t have jumped into temping so quickly when I struggled to land a job back in London. If I hadn’t taken the first temping job that I got offered, I would never have met Steve.

I guess it is because at the beginning of the month we got to go on one of my many many “bucket list” type trips, back to the States, that I have been contemplating my ifs lately. If I hadn’t done that masters, I definitely wouldn’t have been on this trip. It is the things I learned during that year that added this place on my “I’d love to go there” page. I knew it would fit well for us, for who the kids are and what they are interested in right now, the history to visit, the narratives to learn, the wildlife to experience – and it did.

I realised that while we were there I felt free in a way I don’t feel at home, mainly because I was pretending to live a life that isn’t mine, but maybe could have been. We stayed downtown, enjoying Southern charm, breakfast in the courtyard that somebody else made, a hot pot of coffee always ready on the stand, wine and cheese receptions, fresh-baked cookies before bed, and everything in walking distance. Historic buildings that we had read about and seen in photos, where things that changed destiny happened, colourful streets lined with palmetto trees, iconic views on our doorstep. Different flavours, smells, tastes, sounds, accents, arrays of things we recognised but that were different in the stores we meandered past, all right there, just minutes away, so we could pop in pop out, absorb ourselves in every moment of the life of the city. Then we moved to the beach, a beautiful beach-house with games in the basement, views from the covered porch on the top floor of the house, sunsets to make you marvel at life, Spanish moss hanging to remind you how far you were from home. A sandy path through the trees, over the creek, to the dunes and the white sands beyond. Sunshine and surf, the warmth and the waves.

And as I lived in a house that wasn’t mine, and walked with engaged and enthused children down streets that aren’t mine, as I watched them on their boogie boards out in the ocean, laughing under the open blue skies, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like if life had taken us somewhere different. Like an end of La La Land vision of what might have been if I had got that job, met someone different, moved to this beautiful place full of fascination to develop work I would have started, raised children with a father who didn’t die….

It’s a pointless thing to think, of course, because that’s not what happened. But perhaps it will also always be something that I carry. The perennial if. The tumbling down the rabbit hole of the path not taken. The projection of what might have been over what actually is. Perhaps it is just the stage of moving forward with this life that I am at. Grieving not only for what I lost, but what I will never have, not looking at the hole that we have built over with a life that is beautiful in its own way, but imagining a life that never had a hole in the first place.

I can appreciate that it doesn’t really do me any good wishing for something I can never have. I suspect part of it comes with the realisation that after very nearly five years of doing life without Steve, doing life with him seems as much part of history as those years at university or living in the US – a bubble, boxed in the past, long gone.

But while it can make me sad, while it can make me want to uproot and move and start over which is also not really an option, I do also think that it is the next right thing to take myself out of my life occasionally, to go to the dream places and live the short-term dream.

While pretending that those vacation days are my long-term reality is never going to help, having a break and experiencing them for what they are, does. Getting to be that person who sets a different budget for activities and food and says yes when she would usually be more careful, getting to design days and experiences around and for kids who don’t have any other options for their time, getting to bask in the warmth of not only the sun, but of the life away from the responsibilities that circumstance gave me to carry.

Finding a happy place, when home isn’t always it, remains important. Reconnecting with my children far away from the pressures of regular life, finding something different to talk about, seeing things, experiencing things, enhancing the fabric of our lives together, not only being the sole source of resented authority, seems particularly vital. Slipping into an alternate existence, that maybe we can’t have forever, is still good for the soul.

Because as much as I hate what happened to us, as much as I wouldn’t choose this, as much as I wonder about what would have happened if, who they would be if, who I would be as a person and a parent if…. I also wouldn’t be that kickass brave warrior widow, stood watching the sunset on the beach with her kids, after a day of seeing dolphins and sharing a ridiculously large portion of loaded fries, doing it all by myself on my own terms, with the potential to one day come back or go to the next place and keep finding happy places all over the world if this didn’t happen either. I need there to be those good things, big-life moments in a life that isn’t our usual, so that the sting doesn’t hit so hard that this wouldn’t be how it is if….

I won’t say that I don’t kind of wish that some of what we experienced was my real life, because I do. I won’t say it isn’t hard coming back from adventures to the relentlessness of keeping life going as a solo working parent, because it is. But I will say that I am glad I have the opportunity to step outside of my life sometimes, in the places I would love life to have taken me to in any circumstances, to create adventures that are just what I want and just what we need, so that if opportunities come in the future, even though it doesn’t always feel like they will, I know we will say yes.

Small

Fun fact.

In 2018, when Harry and Meghan got married, the Lorraine show did a feature on what Mark Heyes, the fashion expert, thought the Royal Family would be wearing to the wedding. The day before the ceremony, they did a live special featuring lookalikes, as he styled them as they might be for the occasion.

At the time a friend of Benjy’s from preschool’s godmother (convoluted much?) was involved in the production of the show and it turns out that official child lookalikes are expensive, so she was hoping that her goddaughter could be enticed to appear as Princess Charlotte with the promise of some Haribo in the dressing room and probably keeping one of the outfits from the show. And did she have a small blonde friend who might make a Prince George?

Which is how Benjy ended up dressed in a linen suit from M&S, which Mark Heyes crudely hacked off with a pair of scissors just below the knee to tuck into a pair of knee high socks moments before he went back on set, holding the hand of a dubious Prince William lookalike waving a Union Jack while confetti cannons fired.

The Kate lookalike was amazing with the kids, looked eerily like the real Princess, and was a genuinely lovely person. We had a lot of fun with her backstage, and the result was that despite knowing I had been chatting with someone called Naomi who actually had a northern accent, I felt like I knew Kate. That’s how good of a lookalike she was.

However, thinking I know her when I evidently don’t is not why I have been unexpectedly shaken by the news today that Kate has cancer.

It’s because every news article about it lists underneath the names and ages of her children: Prince George, 10, Princess Charlotte, 8, and Prince Louis, 5.

And those are the exact ages that my kids were when we had to sit down and tell them that their dad had cancer. Boy, girl, boy. 10, 8, 5.

At the time, it was just something we were living. It was playing the hand we’d been dealt. It was reading up on how you tell kids their parent is going to die and trying to remember it all when you are looking your actual kids in the eye and their dad is so upset that he becomes unable to talk midway through. Everything says be simple, factual, allow them to ask questions.

“Is Daddy going to get better from the cancer?”
“No, I’m really sorry, there isn’t any medicine the doctors can give him that can make him better. Daddy is going to die from the cancer.”

I have a friend at school whose eldest child is the same age as my youngest, and her subsequent two have the same age gap as mine. Two years, then three years. And so hers are currently the same age as mine were when everything went to shit. And every time I look at her youngest one, going off into reception with his backpack that’s almost as big as he is, in his brother’s hand-downs, I think: “he’s so small.” Because mine aren’t, anymore.

