One Drug Less

The good news today is that I'm off the antidepressant drug. I have to admit that I've cheated a bit, we had originally agreed with our GP that we'd reduce the dosage in steps over five weeks. But I was suffering from so many side effects that I pushed a little harder and got rid of it in four weeks - this is the same time that it took to build it up in the first place. The result is that the nasty headaches, toothache and shoulder & neck pain that I was suffering a couple of weeks ago have almost gone. My head feels, hmmm... how can I put this? Less restricted? Clearer? Difficult to say.

The reason for starting with this drug all those months ago was because I felt a creeping sense of despair. Certainly I don't have that feeling anymore so either the therapy worked or, more likely, the worst has happened and I'm actually now in the place that I was dispairing of being.

The bad news is that the sleeping problem persists. Last night I attempted a third night without using a sleeping tablet. I tried to induce sleep using melatonin and the lighter drug I'd mentioned previously. But again my mind simply wouldn't relax enough to enter a sleep state. At some point I started to drift off when suddenly I was 'shocked' awake. That was enough. It was 12:30am and I wasn't prepared to fight another night so I gave up and swallowed a damned tablet. I then slept pretty well, but not long enough.

Maybe it's too early for me to be dropping the sleeping meds. My mind just won't seem to rest of its own accord and too often when trying to get to sleep I find myself thinking about Kay, about her last days, about her beautiful persona and other painful things that lead away from peace of mind. I also noticed last night that immediately I turned out the light and closed my eyes my heart started thumping in my chest, an obvious indicator that I was not fit to sleep irrespective of the fact that I felt extremely tired. This is pretty frustrating. I long for the tine that I could put my head on the pillow and blink out for 7 hours or so, to wake up feeling refreshed and looking forward to a new day. Waking up at the moment is an exercise in wishing I could just go back to sleep again, wishing I could slide away from the horrible reality of a world without Kay.

Update

Finally decided to reattempt sleep at 3:15am, but no luck for at least an hour or so. Eventually the churning 'real' thoughts in my head turned into churnng 'unreal' thoughts and I entered some kind of sleep/dream state. 'Woke up' at 8am, if you can call it that, with a feeling of not having had any mental rest at all. Marion has snored the whole night away, in a ladylike way of course, and is still doing so now. Gggrrrrrrrr.....

Not Sleeping Hell

I'm struggling with the whole sleep thing again. Marion has managed to get herself off the sleeping tablets in the last week. Although this has meant that she's had a week of poor quality sleep, she tells me that one just has to get through it and that now she's sleeping normally. Emboldened by her success, last night I skipped the sleeping pill but took the proferred homeopathic alternative. The result was pretty horrible. 

Initially I couldn't get to sleep at all, I lay in bed tossing and turning, hovering somewhere between sleep and full consciousness. Eventually, at 1.30am, I gave up and took a lighter sleeping tablet that's meant to help one fall asleep. I guess that this did its job because the next thing I knew I was in the middle of a terrifying nightmare. I was descending some stairs when suddenly something I couldn't see grabbed both my wrists. My eyes were closed and I couldn't open them to see what had grabbed me and I was struggling more and more and becoming more and more frightened...  when Marion woke me up. My struggles had woken her up and she realized that something was wrong and so had intervened. I can tell you that I was rather relieved.

I then went back to 'sleep', but continued to dream unabated. Sometime in the early hours I was back in the hospital, in 'our' room on the childrens ward. I decided to go up to intensive care to see how Kay was doing. When I went into her IC room, I found a much younger Kay lying on the floor. She'd obviously fallen out of bed. I started yelling for a nurse and as I looked at Kay her leg suddenly moved. My heart raced. I picked her up and put her on the bed and suddenly she sat up. My heart burst with joy, Kay was back from her coma. She opened her eyes, but was clearly disoriented. I continued yelling for a nurse. Kay then tried to say something to me, but could only mumble. The the nurse came in and I ran out of the room and raced downstairs, burst into the room where Marion was and told her that Kay had woken up from her coma... and then suddenly I woke up and was immediately hit by the realization that it was all a dream and that Kay is gone. Need I say more?

Man, this is extremely tough. Esther told me that the sleeping meds block REM sleep and that it's quite likely that one has to go through a period of effectively catching up on a REM sleep deficiency. But if this is what I'm going to have to go through before I can return to sleeping normally, I have no idea what I'm going to do. I can't face the idea of more nights like last (Friday) night. 

