Tag: Love
Love is…
Love is…
This post has the possibility to be cataclysmicly misinterpreted, but I’m going to write it anyway because I want to document how I feel and I know others feel the same way when they have lost partners.
Words can’t express how lonely I feel at the moment, and that is very definitely ‘lonely’ and not ‘alone’. Those two words seem to have the same meaning on the face of it but they are so completely different, I’m surrounded by wonderful kids, supportive family and amazing friends who are doing everything they can (for which I am truly and eternally grateful) but it doesn’t matter what anyone does there is no substitute for the love that is shared between partners.
There is something about the love of a partner that is so very different from anyone else. There are conditions to the love from a partner, it’s not handed out because they are family or because they feel sorry for someone, the love from family and friends is unconditional, it’s kind of compulsory because of the relationship. But the love of a partner is conditional, conditional upon that love being reciprocated and it feels very different to all the other kinds of love.
The Love of a partner has to be worked at, it has to be noticed every day and it is completely two-way, and because it has to be worked at you feel it every time the other person extends their love towards you – and right now that love is missing. Not only missing from being given to me but missing in that I can’t hand it out, and that feels cold… so very cold.
There’s nothing that can replace noticing how beautiful Claire was, stroking her hair, giving her a peck on the cheek and then getting on with what ever I was doing. Even hearing the jingling of another woman’s jewellery brings those emotions flooding back, or seeing someone wearing some clothes similar to what Claire wore reminds me that I can’t just tell her I love her, give her a peck on the cheek – giving love and feeling love!
I posted this on Facebook last night, and I really mean it…
“If you have a partner, please go and hug them right now and notice how wonderful it feels to be so close to the one you love. I’m wishing I could do the same.”
What is grief?
What is grief?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. I spend a lot of time online which is good from the point of view of finding out information, and bad because you never know if the information is good or not! We have a local hospice which offers grieving counselling and bereavement support, the doctor made a referral for the family to them at the beginning of May, but typically for government organisations we’ve not heard anything yet!
Just so that I could connect with other people in a similar situation I’ve been browsing a few forums dedicated to grief and loss, particularly that of the loss of the spouse. They are a mixed bunch really.
One of the things that seems to be standing out is that everyone is grieving struggles with the concept of what it actually is, and what they should do.
A person posted on one of the forums yesterday that her family thought she was obsessing about her late husband, she posted a whole host of things she was doing and asked the forum if she was indeed obsessive or whether this was normal.
The question is, what is normal? And who makes up the rules?
Reading through the posts that many of these people are making I’ve come to realise that in this situation we make up our own rules, and then beat ourselves up with them… What a crazy thing to do.
Each time I catch myself using words like should, must or ought I ask myself the question “Who says?” – and most of the time it’s me, putting my own pressures on myself.
Learning to ignore myself is a strange thing to do. I’m learning to accept that however I feel at any given moment is absolutely fine, I don’t have to do anything. There are no stages of grieving! People have said that everyone goes through seven stages starting with denial then anger then some other bull shit… Who says?
In my own grief I refuse to be defined by other people’s version of normal. I refuse to define myself as a grieving person.
As ever I’m writing this post off the top of my head and things keep coming to mind, and what comes to mind now is the political correctness regarding disabilities (okay, my mind leaps around all over the place). I always used to think that the person with disabilities was ‘disabled’ – and I remember advertising campaigns saying they are not a disabled person, they are simply a person living with a disability. It always seemed like a semantic argument, but now I understand. I’m not a grieving person, I’m a person living with grief – I refuse to let it define me.
One of the other things that other people on the forums seem to struggle with his guilt. I can understand this but choose not to do it myself. Sitting here writing, if I think about it, I can find lots of things to be guilty about. Guilty that I didn’t make Claire slow down a bit. Guilty that we didn’t move to her beloved seaside a couple of years ago. Guilty that we didn’t take her to the hospital sooner. But I choose not to beat myself up over these things. What’s the point?
Guilt only serves one purpose and that is to destroy us. The reality is that Claire and I made the best decisions we could, at the time that we made them, knowing what we knew then. With the extra knowledge I have now, if I could go back in time, I would make different decisions. But when those decisions were made I didn’t have that additional knowledge, and so we made the best decisions that we could.
I’ve let those things go.
One of the things that someone said on a forum yesterday was that people die, but love doesn’t. I took comfort from those words which reminded me of what Claire and I had engraved on the inside of our wedding rings:
“Endless Love”
And it is…
Is The Present Tense Right?
Is The Present Tense Right?
last night was really tough. The kids didn’t want Claire to be at the funeral in just a gown, they wanted her to be clothed in her own clothes and wearing her jewellery – so we spent the evening finding something appropriate that they were all happy with.
At the end of it, whilst it was just a pile of clothes, jewellery, her glasses and a watch, it seemed all too real. It seemed as though we had tried to reconstruct Claire in a very personal way.
The part I found the hardest was that each of the 4 kids have written a letter to their Mum that they want to read out at the funeral on Friday, they all made me cry. But what really made me cry was that they wanted a copy of those letters to go in the casket with Claire as their final notes to her, preferably clasped in her hands – oh man did I blub!
The one and only reason I’m writing this down is to resolve it in my mind. To articulate it and make sense of it.
It’s not the loss of Claire that got me last night, it was the love that the kids were showing – a motherly love that can no longer be requited.
We talked about whether they should phrase their tribute in the past or present tense. ” I loved my Mum” seems like it has stopped, and it hasn’t.
We also realised that their mother is not the flesh and bones in that casket, Claire was more than that – she was WAY more than that – no really, Claire was way, way, way more than just flesh and bones – she truly touched out hearts.
And ALL that she was still IS and can never die – the present tense is absolutely right – they love her, she IS their Mum and she DOES live on in our hearts.