But they were once. And my smallest was that small when we told him his dad was going to die. At the time it was just our life. Looking back, they were so little. Backpack down to the knees little. And their dad was dead.

During counselling last year, my counsellor suggested to me that perhaps I hadn’t allowed myself to fully realise the enormity of what we had been through as a family, that the trauma we had experienced losing Steve to cancer and then our support network to lockdown was bigger than I was perhaps acknowledging, because I had been so consumed by powering through as a necessity. That I had maybe seen it all as smaller than it actually was. Because when you are in it, you can’t really look at how big it is, because it will crush you.

She probably had a point.

I’m taking myself far far away from social media tonight because everyone, of course, wants to make their opinion on the diagnosis known. Everyone’s an expert. The fact she was thrown under the bus about the photo when they knew she had cancer. The fact William isn’t sitting next to her holding her hand in the video. Making news about when things are said and the way things are said and how things are said.

Removing the expletives that are definitely in the version in my head, I want to ask all these experts if they have ever had to sit down with a 10, 8 and 5 year old and explain to them what cancer is and where in their parent’s body it currently exists. I want to ask them if they have ever had to be the one to speak that fear into the lives of their children, to watch that darkening and cloud come over their tiny faces, to see three child react totally differently and not be able to be everything each of them needs concurrently and second guessing every word out of your mouth that breaks their hearts a little bit more. I want to ask them if they have had to know how it feels to be the one holding everything together but not the one that the disease is happening to, so not the worst off and it not being your story to tell, or your decisions to make, but it absolutely affecting every single thought and part of your life but feeling like you should be grateful it’s not you even though anything that happens to them impacts everything about you to an infinite degree.

I can guarantee that those that are casting more judgement have not.

Maybe, she didn’t care what anyone was saying about the photo. Maybe, she needed time with saying the words out loud without her voice cracking on the “c” one every time. Maybe, she wanted to be the one telling what was happening to her. Maybe, it’s easier for her to not have his pain next to her because having him alongside would make her more emotional and she just needs to get through what she has to say. Maybe, she wants one of them with the kids at all times and she needed to know he was with the children while she talked to the camera because that’s what they need right now. Maybe, this is the only way they know how because they don’t know what they are doing and there’s no guidebook and even if there was you would still have to find your own way through it because there’s no right way, only your way.

When today started, I wasn’t expecting to be cast back to that day in January 2019 that I told my kids a truth I wish I never had to. I wasn’t expecting to think: “but her kids are so small” (or as a douchenozzle on social media before my brain kicked in and told me to turn it off suggested: “still quite young” – FIVE, really?) and remember how small mine were when we had those conversations.

I liked having in common that my kid had once been dressed as her kid. Having this in common? Not so much.

If there is anything today that is the next right thing it is surely to remember to be kind. To people we will never meet, but who are going through something awful. To the man who grew out of the teenager who had to follow his mother’s coffin in front of the world and is now having to grapple with the cancer of his remaining parent and the other parent of his small children, as the world looks on and judges his every move, when it is her story to tell in the way that she wants to. To everyone we come across because we don’t know what it is that has made them feel small, but it can be things like this, and just being kind can make everything less awful. Because people can be small, but they can be carrying something absolutely massive. And when you get judged for how you carry something you never asked to pick up in the first place and that is so heavy that your whole self has changed from the weight, that judgement breaks you a little bit more than you were already broken.

I’m glad that Kate’s medical team are positive. I hope and pray for a full recovery for her. We never had any conversations about cancer that had any suggestion of hope in them, so our experience is definitely not theirs.

But there are stories that you hear that take you back to moments of yours that you almost can’t believe were your life. And today has brought one of those stories.

Cancer happened to us when our children were properly small.

Cancer happened to us and me feel small. Helpless to support my husband in something that only he was going through. Helpless to keep things going. Helpless to be in two places at once for what he needed and what the children needed. Helpless to have the right words, to answer the questions in a way that was appropriate, to make space for the big emotions.

And it was just what happened.

It happens to a lot of people. Even ones who live in palaces.

I guess today has just reminded me, as I think how chuffing terrible it is for this to be happening to them, that this happened to us. And it was chuffing terrible for it to happen to us, too. And sometimes how big of a thing it was, when we were so small, is something that just comes up and reminds me of the counsellor asking, do you realise how big it was?

I’m not sure.

I feel small tonight. And I feel sad for those small people that my children were at 10, 8 and 5, and for the small people that hers are, too.

Shoes

When I was a teenager I lived in DMs. I had a black pair and also a purple pair. Between our friendship group we all had a coloured pair, I was purple, friends were cherry red and royal blue. We also all had short suede skirts from Kensington Market that matched the colour of our boots. We thought we were it.

We thought we were making such a statement.

Years later, my mum told me how much she loved that I lived in my DMs through my teen years because they were so good for my feet, having not done her own any favours by wearing the less podiatrically friendly fashions of her own adolescence.

Foot health was not really the statement teenage me was going for. My mum obviously never told me at the time that she thought the boots were “sensible” because, having been a teenager, she knew that I’d probably stop wearing them if I thought that’s what she thought (she was probably right, too). Parenting decisions made having walked – not literally – in my shoes.

Finding myself the solo parent of two teens and one who will be there in the next few years, I often remember this shoe story as I try to figure out how to play it. Putting myself in their shoes, what would I need from my mum to help me make the best decisions for myself? Advice, time, or just the silence of someone affirming choices without wanting to make them feel less independent by virtue of agreeing with them.

The problem is, I sometimes struggle to put myself in their shoes.

In most areas of my life now, nearly five years into being widowed, I am used to being on my own. I may not always like it, but it doesn’t really rock me like it did in the past. I may prefer to be sharing my life, my adventures, my good days and bad with someone who chose me to care about, but I’ve largely stopped longing for it, or being resentful that I don’t have it. I’ve learned the gossamer thin silver linings of being on your own and tried to lean into them rather than focus on the exponentially larger cloud that they accompany. I’ve tried to dwell on independence and freedom of choice rather than soul-destroying loneliness. I do wonder, sometimes, whether this has left me a little closed off, but I also know that to see my life as empty because there’s no “significant other” would leave me reaching back for a past that can’t exist in the present, or chasing after a person to fill a void, and not necessarily in a healthy way. So I don’t see it as empty, mostly – just filled differently.

In most areas of my life. But not in parenting.

Solo parenting will likely always be the part of this whole crapfest that gets to me. The way I feel utterly robbed – and not just for my kids but also for myself – is something I haven’t really learned to live with in the same way. Solo parenting feels to me like forcing my feet into sky high stilettos a size too small, rather than the comfy well-worn slippers of parenting as a unit.. I can walk in them, but it doesn’t feel right. And it feels like whatever I do, even if it is taking a semi-confident step, I’m still making blisters everywhere.

