Year: 2013
Removing a critical component
Removing a critical component
My middle daughter (16 years old) wanted to go to the shops on Saturday and asked if I would go with her, oh joy I thought!
We wandered around for a bit going in and out of various shops whilst she looked for the sunglasses she wanted and I really noticed how sorely lacking in certain skills I am. The whole ‘shopping’ thing is totally beyond me, I do man shopping and it takes me a few minutes to get what I want and then I’m in the car and going home again.
It just highlights the things that Claire used to do which we all took for granted. Don’t get me wrong, Claire hated shopping too and we often joked that she could be an honorary man when it came to her style of shopping, but at least when the girls wanted someone to accompany them, she knew how to play the good mother and join in the ‘fun’.
It’s also been a few family members birthday this week, and I missed it. Once again, I’m a typical man.
If things were the other way round and it was me that had died then Claire would be writing the same things I’m sure, from a different perspective. I suppose it’s to be expected that as we get back to normal, what ever normal is, we begin to notice the old ‘normal’ things that are difficult or impossible to do now.
I’m quite resourceful person so can usually cope in most situations, but it’s so difficult when I spent 22 years not exercising a whole load of resources. It sounds sexist but there are whole load of ‘motherly/womanly’ resources which Clare had in abundance and so it was easier to let her look after those side of things in life. And now I can almost see the gaping hole where those resources should be, but I don’t even know what they are let alone how to begin using them.
Sending birthday cards, booking holidays or going to the shops with the girls sound like easy things to do, but I’m struggling to know where to start.
Making the printer work, packing the car to go on holiday and finding the best deal to shop online is what I know how to do and to me those things seem easy, but ask me to get organised enough to buy a birthday card a week in advance, write it and get it to the post box and I’ll struggle. I just haven’t used ‘that resource’ (what ever that resource is) for 20 odd years.
I guess that’s one of the problems of working Together in a marriage, like a well oiled And highly efficient machine, as soon as one of the critical components is removed the whole machine falls apart – Our marriage worked so well because we worked so well together, and it seems ironic that it is that very fact that makes things so tough now.
I know that as time goes on I will recognise what resources are lacking and begin to find out how to use them but in the meantime if I miss your birthday please accept my apologies.
My beautiful daughter’s prom
My beautiful daughter’s prom
Last night was my beautiful daughter’s prom. It was tough.
The kids all met at a friends house for a pre-prom party, so many Mums were there having their photographs taken with their kids, a tough day.
It wasn’t easy for me to get there yesterday and I now know the full horror of what being a single parent is actually like. I’m trying to work a full day, look after the house, keep everything running and be there for the kids at the times when they need me. Thea told me that I didn’t need to worry about going to the pre-prom party and I almost didn’t go, but I moved some things around working a little later in the evening and I’m really glad I did.
The temptation to say ” Claire would have loved this” or ” it’s so sad that Claire isn’t around to see this” is mightily strong, but doesn’t get us anywhere. I could go on and on, all day every day thinking the same thing. Every new experience is something that Claire is missing out on. She won’t get to see her kids grow up, get married or have more children of their own. She won’t get to live by the sea or enjoy all of that time we had planned travelling around in a motorhome visiting the coast of the UK.
I’m not sad for myself, I’m sad for her.
The love that she had for us endures yet so does the pain of her not sharing these experiences with us.
This has been the hardest post to write for some time, I guess it’s because yesterday was such a ‘real’ experience made more noticeable by the presence of all the other Mums.
I’m not sure yet of the best way to cope with this kind of loss. The loss of those shared experiences, those experiences that we would have enjoyed together that now have been tainted with loss. I suppose one of the ways of coping is to just avoid those experiences, to never have fun again! I can certainly see why that would be appealing for some people, if we have lost someone dear to us and we just curl up into a ball then we won’t have any positive experiences which make the pain of loss feel greater.