Another consequence of last night is that I've been pretty tired all day. We have been out most of the day doing one thing or another and we got back around 4pm. I put my feet up on the sofa and almost immediately dozed off for an hour or so. A bad move since this almost always makes it more difficult for me to sleep at bedtime. But anyway, we went to bed at the normal time and I decided to bite the bullet and skip the sleeping tablet again - might as well get the bad nights over with as soon as possible. And since it's weekend, if I'm tired tomorrow (Sunday) it doesn't matter so much. But this time I decided to immediately take the lighter "fall asleep" tablet in addition to Marion's homeopathic solution, I had no desire to lie around waiting for sleep to come.

Well, so far this has all been a big failure. It's now 2.15am on Sunday morning and I'm sat downstairs writing this blog entry, absolutely wide awake. I guess that I've been sunk by my afternoon snooze. After taking the aforementioned tablets I lay in bed reading for a bit and then tried to sleep. But I just re-entered the sleeping/not-sleeping zone where my control over my thoughts starts to soften and they go spiralling off towards stress-generating subjects. There's a perversity about this: I need to exercise mental control to relax but as I start to relax so my mental control slips and I start to "unrelax" and so cycle backwards and forwards. But I'm also aware of the whole thing and I start to get frustrated that I can't relax and then the whole show is over - I'm awake, annoyed and far from the level of relaxation that I need to sleep.


The easiest thing would just be to knock back a tablet. But that way lies a kind of addiction. I have to and I want to get off these damned tablets. But equally I've had a sleeping problem for a long time now, for months before Kay died. So maybe it's a bit optimistic to think that I can straighten myself out quite so quickly. But then again, if not now then when should I tackle this problem? I don't really want to try to tackle it during the Christmas holidays. I'd rather like to have a rest during the Christmas period and battling with sleep problems won't help with that goal. Equally I have a lot of work to do the coming weeks and turning up at the office, brain-dead due to a lack of sleep, is not going to help that either.

But then again, again, I hate being dependent on anything, certainly anything artificial and it's going to bug me that I've got a dependency that needs sorting. And Marion's pushed through it, so why can't I? And further, if these tablets build up a REM sleep debt, the longer that I'm on them surely the more mentally painful and difficult it's going to be to unhook myself from the dependency. Also, the sleeping tablets get less effective with time, so then I'm simply building up a REM debt for less gain. Therefore my thinking is that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later.

So here I am, wide awake in the middle of the night, fearing sleep, dreading failing to sleep, but equally knowing that I'm going to be a zombie tomorrow (today) if I don't sleep. 

I wonder if I can find an ancient copy of the "Val Doonican Show" on iTunes? That would probably be an instant and non-toxic way of falling asleep, though I suppose that there would be a risk of permanent brain damage if I didn't fall asleep within the first few minutes.

Dobby

This being Harry Potter season, one of the films is on TV tonight. Which reminded me of just how much Kay was scared by Dobby, so scared that she dare not watch any episode that was Dobby centric. So I suppose that she won't miss the final installments. Or maybe I'll just miss her hiding her face in my chest whenever Dobby appears.

The limits of a blog

Blogging has its limits, as I'm finding out in capital letters this week. A bunch of things have happened that are too sensitive to air in public. But trust me, another couple of kicks have been dealt out the last days. Before anyone assumes the worst I should say that the impact of the kicks is, hopefully, largely emotional. But today I have been completely knocked sideways by some news that I had this morning, to the extent that I've been non-operational and very upset all day. Sounds a bit wimpy stated like that, but yeh, it's also accurate.

Part of my strong reaction is because it feels like another 'story' is about to start. Now, I have received assurances that this is not the case, but still, given our experiences during the last years it's difficult to give bad news the best interpretation. I thought, hoped, that Kay's death would be the very last chapter of difficulty in our lives. But I suppose that that's the definition of false hope. Or maybe not, we'll see.

To neutralise my shock and occupy my brain I've subjected myself to back-to-back episodes of "Reggin Perrin" this afternoon, both the new series. For those not in the know, this is a comedy series about a business executive going through mental meltdown/midlife crisis. It's very funny but in a way that sounds more than a note of reality. I have been simultaneously laughing and wondering about adopting some of his crazy ideas myself. Going to work in a white suit, imitating voice mail to avoid taking calls and taking nothing seriously sounds just about right to me. Ha!