While my children are loved by plenty of people, it is hard to know there isn’t that other person who they utterly belong to, for whom they are everything, and who bears equal investment of love and an equal share of responsibility. I hate it for them, of course, that they don’t have that. But I hate it for me, too, because I think parenting was so different when there were two of us. I felt like I became a better version of myself when we parented together. I don’t feel like that parenting alone, even though I know I try my best.

It’s not that Steve, with the knowledge of his impending death, didn’t think ahead. He did. He left videos for the children, which he had a friend record and send to us. But the videos were made perhaps a couple of weeks too late, when he was already being affected by the encephalopathy associated with his cancer, and was struggling to stay on topic and find the words he wanted to say. So what he meant to be an inspirational watch is quite an uncomfortable one, because he’s not really himself. And, which is perhaps harder now, the videos were made for the versions of the children that he imagined they would be in their later years, wanting to watch his advice and encouragement.

The fact is, he never met these children that actually exist in the here and now. He never met children who had tried to cheer their sedated dying father in hospice by describing the tennis match going on out the window and the Eton Mess on the dessert menu, despite knowing he would never wake up or eat again. He never met children who had climbed alongside the body of their dead father in the chapel of rest to rub his earlobe like they used to when they were a baby and whisper how much they would miss him. He never met children who were scared by the enormity of the grief that insidiously crept around their home. He never met children who lost their support systems through a pandemic less than a year after losing him and consequently, after already knowing death, really doubted that there would be a future to hope for. He never met children who went through phases of believing that life is just a random dealing of bad cards and you’re better off not being too invested in it. He never met children who catastrophise to the point of anxious paralysis.

The videos he made were to the versions of the children he thought they would be based on everything he had dreamed for them in their short lives and believed that they could become. Because he didn’t know the impact that not having him would have on them. How could he? How could anyone?

But that does leave me feeling more alone in the parenting than ever. Out of the three of the kids, he only saw one reach double digits. They were all so small when he died and he never dealt with any of the questions that come up now, so how would I know what he might answer, when his answers would have been tailored to the children he knew, as they were before the trauma of bereavement?

And this is my challenge: how to parent children when I never walked in the shoes they wear. Not literally, of course. I wear my daughter’s sliders to put the bins out all the time, though I can’t really wear the older two’s shoes except for the bins because they have bigger feet than me and I feel like I have clown feet. But because I don’t fully know what it’s like to experience what they have at the age they did. I don’t fully know the level of fear or rage or anxiety or confusion that introduces into a 10, or 8, or 5 year old. I don’t fully know how their brains or thought processes were impacted. I don’t fully know how it made them feel to know he wouldn’t know them past the ages they were when he died.

And I constantly fight against the low-level fury that not only did he not get to know them, but I won’t get to know the them they would have been if this hadn’t happened. I have to not let my mind go to the place of imagining how their lives would have been, how they wouldn’t have struggled, how they might have embraced life differently, been more confident, had wider circles, dreamed other dreams, if something inside them hadn’t been impacted by their dad’s death. I have to not let my mind imagine the shoes they might be wearing, shoes I might recognise and understand better, shoes I might not feel so lost in tying to their feet.

There are days when solo parenting is a heavy thing to carry. Not every day. But some. Days when I wish more than others that he was here to make decisions with, think of ideas with, try a new approach with, be the bad cop to my good or good cop to my bad. Days when I wonder whether he would have understood one child or another better than I am in that moment and been able to translate the difference. Days when I can’t think of anything else to try and feel totally and utterly not enough.

Still.

I don’t feel equipped to parent these growing humans through this stage of their lives, but I feel like I would have done a better job if we were learning together, sharing both of our own experiences and gut feelings rather than me winging it on my own. Having worked with kids in some capacity since I was in my early twenties I felt fairly able to be a fun parent when they were smaller – even when I was doing it on my own. Despite working with teens as a youthworker, I often feel totally unable to parent as they need now they are bigger and less likely to want to engage with me.

I know I try. I know I try my best. I know that deep down they are good kids and they could have it so much worse than they do, despite everything.

But I have never worn their shoes, and their teenagerness – the hormones, desired independence, semi-rebellion, increased apathy and attitude, all mixed together with the longer lasting impact of their bereavement, some of which is very much not dealt with fully – and the responsibility for helping them become healthy happy humans as they grow feels as difficult as a night in stilettos after a year of DMs.

All of which to say is that for me, the next right thing, at the moment, is to try to remember that my mum may not have loved my DMs for aesthetic value, but she could see that they would get me to where I needed to go safely, even if she may not have chosen to tread that path herself. And to remember, therefore, that this stage of my kids’ lives may not be what I would have dreamed for them as I held them as teeny tiny newborns, with every page of their fresh new book still to be written, but that I somehow have to keep believing that ultimately things will be ok, even if they are not taking the route I recognise.

I can’t make them into the versions of them that they might have been if what happened hadn’t happened, because it happened. And I may not ever make peace with that, and that’s just part of what happened. Loving kids who were damaged by circumstance, and who sometimes seem to be totally unconsciously or very deliberately consciously staying in that place of damage, is hard. Wanting something better for them not just in spite of what happened but because of it, that’s hard too. Especially when you can’t make that better happen for them, because they have to stand alongside you and fight for a future they are reticent to trust, and they don’t really want to.

I long for “normal”, knowing that yes, that doesn’t really exist. Because there is a more “normal” than we have, and we had it. I long for their childhoods and adolescences to not be marked by what isn’t, who isn’t. And in so many ways they aren’t. But they also are. I long to be able to tell them what I mean in words they can hear and understand and appreciate. And I will keep trying – over ice cream to bribe them to connect, in the car where they don’t need to make eye contact, on another long weekend walk because they need to get out the house and word vomit at me even though I am tired from a manic week at work and just want to get the laundry done before it’s dark.

But there will be times where they don’t understand me and I don’t understand them because I haven’t walked in their shoes. And I don’t know how it feels to have been cut adrift from one of your anchors so young.

All I can do is silently hope that they will choose to keep putting their shoes on and walking their walk, taking them to a destination as yet unknown, even if right now I struggle because the path I thought they would be on to get there is constantly re-routing but not yet offering that blue line to get there, and I feel like I am still that mum moaning at her toddlers to “put your shoes on” even though they are anything but.

So solidarity to the solo parents. I guess our shoes turned out to be wellies to wade through the streams of dubious substance. But I hope we can all keep wearing them with style.

Down

The week before last (the one before half term) was not a good week.

Life, whoever’s it is, comes with highs and lows, ups and downs, you win some, you lose some. Always has, always will. But when you have lost the someone who you used to win and lose with, the someone who held your hand tight as you faced the storm together, it feels like the lows are lower, the losses hit harder, the downs kick you while you were already down.