Every time there is a positive experience we are reminded that we are not sharing it with the one we love. And that hurts.
But I’m not going to do that, I’m going to put myself in a position where I can have those positive experiences and when I’m reminded that I’m not sharing them with Claire I will experience the loss, the sadness and the hurt that she is not there with me – I will acknowledge those feelings, I will learn something from those feelings, I will apply what I learn to myself so that next time I experience it I can grow – and then I will move on.
And for me, that’s the way it has to be…
A New Chapter By The Sea
A New Chapter By The Sea
We went down to our new house over the weekend to have a chat with the guy selling it. Nothing is definite yet as we haven’t exchanged contracts, but as far as we are able to tell everything is good and we should be moving there late August or early September.
The house is in a small village in West Dorset and is about 0.8 of a mile from the beach. Claire informed me that we had been to the beach a few years ago, but I must say that with my man memory I have no recollection, and so I decided that we’d walk to the beach on Saturday to see how far it was from our new house to be.
We set off walking from a house and just 20 minutes later Thea, Millie, Toby, Olivia, Tommy (O’s boyfriend), Evie and myself were on the beach.
I was overwhelmed with emotion, both good and bad at the same time. It felt great knowing that we would probably be living a short distance from such a fantastic beach which we can visit at any time but at the same time it was so sad knowing that this was Claire’s dream, and she came so close to realising it herself.
Claire desperately wanted to live by the sea and we often spoke about when we eventually would. She saw our new house about a week before she died, so at least she died knowing that she would be moving to the coast fairly soon. It just makes me sad to think that she never actually made it.
Losing Claire has changed me so much. I can’t put my finger on what it is exactly and the only way I can describe it is as a “bollocks, I’m doing it” attitude! Facing mortality and death like this is bound to change our beliefs and values in our own life – and I think this is where the problem lay for people that don’t deal with their grief. The shift in our thinking changes so much that it becomes difficult to cope with.
Facing these issues head-on has become really important to me, I know that it would be easy to store up many negative emotions because it’s so difficult to deal with all of this change in thinking which has happened so fast. All that I know is that this is a process which happens slowly over time, each day we deal with a different issue and we move on. How long the process will take I have no idea and in fact I’m not going to focus on that at all. The problem is that we have no way of knowing that the process is finished and so why even bother asking ourselves the question, ‘is it finished yet?’.
If I’m working with a client as a coach that wants to be more confident or happy I will always ask them ” How you know that you are as confident or happy as you want to be, what will you see, hear and feel specifically?” – using this same logic on my own grief leads me to ask the question “How will you know that the grieving process has finished? What will you see, hear and feel specifically?” – unless I can answer that question with absolute clarity there is no point in me wondering how long will this will take because without clarity around that question I could end up feeling low for ever.
Moving house won’t sort all of this out I know that. But we started the process together as a couple, we were about to begin a new chapter in our lives and I’m looking forward to beginning a new chapter albeit in a rather different way to how I originally expected.
The Paradox of Despair
The Paradox of Despair
I’m currently reading an excellent book called “Seven Choices – finding daylight after loss shatters your world” by Dr Elizabeth Harper Neeld. It’s the account of Dr Neeld as she works through the emotions she feels after the loss of her husband to a very sudden death. Her story resonates deeply with my own situation.
Some of the things she writes are especially challenging and I’d like to share one of those challenging thoughts here.
Something which she has picked up on, which I strongly recognise, is the double loss of losing someone so close, not only have we lost the person as an individual but we have also lost our “Assumed Future”. We all have an assumption about how our future will pan out, even if it is not explicitly written in a life goal (as mine was) we will have a general feeling or an idea about where life is taking us.
Visits to the park, Christmas’ shared, birthdays celebrated together and even things further off – we imagine growing old, how life will be once our own children have grown up and the time we can share with each other in the future.