Anyway, I'm extremely tired, too tired to continue writing around the edges of stuff.

Detox

Over the last weeks we have been slowly weaning ourselves off the support medication. To recap, both of us have been on anti-anxiety/depression meds since July or so, and on sleeping tablets since Kay's death (that word is oh so wrong). The anti-depression meds played hell with my system for four weeks when I started them. I had a permanent headache, dizziness and nausea. My head has not felt right for months, but of course there's no way to be certain of the cause. However I don't like taking drugs and, since I generally feel rough these days, I'm fairly anxious to eliminate any external sources of problems.

So we started the process of slowly detoxing from the antidepressants three weeks ago with a plan to be off them after five weeks, give or take. Last Monday I was down to a 50% dose but as I mentioned, I started suffering some very bad symptoms a couple of days later. Again, headaches, nausea and dizziness with the addition of very painful shoulders and neck.

We had originally also agreed with our GP that we would tackle the sleep meds later. But I had noticed that they were having progressively less effect, namely I was falling asleep later and waking up earlier. This is an indication that my system was getting used to their effect. So after chatting to our GP we both decided to try reducing the sleep meds. The plan was to stop them three nights per week in a planned way.

So last Monday night we skipped them for the first time. The result was fairly dramatic, we both had a terrible night. During the period that I have taken these tablets I have had more or less dreamless and restful sleep. But last Monday I slept very lightly and 'woke' the next morning feeling like I'd caught up on two months dreaming in a single night. And weird dreams they were indeed, at one point putting me in a canoe in Rotterdam harbour with a friend. Marion had exactly the same experience (not including the canoe), strangely enough and the result was that on Tuesday we both felt as if we had been lightly beaten with sticks the whole night.

For some reason that I've forgotten I decided to repeat the experiment on Tuesday night. However my cunning plan this time was to use a lighter sleep inducing drug that we'd still got in stock instead, the theory being that if I could get into a deep sleep then hopefully I'd stay that way. I also managed to convince Marion of the wisdom of my theory. But it turned out to be a stupid idea, we simply repeated Monday night's experience. Thus Wednesday started badly and went downhill from there. I have now resolved to continue with the sleep meds irrespective, trying to reduce both drugs at the same time is way too hard. Having said that Marion is toughing it out according to the original plan w.r.t. the sleeping meds but using homeopathic alternatives.

As I mentioned yesterday, various interventions seemed to have counteracted the diverse physical effects that beset me. Friday through till this morning I have been feeling reasonable. But this afternoon I started to feel rough again and as I sit here the shoulder pain has returned along with the nausea and I'm feeling extremely tired. The idea that I'm probably only half way through the detox process is pretty intimidating. I simply can't wait to get off this medication and return to "normality" where, according to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, "Anything you still can't cope with is [therefore] your own problem".

Hard Week

Apologies for the lack of posts. Last week was a hard week for both of us and I just didn't have the energy to write. On Monday I had a major emotional dip. Then on Wednesday my physical symptoms took a major turn for the worse.

In the afternoon I started to feel terrible. I went to lie on the bed but I couldn't rest. My mind kept slipping to thoughts of Kay and I kept being hit by panic attacks. In the evening I started suffering from neck and shoulder pain to the extent that I was horizontal with a hot water bottle and strong painkillers. I also had a thundering headache and nausea. Coincidentally on Thursday I had standing appointments with the homeopath and, separately, the physiotherapist. The homeopath gave me yet another, but stronger, dose of the same medication that I had two weeks ago. The physio recommended acupuncture and proceeded to stick me with 10 needles.

Now, I remain completely neutral about homeopathy. I take the medications and hand them to Marion and she manages the application. I pay no attention to what I'm taking and I have no expectations. Acupuncture is something different, from previous experience I have some expectations.

The acupuncture delivered more or less immediately, the feeling of nausea decreased as did the pain in my shoulders. But neither to a huge extent. However on Friday I felt a hell of a lot better, less pain, no nausea and generally mentally stronger. The effect of the homeopathic medication? Draw your own conclusions.

Further, on Friday afternoon I had a fantastic massage from a friend, which was so good that for the first time in ages I felt some pure, uncompromised enjoyment. I had a smile on my face for the whole of Friday evening.