It was a catalogue of things going wrong. Things that had taken the investment of time, effort, energy and sometimes cold hard cash in the first place. Things related to kids, home, things that impacted my wellbeing. Things that with all the work I had done or commissioned others to do, should have gone right. But due to powers outside of my control did not, and then required more time, effort and energy – none of which I had in surplus – to be corrected or at least talked about so that they perhaps didn’t go wrong the next time. When, given the investment already made, everything should have been hunky-dory.

All of which, when combined, left me feeling down. When one thing belly flops it’s still manageable, mood-wise. When there is an avalanche of misfires, the willingness to get back up and fight another day does a vanishing act.

Throughout this “journey” (bleurgh, sounds borderline toxic positivity but I can’t think of another word to use), I have dealt with the downs in different ways. Sometimes it has been crawling under the duvet post drop-off and hiding from the world until the emails start pinging. Sometimes it has been howling at the sky (sometimes howling also means using words the children shouldn’t hear). Sometimes it has been chocolate. Sometimes it has been incrementally removing myself bit by bit from the world that seems to conspire against me until I am barely there. Sometimes it has been escape into fiction – print or screen – so that I can pretend this isn’t really my life and I don’t really have to deal with any of the problems that I don’t want to deal with and perhaps forgetting myself a little in the process. Sometimes it has been loudly tippy-typing posts here to an imaginary audience who will of course agree with every word. Sometimes a mixture of any or all of the above.

Usually, there’s an element of wanting to give up because why does everything have to be so hard and can I please just catch a break for once.

The week before last I was caught between wanting to rail with fury at everyone who had smited me and my well-laid hard-worked-for plans and wanting to hibernate like a bear, not waking up until late Spring, earliest. I wanted to throw in the towel. I wanted to run away. I wanted to stop adulting and parenting and just not please thank you very much.

But, I’m learning. Slowly, maybe. And also, I don’t get to stop adulting or parenting because apparently that’s not an option. Should be, but is not.

So despite everything within me wanting to crawl into a well-furnished hole or, preferably, jump on a plane to a tropical island – alone – I tried to resist the temptation to give up. Despite everything within me justifying that it would be fine, given the circumstances, to let the rest of the week slide in a couple of days of pissed-off-ness and hopeless malaise, I tried to keep mentally afloat.

Because I know I can spiral. I know when I am down everything seems worse, and I sink lower, which only means I have further to climb back when I’m ready to.

So the next right thing was to grab at a life-ring. Which currently is walking my friend’s dog with her, at pace, while word vomiting everything that is doing my head in. The word vomiting helps, somewhat. It doesn’t hurt that my friend is training to be a counsellor and asks interesting questions, nor does it hurt that we think very similarly, have very similar backgrounds, and very similar children, nor does it hurt that she’s a generally awesome person. But the main thing that helps is that her dog is a golden retriever who loves puddles. And you can’t stay properly down when you are watching a golden retriever in her happy puddle, tail wagging, eyes full of delight, especially when that golden retriever is so excited when she sees that it is you at the door that she runs in a circle so fast that she has to lie down for a moment.

The walking and the dog don’t change any of the circumstances other than my jeans which were previously clean get adorned with dog drool; nothing is undone, everything is still pants. But that hour gives me a reset. That hour is, perhaps, my happy puddle.

It reminds me that I’m down, sure. But I’m not out. Down and still in, mostly, is a much better mindset.

I still feel like the universe should appreciate that when you’ve lived for so long in trauma-mode, and survival-mode, when you solo parent living life hanging on by your unpainted fingernails, it would be a kindness to just stop dealing the crap hands. But the universe is yet to catch on. So I guess the downs will keep coming.

But I’m down and still in, and if I’m in it, there may yet be some more win its.

Last week was better. This week could go any which way since it’s only Tuesday, but so far, so not terrible. Still in.

Stuff

Earlier today a very nice man came and took the skip that he delivered, empty, this time last week, which I had filled up with stuff. He actually said it wasn’t quite full, but to my mind, it was quite full enough.

Some of the stuff has come from the home transformation that has been going on here as part of Christmas presents. Given the three autumnal birthdays, the increased allowance meaning some disposable income of their own, and the fact that they don’t “do” toys anymore, festive gifts for the kids is not quite the pictures-from-the-Argos-catalogue ease that it used to be. And so this Christmas was “new bedrooms for the boys”, ending the forever reign of shared space that in our small children naivete we thought they would enjoy. Spoiler alert: later on, they did not. Another change to the home that Steve will never know about, but another change made to make our family-as-it-is work better.

This change of course brought with it the detritus of dismantled bunk beds and a sleeper sofa that only the cat had slept on, and made his own by unpicking it with his claws. Classy. Hence, the skip.

But while I had the skip, it made sense to fill it up (or not, depending who you ask!), and so I thought while I was in this headspace of getting things “sorted” for the New-ish Year (job, bedrooms, etc.) I would attempt to tackle some of the stuff in the loft.

One of the things that Steve said to people when he was terminally diagnosed was that he was going to sort through all his stuff in the loft so that I wouldn’t have to do it. I truly believe that he had every intention of doing so, in his mind. But when you know that your time is limited, do you really choose to spend it going through boxes of old crap? And then, of course, by the time you are too ill to do all the things you actually want to do with those last days of good life, you are definitely too ill to get up the ladder to said boxes of old crap. So while I think he thought he would, I can also see, especially with hindsight, that it was never going to happen in a million years, and definitely not in the one third of a year that he had to do it.

So while I have friends who remember how he said that was one of the things that he was going to do and thought how amazing he was for it, he didn’t actually do it.

What he did actually do, apparently, was put everything in the loft and forget about it like there was some vortex of miscellaneous belongings from a past life swirling above our upstairs ceiling. Things I thought he had donated, or rehomed, or taken to the dump, were all in the loft. Things that had moved directly from storage before we bought this house because we didn’t have room for them in the flat we lived in before here, to the loft, had squatted up there, untouched by human hands for long enough for the then 11 month old to be starting his GCSE courses. Not merely gathering dust for the nearly five years since their owner died, but for the ten years we had lived in the house before that. Unopened. Uninterested. Unuseful.

It’s funny with “their stuff”. Everyone does it differently. And everyone does different bits of it differently, I think. It’s as personal as the stuff is.

For me, I was very quick to clear out most of what is now only my bedroom. The clothes in the wardrobe all got donated except his shirts which I kept and the kids chose ones that were particularly special to them and a wonderful friend made cuddle monsters out of the fabric. I have kept the rest of the shirts because if you knew Steve you knew he loved his shirts, and I know at times we will all get a kick out of looking through them and remembering times when he wore this one or that. All the rest of the clothes went to charity, including all his suits, and the shoes went to recycling. I didn’t want to see his coat hanging on the rail with ours, never to be worn again, every time I left and came home, and I didn’t want to feel sad every time the wardrobe door opened and I woke up to see the things left behind by the person who would never be here. Plus, the storage space was handy, if I’m being totally honest. If you have to find a positive to the worst nightmare being your actual life.