I’m not just talking about myself here, I’m talking about Claire’s sister, brother, mum, dad and my own kids. We all had an assumption about how life could possibly be in the future and we now have to face the loss of that as well as the loss of Claire herself. In fact anyone that knew Claire would also have had these assumptions about the future and how they would share their lives together in years to come.
This deep loss leads us to a place of despair. Despair is a word, indeed an emotion which I have never considered before. Of course I knew what the word meant academically, but now I know what it means to experience it myself.
As Dr Neeld points out, and this takes some deep thought, the fact that we are experiencing this despair means that our assumptions have been destroyed, and when assumptions are destroyed it opens up enormous possibilities. Wow, what a paradox!
When I did my creativity module of my MBA we spent many months looking at how assumptions by people in business stifle creativity and how breaking down those assumptions about their ‘given future’ in their career would massively help the business and greatly improve creativity. Without assumptions all we are left with is possibilities.
And there is the irony!
The truth is that if we feel that despair then we also have a world of possibilities. The challenge now is to allow those possibilities to happen at the same time as giving despair the respect it deserves.
Claire. My head knows that this is the truth and this is the kind of discussion I truly miss. Ironically, we could have spent a couple of hours discussing this and I know in my heart that you would have come to the same conclusion. You would have recognised the paradox of despair and possibility, indeed with your counselling training you may already have done so. I’m not going to lie, my heart feels differently. All I can feel at the moment is despair, I know the possibilites are out there and I guess that the first stage is recognising that – accepting and looking for those possibilities is something I can work towards. Goodnight sweetheart, I love you.
All That I am I give to You
All That I am I give to You
It looks like, in all probability, that we’ve sold our house.
This is the first major decision I’ve made without my beloved Claire and I’m left feeling really odd. And as I write that I’ve just had a epiphany as to why I feel odd… my reassurance strategy has an ‘external auditory’ that involves Claire, and of course that strategy can’t run. If you’re in to NLP you’ll get that, if you’re not then sorry but it makes sense to me!
On my to do list today, contact my coach and get that sorted!
So, back to moving house. Because I spent so many years living with Claire we became one, we acted as one and thought as one, consequently I’m not 100% sure that my decision to move down to the coast is completely mine. Losing a partner is not like losing someone external to yourself, it’s as though an integral part of my body has been dissected out and I’m having to make life changing decisions on my own. I feel like an animal in a vivisection laboratory that has had part of his brain removed to see how it copes.
Every day living is fine, my business remains completely unaffected, both of which I’m very grateful for but when it comes to making life changing decisions, something isn’t working quite right.
What strikes me is the uncertainty. When Claire was around we could bounce those uncertainties backwards and forwards and the process of doing that helped us make our minds up. Once I knew that Claire was happy with any decision, it was that that made my mind up for me. When I said those wedding vows just over 22 years ago I really meant it.
I give you this ring
as a sign of our marriage.
With my body I honour you,
all that I am I give to you,
and all that I have I share with you,
All that I am I gave to her, and if she was happy I was genuinely and truly happy also.
Marriage requires that complete surrender to the other person, and when both parties do that it works. We did… and it did! But what when one partner dies? What then?
I guess it’s a process of ‘un-surrendering’, of living with some uncertainty for a bit, enjoying it and seeing where it takes me.
The Power of Now
The Power of Now
Sometimes the smallest things can get me thinking, and I never know where they are going to come from. It would be so easy to just give in to these negative thought patterns and spiral out of control, but there really must be a balance between listening to our body and getting on with daily life, if I completely listened to my body I’d curl up in a corner and not come out for quite some considerable time.
Someone asked me yesterday what my motivation for jogging was, they were saying how good they felt whilst exercising and that it is addictive. I must say, I feel no addiction to physical exercise at all… I never have. I don’t get that endorphine kick and each workout is painful from the first step to the last; this is nothing new, it’s always been that way with me.