The combination of all these things is that yesterday I managed to spend the whole day doing jobs around the house. Between 9am and 6pm I think I didn't sit down for more than about 30mins. It was good to be busy in this way, the house is showing signs of a distinct lack of TLC. Light bulbs have now been changed, lights and pictures hung, the fireplace cleaned, etc, etc. We're working on creating a "Kay Corner", a permanent location for her beautiful photo with a table underneath with the hockey ball from her final match in which she scored five goals, and all the other important momentos of her life.

Irrespective of all this we continue to struggle emotionally. Marion has just this minute burst into tears. I asked her whether Kay got a trophy for winning her club spring tennis championship this year and this was too much for her. Yesterday it was my turn. We were visiting friends and Nattie and their son started making candles. This suddenly reminded me of the soap and perfume making sets that I got Kay for her birthday and how we spent a few hours here and there making smelly soap. This memory was just too much for me and I fell to tears, as I'm starting to do now while writing this.

It is truly terrible, how much I miss Kay. My heart aches for her. Everytime I walk into the lounge and see her photo I just want to put my arms round her and hold her close, so very close. Today I went mountain biking and it's so hard to put to one side how much Kay was looking forward to coming on her mountain bike with me.

We're now entering the difficult festive season and I'm dreading it. There will be so many tears and so much pain. I can't believe that it's possible for a year to contain so much. This is the year that Kay won the tennis, when she played inspired hockey, when she drove herself to take part in selection training, when she survived chemotherapy and terrible mistakes in her treatment, when she came through the bone marrow transplant extremely well, when she weakened, when she died. How can all this be possible in a single year? How can our lives have been ripped to pieces in such a devasting way?

I was thinking this afternoon how difficult it is to tell people just how certain Marion and I were that Kay would survive. We never really believed for a single second that Kay would not survive. The thought never really crossed our minds. This may seem strange, certainly if you read Kay's blog, but it's true. We never never NEVER expected to be here, now, in this situation, without Kay. Think about it, that after everything that happened the possibility of failure never really was a possibility to us. Then just maybe you might begin to understand one of the most difficult aspects of how we feel. Certainly this is one of the major reasons why I'm still in shock, I still can't begin to comprehend our loss.

I've rambled on for long enough right now. Long blog entries become boring.

Night night.

Broken Promises

Here's an example of how variable my thoughts and feelings can be: I was just driving home from work feeling pretty good because of an excellent development in the business. I started wondering how much Kay had influenced things for me, how much she was looking after us and she was immediately in my head again.

And then suddenly I was reminded of all the promises that I had made to her that everything would be alright. How often I told her to look into my eyes and trust me that everything would be alright. How often she would tell us that she felt that her body was giving up and how many times that we convinced her that it wasn't, that she was doing well. How, when her blood counts suddenly soared at the end of August and the bone marrow boost was cancelled, I told her that it was proof of the fact that her body wasn't giving up, that everything would be alright, that her daddy had been right all along.

How wrong can one be? How many promises did I make that I couldn't realise? That weren't mine to make? How much trust did I betray? How many lies did I tell?

Oh, my Kay. I hope you understand. I hope I didn't betray you, lie to you, although I broke my promises. I would do anything to make it otherwise.

Low Day

I've been struggling to stay on an even keel today. I think that the wind from last week has fully left my sails and the momentum that I'd built up has gone. (Thinking about it, thats a bad metaphore: if there's no wind a boat must be on an even keel. Hmmmm...) Again I had all sorts of plans for the day but in the end I just alternated between reading and dozing off. Lauren called, she's also been having a bad day and we shared fighting off tears together for a while.

I've taken to reading a bedtime story to Nattie regularly. But unfortunately we left our Dr Zeuss collection in France and we're now down to our last Thomas the Tank Engine book. I checked in the Kindle and iPad Bookstore but Thomas is not yet available as an eBoook. Looks like I'm going to have to order a printed book for the first time in a year. Gee, how old fashioned. It's that or search Kay's bedroom for more English books.

I guess that it would be a good idea if I took the coming week at a slower pace. Spending a whole weekend recovering from work is not my idea of a better quality of life.

A Moment of Quiet

I'm sat here on Saturday afternoon with a long list of things that I intend to do and no intention of doing any of them. I got some advice from my brother-in-law a while ago in which he said "be good to yourself". So I'm heeding his advice and sitting here reading, listening to music (The Script twice already). Marion keeps saying things to me like "weren't you going to do this...? Or didn't you plan to do that?", to which my answers are "Yes" and "Yes". But I'm still sitting here, now on my laptop simply because I feel weary to the core of my bones.