So some stuff went quickly. See also: his stuff in the fridge, because I open it on the regular and it got to feeling like the fridge was being mean by reminding me what would go uneaten. I don’t need my fridge to be mean. I need my fridge to store chocolate and keep Pepsi Max cold (and also the occasional can of cocktail).

Weirdly, the bedside cabinet is full of his stuff that I just don’t know where to start with, but I mainly use the bedside cabinet as a table so we can all just pretend that’s all it is and there isn’t a cupboard with all manner of items wedged in precariously, even though there is.

But the stuff in the loft. That was a whole other stuff.

And I’ve been putting it off for a loooooong time because, as with so many things, it wasn’t supposed to be my bloody job and I do enough of the rubbish jobs to not want to sort actual rubbish.

However. Needs must. And if you are paying for a skip for some of the stuff you are a fool if you don’t fill it up (at least to the point you think it’s full, anyway), because skips don’t come cheap.

So, finally, the next right thing was to skip some stuff.

It’s a weird thing to sort through the things that someone else kept to remind them of things you weren’t there for. Rooting through boxes of pictures wondering what the kids would want to see when I don’t know any of the stories behind the photographs, or why their dad enjoyed the memory of them enough to keep them. Knowing that even if they have the inclination to see his “interesting” hair choices of the 80s and the very dubious choice in shorts on holiday somewhere I don’t know where it was, how many pictures will they realistically want to keep? The ones he must have taken, full of who I assume were friends, possibly previous girlfriends, but that he’s not in – do we need those? When I don’t even know who those people are? Is it cruel to skip what someone else deemed a recollection of their life? Or is it more cruel for me to keep it, together with all my crap, and make the kids go through a double amount when we are both dead, knowing even less than I do?

The plastic lidded storage box being my friend, I have kept some things I think it might be interesting for us to go through together sometime. Trophies from golf tournaments, photographs of him through the ages – stages of borderline mullets and wannabe Iron Maiden hair that I’m sure the kids will get a kick out of or be mortally embarrassed by. Birthday cards he signed for them, Father’s Day cards they made for him and he kept. And the shirts.

But boxes and boxes of stuff drove away on a skip truck today. Not just his stuff, also lots of baby things that I thought had been passed on but were merely passed up. Things that hold memory, but that I don’t think need to be physically stored. I worked and cleared on the basis that if I hadn’t known it was up there for the past half decade, and hadn’t needed it, it was unlikely that I would in the future. Again, keeping back the odd sentimental item, in case they ever ask, but being brutal with most of it.

I’m not sure if it’s the time that has passed that has meant I haven’t really felt sad in doing it. Maybe, fresh from death, I would have wanted to keep more, grasp at anything he had touched, or that made me recall something about him or somewhen about us that I hadn’t thought of in a while. Maybe it was just the right time for me to do this bit, and if so, I’m glad I didn’t push myself before I was ready and get overwhelmed by it all (because, there was a LOT that I could have been overwhelmed by, a skip-full in fact).

I’m not sure if I’m just not that sentimental of a person. Maybe I just don’t hold things in that high a regard. Maybe I’m one of those people that copes by focussing on the present, and therefore lets go more easily – too easily perhaps – of the things gone by because they can’t change anything anyway.

I am sure that there is no right or wrong way of dealing with the stuff. No one thing that if you don’t keep it means you are bringing dishonour, no one thing that if you do keep it means you are holding on too hard to something you can’t have back. As with all of it, there’s only what feels like the next right thing to you, and not feeling guilty about that being your way of walking the next right thing for yourself.

It would have been nice to have known what he wanted kept, in some ways. To have that decision making part of the process taken out of my hands. And certainly to have the shifting of the many many bags and boxes of what I now deemed trash from loft to skip taken out of my hands, literally (though credit where it’s due, my parents and middle child did form a production line which worked wonders).

But I didn’t know. There were many important conversations we did have, and this wasn’t one of them. And that’s ok. Because the stuff wasn’t the important thing then, and I guess, to me, it wasn’t really the important thing now. It was just that now I had the time and focus and energy and bloody great skip on my drive to get it all sorted.

And so as the stuff drove away, it left an empty space in the loft, territory that once was ours (though in his mind, his), but is now solely mine. And I have no rush or inclination to fill that space up with more stuff. Looking at the expanse is actually more rewarding than I thought because it’s like a readying, a movement, a clearing of things no longer needed, though small and not even visible from the house below.

And maybe that reflects some of the stuff that’s going on with me inside, if we’re being deep about it. Who knew.

Only

There’s a saying about parenting that you are only ever as happy as your unhappiest child.

And I think there’s a truth in it somewhere.

Obviously, coming up five years since Steve died, none of the four of us left are where we are when it was all happening. But the impact of watching your dad die when you were so little trickles on through the years.

Sometimes I look back at photographs of the children the summer before Steve was diagnosed, or that September when the cancer must have been there but we didn’t know anything about it, when they all went to school together for the first time, and see unbridled joy, unfiltered freedom, a sparkle in their eyes and a liberty to their smiles that I don’t see in later pictures. Sure, they can still smile, and do (though occasionally need incentivising), but there’s a reservedness in their faces, and their eyes seem twinkleless. They’re there, but also not. They’re holding back and there’s an emptiness or a reservation that wasn’t there before. And I look at those photos, especially ones taken in the immediate aftermath, and I want to hug those little people and never let them go.

And at this stage I’m used to carrying the sadness of the way life turned out for me, the disappointment of dreams dashed rather than deferred, and used to bearing the weight of my own loneliness and diminished joy. For I am not joyless, not at all, but I do think that sharing joy increases it. My life is not what I expected, but I am not down and out, and I can look at what I have and not be crushed. So, it’s ok. But what I struggle with is the sadness of my children. A sadness I cannot fix, only hold them through.

I often wonder who they would have been if they hadn’t stopped trusting in the world at such a young age. If 2019 hadn’t delivered to them the terminal illness and death of their beloved father and then the numbers at the end of a virus that caused a pandemic that would further blow their lives and their routines and their expectations and their certainty apart.

I watch them navigate their lives and wonder whether had they not lost their other cheerleader, half their foundation, the security of having another person in their corner, in the audience, in their home, in the driving seat so they could get to places, things would have been different, life would have been bigger, opportunities might not have seemed so scary, they might have believed that dreams do come true and life wants to deal you a good hand if you just press into it. I watch them waiting for the worst, reducing their expectations, dwelling in anxiety, refusing to think further than the next five minutes and I know these things are a by product of what cancer did to their little minds before they were old enough to understand long multiplication, or even their times tables for the smallest.

And I see them unhappy. I hold them when they cry themselves to sleep but can’t put into words exactly why they are crying. I listen to them wondering why they never quite find their fit. I meet with the teachers who only want to help a child who doesn’t know what would help.