I guess my motivation to get physically fit is that I now understand how fragile our grip is on this life. It’ll never happen to me… It always happens to someone else doesn’t it? We watch programmes on TV about disasters and bad things that have happened in other people’s lives… And there it is, other people’s lives… It never happens to us does it?
Well, this time it did happen to us.
If I am a little fitter then my blood pressure will come down, not that it is worryingly high but it is higher than it really should be, my heart will be stronger and in the event that I do get ill I will be better able to fight it.
If something happens to me then the kids are completely alone, so there it is… That’s what motivates me to jog.
So that thing that got me thinking what was it? I was watching the news this morning and saw an interview with a tennis player who has recently finished his chemotherapy cancer treatment, I bet he never thought it would happen to him, I bet he thought it always happens to someone else.
Our time on this planet is short, our time with the ones we love is often shorter and in this world of business planning, key performance indicators and business exit strategies I wonder how much this detracts from enjoying the now.
The only known is now. The only sure thing is now. The only guaranteed thing we can enjoy is now.
I wonder what we could notice if we simply spent more time enjoying now?
The Things I Want to Remember
The Things I Want to Remember
Once again I’m not really sure what the purpose of this post is, memories lost.. or memories retained.
I guess I have two options, the first is to complain about all the things I miss about Claire, except that would be a negative frame to look at it. In fact, those same things that I miss about Claire are the very things that I want to remember… And so here are those things that I never want to forget, and now they are down in writing I guess I never will.
- When life around us seemed like it was going wrong (and we went through a phase where some big shit happened) she would cuddle me late at night and say “At least we’ve got each other”.
- The mock arguments we had. Claire wanted the tiniest camper van for some bizarre reason and when she spotted one would screech ‘Oh, can we have that one? – we’d then have a silly & joking debate/argument with me telling her how silly she was.
- Her snoring that drove me to distraction, but oddly now the memory is a comfort as it’s a sign she was alive.
- Her unfailing, unwavering and constant patience with the kids that surpassed my wildest comprehension. She truly did have the patience of a saint!
- Her intellect. She was one clever cookie.
- Our infrequent but long a deeeeeep conversations.
- The way she looked after me if I felt under the weather. “No, don’t worry dear… I’ll do it” was her stock phrase.
- The fact that she had a massive travelers chest FULL of recipes and we often joked that in 22 years of marriage she’d never cooked the same meal twice. If she cooked something different I would joke “mmm that was NICE, I’m looking forward to having it again when I’m 73”.
- The love she had for Lowen our border terrier.
- Her get on and do it attitude. With the house moving project she’d arranged colleges and schools for the kids all well in advance.
- Her total ineptitude with anything that had a lock or key, especially the caravan where she once spent 20 minutes trying to get in, then drove all the way home to tell me the key wasn’t working, I then drove to the van and opened it first time… she had the key upside down!
- Her incompetence with anything technological, especially mobile phones – a constant source of hilarity to both herself, the kids and me, especially when she tried to video Evie minutes after she was born, all we got was a video of Claire looking at the phone cursing “I’ve no idea how this stupid thing works, how do I turn it on to video?” – little did she know she’d already turned it on and we got the whole thing recorded!
- Her chocolate brownie cake at every birthday.
- Her complete love of the sea where she felt most live.
Seeing her hold and play with our beautiful grand-daughter Evie.- Being there 5 years ago when we faced financial ruin and came close to loosing everything. She planned, calculated the options and came up with alternatives whilst I found it hard to see the wood for the trees.
- Her giggle’s at the small things.
- Her uncontrollable crying laughter at the big funny things that went on for ages.
Roundabouts and Whirlwinds
Roundabouts and Whirlwinds
This is more of an observation than anything else, but time seems to be passing so fast at the moment. No sooner have I woken up then it’s time to go to bed again. The week days are blurring into one and the weekends seem to be hurtling by, one after another in quick succession.
I don’t know why this could be, I guess it’s a coping mechanism of some form?