"Weary" is a better word than "Tired", because I'm not really sleepy. But the last week has been so extremely busy and that my operating battery is pretty much completely discharged and I just feel like sitting here and reading. I also feel guilty about it because there's so much to do, so many important things to do. Normally I don't sit still, can't sit still, because feelings of guilt and obligation usually win over. But when they don't it's an indication that I do indeed need to just sit, that my body and mind need a moment of quiet to recuperate. So that's what I'm doing (and still feeling guilty about it).

The last week was an important week for the business. This is not the place to go into it, but my team has worked extremely hard to accomplished an important goal and they have done it with style. We have had a good week, but it demanded (relatively to recent times) a lot of hours from me and a lot of mental output. I was fairly apprehensive at the start of the week whether I could indeed do everything that was required. I succeeded (I think), but the cost has been quite high. Every evening I've felt more or less like I'd cycled 150km that day. And so I'm sitting here, hopefully recharging.

Mentally, I've felt stronger this week. The grief remains the same but my ability to manage it has improved marginally. I can think of a couple of things that might explain this change. It might just be the natural progression of the Sickness of Grief. Alternatively it could well be that I have been working so much that my mental health has been less exposed to grief and its corrosive effects. I could imagine that this has allowed my mind to heal a bit, resulting in me feeling stronger. Also, the business is entering into an exciting phase. The future of the business looks bright(er) and I feel this excitement through the grief of Kay's passing. Maybe work is a therapy for grief, or at least my kind of work.

But there's another explanation. I went to Marion's Homeopath on Tuesday. I spent an hour describing to her my symptoms, both physical and mental. The list takes an hour to detail (ha). In order of seriousness she felt that my grief and depression were the most important symptoms to treat and she gave me four tiny tablets, two of which were to be taken when I got home. She warned me that she was giving me a high dose of whatever and that if I had any side effects I should let her know. Also, should I continue to feel as bad I should give her a call and would instruct me to take the remaining two tablets. The way that she handled this stuff and the instructions I was given led me to conclude that it was pretty powerful. I drove home carefully, avoided braking sharply or taking corners too fast and took the tablets while sitting down with my centre of gravity well to the back of the sofa.

Now, those of you who have been reading my bleatings for a while will know that I'm a person of skeptical mind. Although I've had some positive experience with alternative therapies in the past, I have a very dim view of homeopathy. But I have to say that since taking those tablets my grief has not been pressing in on me quite so hard. I've been able to deal with some difficult, emotional moments. I've it made through a series of long days. I've been able to comfort Marion during her difficult moments without feeling quite so close to overload myself.

You are of course free to choose your own point of view. But I remain open minded about this homepathy business. I have to admit that it's a forced kind of open mindedness, my instinct is still to dismiss the whole thing as voodoo, placebo and coincidence. But equally the homeopath was the first person to advise a high dose of vitamins and I'm 100% certain that that resulted in an immediate improvement in my condition. So she gets the intellectual benefit of the doubt and I'll go back to see her shortly. 

To carry on with the qualitative, I've said before that in one of the few moments that I've had since her death when I felt Kay talking to me, she told me that she was going to look after Marion and I. Yesterday I was in an important business meeting and all of a sudden I had a sense of her presence. Then her picture came up on the screen background of my laptop and I looked into her eyes and I felt reassurance that everything would work out. Strange. It made me feel more confident, which is always a good message to transmit during these kinds of meetings. A message that of itself biases the outcome positively. Maybe my missing daughter will yet become a force in business. Maybe her father will embrace the idea that not everything that counts is countable.

And yet the grief, disbelief and denial continue unabated. I only need to look at Kay's picture to feel the electric current of shock pass through my chest. I only need to think back for my heart to start racing with the fear of losing her. I only need to think sideways to miss her presence in my life, her cuddles, her laughter. I only need to look forward for the pain of a future without Kay to burn in my mind and flood the back of my eyes with a wall of tears.

But just maybe I'm heading towards being a bit stronger, a bit more able to manage the mountain of pain and grief that beset me.

Short Update

I've been extremely busy this week, within my limited capacity, preparing for a couple of major business events. I'm tired to the core of my bones. Fortunately I have only one more event to go before things get quieter again. I haven't had the time to sculpt a blog entry, will get round to that in the weekend. 

