Where is Kay?

I'm struggling to find things to write about, not because of a shortage of material but because I'm boiling over with so many and diverse conflicting emotions and thoughts. Last night when we went to bed Marion had a major meltdown. She so wants to touch Kay and feel her body, she regrets not spending the last night with her (I dragged her away because she was exhausted and all advice that I got was to make sure the Marion got some rest), but perhaps mostly she wants to know where Kay is now.

This is a subject that I'm finding very hard to resolve in my mind. I have not had the clear sense of communication with Kay that I had during the week or so after her passing. I still have a sense of her presence and I still feel her warmth and love. I vaguely hear her talking to me, reassuring me. But equally I cannot be sure that these feelings are real. For instance I only hear/feel Kay when I think about hearing/feeling her. As yet I've not had spontaneous awareness of her presence.

Part of my mind sees my sense of Kay's presence as a symptom of deep grief, of my mind manufacturing comfort, supported by the fact that I only have this sense when I think about it. But what if this is not the case? It is surely more comforting to accept these feelings as some kind of reality, to believe in the metaphysical. But my problem is, essentially, that I’m not easily a believer. So I’m torn in an extremely painful way: if I dismiss the metaphysical I’m left with the terrible, terrible thought that there’s nothing left of Kay, that her last moments of consciousness, which she spent in anger and fear, were truly it. That everything after that was nothing at all.

There’s a lot of common sense and supporting evidence for this point of view. It’s Occam’s Razor to the max. But it is also the most utterly painful and nihilist view of Kay’s death. That there’s really nothing more than I perceived. That every time I kissed her, stroked her hair, held her hand, that she was effectively already gone, unreachable to me. That her continuing presence is nothing more than a sop invented by my subconscious to help me get through the day.

I really find this nihilist view so so so very difficult to swallow. But the alternative seems to go against my nature, to simply believe in something for which I have no evidence. The only evidence I can find for the alternate explanation, that Kay’s soul is loving us and looking after us, is that I feel better when I think such thoughts.

Fact is that “life is hard and then you die”, a point of view that seems to neatly summarize our experiences to date. In this context we end up back by Occam’s Razor again: there’s nothing, Kay is gone forever in every possible way.

I wrote this recently to Esther, Kay's child psychologist and our fantastic and loving guide through her last weeks. Esther basically replied that there's far more to life than we can know, that we simply do not have the tools or ability to probe these subjects in a quantitative way. She repeated something that I really like, "Feelings are Facts too" and therefore encouraged me to treat my sense of Kay's presence as if it were in fact real because firstly there's no separating one view from another and because it is indeed what I felt. Plus, my own thinking leads me to reason that if the nihilist view is indeed the 'real' one, then there's no harm in accepting the idea that Kay's with me. Whereas the opposite view, that Kay is here and I deny it, is harmful to me in the sense that it will take me down a longer and more painful road to recovery than otherwise would be the case. So the conclusion is that the best thing to do is to accept my experience of Kay's presence as reality and whether that's a nihilist manufactured reality or a metaphysical reality is by-the-way.

I guess the danger lies in what one does when one reaches the conclusion that our children have souls and that they stay with us when they die. I don't plan to do much more than accept that as the way things are. I don't necessarily see it as leading to the conclusion that there's a god, especially after all the other counter experiences that we've had. If I were to conjecture I guess that I'd say about as far as one could go is to imagine a sea of souls with perhaps a distributed hive intelligence. That would match my experiences to date: no single divine consciousness (with throne, beard and penchant for the concept of "glory" and virgin birth), just a collective mind that behaves in ways that an individual mind can't understand.

Still, all this intellectualizing really doesn't contribute too much right now, except perhaps to point the way forward. Right now I remain in a state of shock and denial. Here's an example: yesterday as I was framing a photo of Kay I noticed that there is some light lens flare on the print, partly over her head and face. My thought was, "Oh I'll just reshoot it when the sun's out again". Then the next second, BANG, the hit of electric shock across my chest as a realised that that's not possible. Then BANG as I realized for the first time that my photo collection of Kay is complete, finished, never to be added to again.

Repeatedly I suffer the shock of realizing that Kay's life ended in terror and pain, without us having been able to say goodbye, without the last kiss or last hug. Denial because I don’t want to accept that she has become a memory, that my photo collection of her is final and complete. That my only route to her is through metaphysical terrain.

So, my conclusion is that I/we have not moved on very much in our weeks here. And I cannot imagine how long it’s going to take before I/we move on from this phase and how much pain we have yet to feel before we start to feel less.