Are my kids broken? No. Are they miserable all the time? Definitely not. Are they also thriving, funny, smart, interesting, curious, creative, silly? Absolutely. All of the above. 

It is true that children are “resilient” when they have to be, that they keep going, that the carefully crafted routine helps them to not get swallowed up and distract them with the now. It is true that children “puddle jump” when grieving, that life keeps them splashing in and out as the reality of their experience unravels itself and their understanding of it deepens, and so not every day is spent wet and shivering, it can be just a moment of soggy socks. And I recognise that to an unknowing outsider looking in at my kids, they might not even know that anything happened to them because on the whole they are stable, secure, shining, and even often succeeding in school.

But let’s not pretend that what happened to them when they were 10, 8 and 5 hasn’t altered the trajectory of their lives, how they wander through their years, and who they will end up being.

People will tell me sometimes that they are wise beyond their years, and they are. But that’s because they learned lessons about life and death that some adults haven’t been faced with at the same time as revising their spelling test words. That’s because they have needed to learn to talk about and process big emotions, because their emotions were so big they threatened to obliterate everything.

And while how things are is not how things were when everything happened, they will carry the sadness of living nearly all their lives without their dad present forever.

And for me, I hate it for them. And no matter what I do, what we talk about, what we think of to bring the light into their dark places, there is unhappiness.

And I am only as happy as my unhappiest child.

And there is only me to try to fix something that cannot be fixed.

And being the only one here being only as happy as my unhappiest child is a real challenge (for while I want to acknowledge that I am by no means the only one who cares about them, I am their only remaining parent), because the weight of their sadness is a lot to shoulder alone, and the responsibility of being the only one who loves them like this can feel heavier when they are an unhappy child.

And sometimes, the unhappiest child is really unhappy.

Sometimes the next right thing has been to seek support, get them help, bring in the big guns. Sometimes the next right thing has been to stay quiet and listen and try to understand and share their burden. Sometimes the next right thing has been to go big or go home, and adventure until we find our happy, even if it is just a snapshot in time. And all of those have worked in their moments.

But no matter what we do, the unhappy finds its way back in. With three kids the odds are there will be unhappy on the regular, it’s just the numbers. And it’s hard when I’m trying to build, create, make something of our story, their childhoods, that isn’t just about that one terrible life defining experience, but also goes on beyond and keeps going, when I think we’re in a good place, but one of them is still unhappy, still not where they could be, still not comfortable in the life in which they find themselves, and I still can’t fix it, because none of us know how, and what it ultimately comes down to is probably the thing that is unfixable, or the way that the unfixable thing has made other things feel like a bigger deal.

And so, I guess, sometimes the next right thing is to put your hands up and say, I’m trying, I’m building, I’m planning, I’m working on it, I’m pushing towards happy. But I’m often only as happy as my unhappiest child. And there’s a part of these children, as much as I wish it wasn’t true, even as their lives hopefully grow into beautiful and glorious creations, that will, deep down, always be tinged by unhappy. 

And I don’t know whether there’s anything I can do about that, and consequently I don’t really know where it leaves me, because I don’t want to be unhappy and more than anything I definitely don’t want them to be. And that’s sad and I wish I could change it. For all of us. 

Because I don’t want our lives to be only anything. And even though he’s not here to want that too, I know I’m not the only one who ever wanted it for them.

Zone

I don’t know if it’s a by product of having ended up in a life I feel like I didn’t choose, but I often go through waves of wanting to make big drastic changes to everything. I wonder if it is to do with trying to wrestle back some control. Of course there are many things in life we don’t have control over, but being a passenger to cancer and imminent death, bereavement, young widowhood, solo parenting, felt particularly disenfranchising, and I do think that some of my phases of desired recreation are in antithesis to feeling so powerless and ending up in a place I never wanted to be.

And over the past year or so I’ve had this sense of being boxed in by life, by the things that have happened to me that I didn’t choose or have any control over, by the consequences of the detritus of everything blowing up in my face when I built a shared life with a ticking time bomb that nobody could hear ticking.

None of this is to say that I hate my life, that there’s nothing I’m happy about, that everything is terrible and bleak and worthless – not at all. But because I often have too much time in my head, given there is no one with whom to share my conflicting thoughts, it can be easy to harbour imaginings of throwing the whole thing out and starting over, even though that’s not really possible.

And at some point I have had to recognise that some of the things that make me feel trapped I have perhaps chosen to stay trapped in. Because sometimes our comfort zone is the easier choice. It is soft, malleable, non-threatening, it is cosy, it cushions us. But what if the things that have been good and soft and cushioning have, over time, time during which we have changed, become cloying or so cushiony that they could suffocate? 

I guess lately I have had to re-evaluate my comfort zone, because maybe, actually, what used to be comfortable from necessity has now become something that is causing me to cramp.

There are lots of things about life I would like to change, many of which are scientifically impossible.

But, given that I have spent a lot of time internally crying out for change, and trying to quieten the screams of frustration with how things are, and trying to quell the itch that comes over when I think about things being like this indefinitely, it became the next right thing to figure out whether there were some things about life that actually I could change, ways I could make things different, even if they weren’t the most impactful ones. Just to stop the screaming and scratching.

All of which to say, tomorrow is my last day at my job. And I’m not too sure how I feel about it.

I’ve been there over five years, which, actually is the longest time I have ever worked anywhere. It was my first “proper” job post-kids, I did some voluntary stuff, some freelancing, some contract work, but this was me getting back into employment after a decade of small people at home, which felt like a big deal.

A week after being confirmed from my three-month probation period, I had to sit down with my line manager and explain that Steve had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and I was going to need to change the pattern that I worked my hours while he was sick, and then again when he had died. My line manager and my CEO held me together that week, pouring venti caramel macchiatos into me and talking to me about taking mental health days during Steve’s illness on days he didn’t have appointments and the kids were in school so that I didn’t have a breakdown. My then CEO had nursed her mother through cancer and been very unsupported, and didn’t want me to have the same experience she did. To say that my workplace was supportive would be a massive understatement. They went above and beyond to look after me, making space for compassionate leave, me vanishing on the day that I had to get Steve into hospice immediately because he didn’t recognise me or the children, picking up everything I just dropped, and letting me dictate the next steps. We learned how I could adjust my hours in the school holidays when the children were too impacted by grief-induced separation anxiety to be left at holiday clubs, and I have always been able to work extra hours at times to allow for school performances and assemblies and commitments so that there was always a parent in the audience.

They provided a place where I felt like a normal human being, which for a while was the only place where I felt like that, fulfiling my role, a sanctuary that was really unchanged by the implosion of everything else when he died. They accepted everything and we all just got on with it.

And I’ve been good at my job. I’ve been efficient, I’ve made a difference, I’ve carried responsibility, I’ve been a great team player, I’ve picked up new workstreams, I’ve delivered what was needed, I’ve been as flexible as they have. And it worked so well while I figured out how on earth I was going to keep doing life, and it paid my bills (mostly (thanks, energy crisis)).