There’s no time to catch my breath, no time to sit and ponder – indeed, no time to really think about the impact of what has actually happened!
The only time I have experienced this in the past, albeit in a much milder form, is when we last moved house 11 years ago. I remember reaching agreement with the respective vendors and purchasers and making a phone call to the solicitor to start the legal process, from then on it was a whirlwind, a constant roundabout that we couldn’t get off of, and no sooner had the phone call to the solicitors been made then we were sitting outside the new property waiting for the removal van to arrive with our furniture to move us in.
It’s that whirlwind roundabout that I seem to be on at the moment, except I’m not exactly sure which roundabout it is.
I’m rather hoping it doesn’t complicate the issue but it looks as though our house sale is coming together as well – so I guess I’m going to be making that call to the solicitor pretty soon once more.
Another roundabout to step on.
Is it all too much?
Is there an answer to that question?
I’m really looking forward to moving house again, the new life by the sea, more relaxed, more chilled out, more space around us but without the very valuable immediate support of my parents and parents-in-law.
Just reflecting on that now reminds me of a recurring conversation that Claire and I used to have. We had often talked about moving to the sea and accepted the fact that it was possible that once we were there we could hate it. The conversation then always came round to us saying “We would rather live life and regret things we have done, rather than regret things that we haven’t done and wished we did”.
Claire my darling, you’ve come to my rescue once again, thank you.
I made it through today
I made it through today
I made it through today… our 22nd wedding anniversary. It’s been an odd day, I’ve not really spoken to many people but those that I did didn’t mention that it was our anniversary. I guess it’s tough for people, no-one really knows what to say, and I respect that.
I was having an SMS conversation with one friend who did indeed say happy anniversary in the message – and you know what I was OK with it, she knows about Claire and I’m actually very touched that she felt she could say that to me, it is my anniversary today and it always will be.
Of course it was a sad day, yes I’ve welled up quite a few times but it’s not been a dark day… just sad, but acceptable sad… almost positive sad… is that possible?
I really am so thankful for the years we spent together, it’s true that some people search a life time for what we had, and I am truly thankful that I found such amazing love and managed to share those 22 years with Claire.
Someone sent me this earlier on today – it sums up how I feel so well.
The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours.The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.
A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause.
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.
Happy to Wander
Happy to Wander
It would have been our wedding anniversary tomorrow – 22 years. I’m 45 now, so next year was the year when the balance turned to 50% of my life spent married to Claire. I was looking forward to that for some weird reason, being able to say “I’ve been with you for more than half my life” – and now the stark reality is that, if I live to a normal age of 75ish, I will have spent far more years without her than I did with her… and that hurts!
What has struck me over the past few days is how much I’ve changed. I’ve never really chased big money but what has happened has really focused my attention. Money, success, fancy cars, big houses count for nada. No I mean it, they count for NOTHING! Financial independence, financially free, passive income are all hollow terms that totally miss the point…
I received this from a dear friend recently who could be in financial trouble:
“The last couple of months have been tough psychologically and now Claire’s story has made me realise that I have nothing to complain about and just need to get on with things. Its amazing how we make some things important and then are given a lesson about priorities. I would go bust a thousand times for you if it would bring her back. So tell her “thank you” from me for making me realise what a fool I’ve been”
My life is refocusing on what really matters and if money, fancy cars and big houses happen as a result then I’m not going to turn them away, but I’m also not bothered if they don’t.
Exactly what I want in life now is still unclear, Claire was my reason for everything I did and without that reason I admit to being lost – hence the name of this site! But for now, I’m happy to wander for a bit – in fact as I write those words ‘happy to wander’ they resonate with me and feel right.
Claire used to wander along the beach when ever we were there, just enjoying the air, kicking up the sand, digging around the rock-pools to see what’s there, making something out of drift wood, chatting to the passersby and sharing the joys of the day with them.
For now, that seems like a good philosophy to adopt.