Being so busy has kept a lot of things at bay. But in contrast Marion has had a very hard week, yesterday breaking down a couple of times. The goal for the weekend is for us both to find some quieter waters. 

Oh, Nattie

I just got home from work and went up to see what Nattie was doing. She was busily working away on her computer. I looked over her shoulder and saw that she had a picture of her and Kay together. I asked her what she was doing and she proceeded to show me a beautiful Powerpoint slideshow that she's making about Kay's life. She has downloaded her favourite pictures of Kay from my Flickr collection and, one by one, is adding them into her slideshow. She has added text to each slide describing Kay or the scene and has fully animated the transitions and the slide timing.

I had an explosion of reactions: astonishment that she could find her way round Powerpoint so well, pride in my clever daughter and the deed that she was doing, wonder that she has the strength and ability to do such a thing, concern that that quiet mind is still so busy with Kay in such a "silent waters run deep" way. And of course GRIEF. I asked her why she was making the slideshow, whether it was a project for school. She replied, "Just because".

My eyes started to fill up and my voice choked off. I managed to tell her that it was wonderful and made me very emotional before hurrying out. Once I'd recovered my equilibruim I went back and encouraged her to continue.

What an amazing child. What an act of love. I don't think possibly bring myself to attempt such a thing.

The Right Moment

Diane posted this link to a grief recovery website in a comment yesterday. I've been reading it this morning and it's very interesting. The thing that pricked up my ears was a remark about being in foreign territory without a map. Yes, that's just how it seems.

Thanks, Diane.

No Way Out

It's late. I'm tired. But a huge wave of grief is building, so much so that I don't want to go to bed, don't want to go into a dark room and try to sleep, don't want to not sleep, don't want to face this grief.

Marion's already long in bed. She was very tired and very tearful this evening. She was asking me why they couldn't save Kay. I have no answers except for the facts.

What to do, what to do? But there's no way out is there? I hate this. I hate sititng here with tears streaming down my face, missing my Kay so badly my heart could burst. I just kissed her photo and I still can't believe that that beautiful face only exists in two dimensions. That the only physical trace of Kay is a bag of ash in a pot. That's what my gorgeous daughter has been reduced to, it's so unfair, unfair.

I feel so alone with these thoughts. And I feel so repelled by this grief. But there's nowhere to go except into it, no ducking, no dodging possible.

I've reached the limits of what I dare write here just now.

Dilemma

I woke up this morning after a disturbed night, feeling rather down: heavy heart, pressure in my chest and generally feeling miserable. Marion & Nattie had gone to hockey early. I went down, opened the curtains and turned the light on over the big photo of Kay in the corner of the lounge. I kissed Kay and stroked her cheek, as I do every morning and night. But today I was immediately hit by a panic attack, don't remember the exact cause. Anyway, so far this has set the tone for the day.

I called Linda and had a chat which brightened me up enough that I felt like continuing with the day, (as always, thanks my dear friend). Since then I've been pottering around doing jobs in the garden and prepping my mountain bike for its first outing of the season. But as I was working thoughts of Kay continued to wash through my head. How she would always wait until the absolute last minute before going to the toilet, to the extent that if she wasn't quite fast enough she occasionally wet herself. She hated wasting a minute of the day and any time on the loo was wasted time. She had the habit of unfastening her trousers on the way to the loo and refastening them on the way back so the whole thing would take less time (a habit of Marion's too!) and she would never fasten the fly of her trousers because she "preferred it that way". These and many other painful/black thoughts queued to cross my mind.

Now, here's the dilemma: does one allow oneself to (repeatedly) think black and/or painful thoughts. Or should one avoid thinking bad things?. For example, there I am working away in the leaf sodden autumn garden when suddenly it strikes me that Kay's seen her last autumn, seen her last leaf fall, raked her last pile of leaves, filled her last wheelbarrow. She's seen her last thunderstorm, she's ridden her mountain bike for the last time, had her last birthday, had her last Christmas... Should I shy away from these thoughts? Or should I let them run their course?