But my life has moved on from where it was, the children are older, their needs are different, and I’ve kind of worked myself out of a job by putting procedures in place and helping build a team that means there is actually less for me to do than there once was. And I don’t do well bored. Because it gives me more time to dwell on what my life has become and how on earth I ended up here.

And a job is something about my life that I can change. Unlike so many other parts of it. And so I have.

I feel strange about it, even though I know it is, ultimately, going to be a good thing (not least because more hours, more money, more responsibility), because it has been a comfort being in my comfort zone: a comfort knowing that there is somewhere that I’m good at something (spoiler alert: solo parenting does not do this for me), comfort knowing that I have colleagues I can talk about the mundane with, comfort knowing that I fit in my space, comfort knowing that I am appreciated, comfort knowing that I can do what is needed without stress to myself. I’m going to miss my comfort zone and the people who surrounded me in it.

But something needs to change about my life, because I’m not only stagnating, I’m drowning in sameness and lack of possibility, and so much just can’t be changed (unless anyone has a time machine handy?).

So this is it. My hopefully next right step. Where maybe I can push myself and be proud of myself in a new way. Where maybe I can make new acquaintances and learn new things about myself as I learn from them. Where maybe my days will include challenge and the thrill of navigating to success, rather than predictability and the temptation of a nap because the world of imagination that appears in a dream is more exciting than anything that real time has to offer.

In many ways I wish it wasn’t this that needed changing because I had the power to change other things. But I don’t. So I guess where I am hoping I land is the serenity prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Serenity, courage and wisdom seem like pretty good end goals. And I think getting out this particular comfort zone is a step on the journey to that end, even though it will be sad to not see some faces every day (well, virtually at least), some of whom carried me through the very worst days of my life.

I hope so.

Whatever zone I land in next, it will be different. And there’s a weirdness in that. Another place Steve will never know we were, another thing he wouldn’t recognise about us, another group of people who never knew the me I was before. Change is always strange now because it takes us further away from him, even though it is a good thing to keep moving.

I still can’t imagine what the future looks like, it’s like a barren wasteland out there, but this is one step into it, because it’s coming whether we like it or not, whether we choose it or not.

Back in the day, the team leader on The Crystal Maze had to choose to move the team on from Aztec to Futuristic when they had exhausted the zone of games and maximised their crystal wins from the options available. I think it’s time for me to celebrate the crystals I’ve gained from this zone of my life, but head towards the next, having run out of doors to open where I am, in the hope that I’m still buying time in the crystal dome by making a move rather than staying put.

Only time will tell. But at least it won’t be time wasted.

Shatter

The changing of the year is always a weird one, because while New Year’s Eve is, for most people, a look back over the year passed and a look forward with hope and anticipation to the year ahead, it is, to me, the anniversary of the day that my life shattered.

And so on top of all the “best-night-ever” hype that comes with the date, which I have always felt was laced with inevitable disappointment, because really it is only the passing of time, there’s this reminder of a day that means precisely nothing to anyone else, but was the pivotal moment of my life that separates the before and after.

Because Steve’s diagnosis did not come with the expectation that any treatment plan the doctors could come up with would do anything other than buy time, the quality of which was at best uncertain. Of course, in the end, there was no treatment plan, but we didn’t know that then. And so the news didn’t come with exhortations that we would fight this thing, a rally cry to take a stand and battle to victory (side note in case it needs clarification, I am one of the many who detest the use of this sort of adversarial language when it comes to cancer, and any other terminal illness, so I’m not using it in any way suggesting that we adopted it, because we did not), it came with the inevitably of demise. There was no suggestion or hope of any other ending than the one we got, the only uncertainty was how long we had until it came, and therein came the shattering of life as we knew it. That moment marked things never being the same again, our paths diverging, our destinations being at different ends of a spectrum, and signalled the weight of being the one left alighting on my shoulders.

There’s no point in reliving those moments every New Year’s Eve, turning the passing of another circuit of the sun into a morbid recollection of life splintering into shards around me as I attempted to pretend to a normality I would never feel again, and New Year’s Eve is not a “sad day” in our house, for that moment lives on in nobody’s brain but mine. This New Year involved, as many have, mocktails, delivery food and hours of the Christmas present board games, our favourite of which this year was Mantis, followed by P for Pizza.

But what with it being five years since that New Year’s Eve, there were moments of remembrance, even if I didn’t dwell on them.

Made perhaps more pertinent when, having picked my car up from the MOT I totally forgot I had booked for 2 January in an effort to get me up early and back in some semblance of routine ahead of school’s back the next day necessitating an apologetic call to Kwik Fit and a sprint out the house to get the car there in time, I realised that at some point something had shattered my right wing mirror, and my perspective as I reversed into my driveway was all off.

Because that’s what happens when things get shattered.

It’s not as simple as being broken, and having a few pieces glued back together, good as new with only a slight fault line that you know where it is so you just don’t press too hard there. It’s the view you see messing with your head. Things not appearing as they should and your brain needing to make what you see match with what is, even though these two things are not quite the same. That’s what I feel my life has been like for five years.

It’s not the worst life in the world, it’s not all awful, it’s not day upon day of misery and sadness. But how I see things, how I think about things, how I perceive things, how I manage things, are from a perspective that messes with your brain because it’s not quite right. The reason why a shatter in a mirror will affect what you see is because each fragment of the mirror reflects light at slightly different angles. The reason why a shatter in your life affects literally everything, is because the loss alters every piece.

And of course it takes time to figure out how death, grief, bereavement, has angled each fragment, and how you are going to learn to compensate for that sliver of your life reflecting differently. And over five years, you do learn to do that, to varying degrees of success, maybe, but well enough to survive, live, even have joy.

But sometimes, the next right thing is to acknowledge that it is a big deal living a life that was shattered, seeing things through this fragmented perspective, finding continually shifting angles as life moves on and changes, but never returns to a singular flat surface of reflection. 

And the turn of the year will, for me, always mark the fact that there was that one time, when New Year’s Eve was not only the end of a year, but also the end of something simple and easy and interdependent, when the road ahead seemed filled with hope, and happiness, and clarity, and what you saw when you looked in the mirror was just what was.

Life isn’t that any more. That’s not to say that life doesn’t have it’s broken beauty, because of course it does. But to not have to mentally compensate for fragmented reflections is so easy to take for granted, because you don’t know how wonderful it is, until it’s gone, in that moment of shattering.

And now, five years on, if I’m being totally honest with myself, I don’t know if I can really remember how it felt to live like that. So I will replace the wing mirror, and reverse into the drive without a second thought. And I will continue to pick my way through the splinters and shards to my life that is beyond survival. But I don’t think I will ever have that unfractured perspective, and that’s hard to explain sometimes, but perhaps important to understand about myself.

Lights

Another Christmas done.

I’m a planner by nature (and kind of by profession) so I get a certain kick out of the pre-Christmas. Yes, it’s exhausting with all the things and being the only one to do it all, but I have my spreadsheets for the gifts to make sure that there are pretty much even numbers by category of gift, and I have my December calendar where everyone gets a colour so I can make sure I know when all the seasonal events are for each person and plan weekends of family festivities around them throughout the month because God forbid the newest teen says we are missing out on the “magic”. Bless her, it’s difficult realising now you’re older Christmas will never feel the same as it did when you were six, no matter what you do.

Even the first year Steve died I didn’t hate Christmas. I don’t find it without it’s challenges, but deep down, I always have been always will be a Christmas lover.

But here’s where the season gets me. It’s the constant narrative of “it’s not about the presents it’s about being with the ones you love.” Because short of a trip to the afterlife, whatever that may look like, that’s not something I can deliver. Full stockings, yes, apparently magically refilling tin of gingerbread by the bread bin, yes. All the ones they love, nope.

As always, it’s the things outside my control that threaten to wobble me. When we get to the end of Christmas Day and the kids are winding down and I think, was it good enough? Did I make it special enough? Will they remember it as being fun? Were they disappointed that it didn’t meet their expectations? Because I want them to have a happy Christmas, but I can’t make it what it was before.

I’m usually pretty good at not overthinking these things. But Christmas evening I always doubt myself. Because I can’t give them memories of everyone sat around the table, because there will always be one person not there. I know that at least two of them remember the Christmases before, and I know they were better, purely because there wasn’t someone missing, and two parents bringing the fun is double the fun. And I start to slip.

Not that we have ever had a bad Christmas since he died. There have always been lights and decorations and new baubles and hot chocolates and extra traditions and matching pjs and presents and grandparents and games and endless amounts of party food to graze on. The kids have had Christmas designed around them, pretty much. 

But still, I question myself. Maybe it is because we get to the end of the day and there’s no one else there to affirm the success. Maybe it’s because the one thing that all the lessons and adverts and morals talk about is being with the ones you love, and I can’t give that to them.

Christmas evening got me to wondering whether, when the kids are grown and have partners of their own, they will start making their own Christmas traditions, or experience the Christmases of other families and realise how quiet the Christmases of their childhood were, and find them lacklustre and dull, looking back. Because, for a multitude of reasons, we aren’t surrounded by lots of relatives, extended family, friends who are as if. And while, for other reasons, it perhaps suits them to have the facility to opt in and opt out of parts of the day, to not have a busy house full of people with their own expectations of what the special celebration should look like, I still question whether what we have made in the last five Christmases, despite all the things I have tried to put in place, is really enough.

And despite sitting in the glow of the fairy lights that I go in the loft to fetch, and painstakingly unravel, and climb on a stepstool to hang because I’m short, when I get to thinking about what we are told Christmas should be, it feels a little darker. Because maybe I’m not giving them that. And maybe one day they will feel sad about it. Another thing to feel sad about.

We had a lovely Christmas, waking up in their own beds as they insist upon, with breakfast shaped like snowmen and adorned with sprinkles, plenty of gifts under the tree, and silly games with the grandparents. But I always end contemplative and questioning, once the oldies depart and the kids drift to their rooms, despite my best efforts not to. And there’s no one there to reflect back to me that I’m doing ok.

Last year, I started a new Boxing Day tradition, having been very aware the year before that the post-Christmas drop that everyone experiences can feel like a mountainous plummet when there are no promises of cosy “family” time like you used to have, or like you imagine everyone else in the world having only exacerbating your own loneliness. And we went to see the light display at Leeds Castle on Boxing Day evening.

It was great, precisely because everyone else was having family time, and our differently shaped family enjoyed a much emptier walk around the light exhibits than in the more popular pre-Christmas rush, and next to no queues at the food trucks. It gave us something to look forward to the day after, rather than everything being done and gone after the day before. And us not being surrounded by extended family meant that we had nowhere else to be – so rather than have the lack of something heightened, we used it as an opportunity to be different. Because we are different, and we feel it.

So this Boxing Day I booked the light display at the Bedgebury Pinetum, and as we wandered around, despite it being a busier venue than the year before, I felt lighter. And not just because the glittering glowing rainbow kaleidoscope of shine and sparkle in the woods was so spectacular, although that helped. And not just because the music they picked for each display was so beautifully emotive, although that helped. But because I wasn’t questioning whether it was enough despite us being without, because we were where we had decided to be based on us being who we are.

And I realised that for me, the next right thing is to try to take what we have, and embrace the different. Yes, the majority of people will be enjoying extended families, visiting aunts, uncles, cousins, both sides of the family. They will have big together traditions that my kids don’t. But we will have our light shows. They will remember their favourites, and that they are – for once – allowed to get whatever they want from the food trucks without looking at the prices, where the queues are shorter because most people are staying in that night.

These moments of beauty, as lights chase each other through the pine forest, choreographed to the melodies and harmonies, as fire bowls cast shadows directed by choral song, become almost transcendent. I am sure we are surrounded by “whole” families, but we don’t notice them, because our gaze is cast elsewhere. We aren’t reminded of what we are missing, but are enraptured by what we are experiencing in the moment.

And these are the moments that I need. They are my lights in the darkness of death and grief and bereavement and solo parenting and being alone.

They might look like stars and fireflies in the enormity of a forest, they might look like bartering in the Marrakech Medina in Moroccan Arabic, they might look like chasing two small shih tzus down the beach in Guernsey in the company of people who make space to love us, they might look like Just Dance competitions, or nights binge watching Only Murders in the Building trying to guess who did it this time, or driving Ferraris, or crying at Les Mis together, or spending hours watching otters squeak or squirrel monkeys chase because they are the current favourites.

I love Christmas. But by the end it can make me feel small, because I never know if I can make it big enough on my own to make up for what is missing.

And that’s why I need my Boxing Day light show, to get me back out there and keep me going. Christmas is just a day, and maybe ours won’t live up to what they could have been. But there are still lights to be found in the darkness, and the lights shine brighter when you’ve seen how dark it can get.

And something to look forward to, time to marvel at beauty surrounding your senses, reminds you to keep chasing the light, to keep hunting out those moments when there is sparkle, even if only fleeting.

I know for sure there will be dark days again, because the cards we have been dealt are not the easiest ones to play. I know for sure I will always question whether the kids’ lives are bright enough and wonder whether I could do more, because it’s how I’m wired. But I also know for sure that I can chase the moments where we marvel at the beauty of what stands before us whether that is standing in awe at a light show or basking in the light of the abroad sun or catching the twinkle reflected in the eyes of a child who is happy in their present, just for now. And these might be at times that the rest of the world doesn’t see, and that we only do because of what has happened. 

But sometimes it feels lighter to make peace with that.