Shying away from them seems to be about as useful as burying CO2: it's (notionally) toxic and it has to come out some time. But maybe not right now, maybe when the world can handle it's CO2 output. On the other hand, by allowing these thoughts to have free rein, I'm allowing myself to be pushed deeper down the black hole of misery and grief. And I certainly don't feel that by allowing them free rein now I'll be better for it in the future. In fact, by allowing them free rein the future seems to be increasingly unattractive, as I wrote on Monday.

What to do? To be honest I don't know. I can try to think about think about other things but the pressure of the grief remains the same and it does feel like sticking my head in the sand. On the other hand, allowing myself to think these thoughts and allowing the repetition feels like I'm permitting myself to revel in grief, encouraging myself to be depressed, engaging in some sort of mental masturbation of misery.

I guess that this is a important subject, the key to healing the Sickness of Grief. But what is wise?

A Surprising Thing

I feel slightly stronger today, with a little more energy. It's a small change but it's the first time in a very long time that I've noticed such a thing. I suspect that the reason is that Marion's Homeopath (English word?) has put us on a high dose of vitamins, particularly vitamin 'C'. Homeopaths are not normally my thing, not since one of them explained to me how diluting a 'medication' repeatedly by a factor of 10 increased its effect with each dilution, etc. For me this kind of thinking is little removed from dancing around the garden naked under a full moon, shaking a stick. The same person used to also talk to vegetables when cutting them on the basis that they became more compliant and cut more easily. Hmmmm.....

Neverthless, in the last years I've had some good experiences with alternative medicine. The physiotherapist that I see occasionally is a fantastic guy who uses a range of conventional and unconventional techniques in a holistic approach towards helping a patient. Some years ago he used accupunture to help me with a nasty stress complaint. Needless to say, I was very skeptical and rather afraid of being stuck like a pig. But the experience fell slightly short of miraculous. Since then I've become a firm believer in accupuncture to the extent that these days I only wince when being jabbed, rather than the full blown screams that I let out the first time. 

I've also suffered from a dodgy knee for years, including two operations. But a couple of years ago when my knee was playing up the same guy diagnosed the problem and fixed it in about 5 minutes. A true genius.

Marion's been pestering me to go and see her Homeopath. I know that the lady helped Marion a lot in the past, but I'd always reckoned that her skills were based on the power of listening and placeboes (listening to Marion for long periods being indeed a wonderous and unconventional skill, ha ha!). But I'm not sure the same cure will work for me, being generally less inclined to talk to strangers than Marion and certainly having a healthy skepticism towards placebo medication. But the vitamin thing and slight improvement in my mental state has made me curious, so I have agreed to go and see her next week.

Maybe I'll yet end up dancing round the garden. But not naked. I'm way too English for that.

Another Day, Another Airport

I guess I'm a slow learner. In this case I'm learning that airports are not the best place to be if you're feeling tired and depressed: I'm waiting at London Standsted for a flight back to Eindhoven. The place is heaving, I'm surrounded by people who are laughing and enjoying themselves while I feel like the black hole of joy. I guess I must be sucking all the life out of a circular space, or hemisphere, of radius 1.5 metres. All the other tables are full but this is the nearest that anyone is sitting to me. Actually, I must remember this trick in future: how to guarantee personal space in crowded place: look less happy than a Russian (there are miserable looking Russians (i assume from the language) on the nearest occupied table to me, but there are people sitting directly NEXT to them. What a badge of honour that is).

Anyway, my flight has been called so I have to run.

Tired++

I managed to avoid a complete meltdown on Monday, mostly because our GP came around in the evening and I chatted with her for a bit. This seemed to release some of the mounting pressure. Yesterday was almost a normal day, at least for someone in this state.

Today I've woken up feeling extremely tired and with a middeling dizzy headache. I just feel like sitting here with my eyes shut and doing nothing. Unfortunately there are things to do so I'll have to raise myself at some point. Tomorrow I have an interesting meeting in London so I want to make sure that I'm fit for that.

This afternoon we are going to pick up Kay's ashes from the crematorium. Promises to be another difficult and extremely emotional moment. I've been wondering where we can put them at home. The scene out of "Meet the Parents" jumps to mind, so I think we should lock them safely away in a cupboard.

Yesterday Esther passed me a "Thought for the Day" , which has stuck in my head: "Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted". This rang with me immediately. I spend a lot of my time trying to make everything countable, I suppose. And as a result I suppose that I could be missing a lot of things that count. Definitely food for thought.

Sea of Emotions

I feel terrible this morning. I'm hoping that writing an entry will take the edge off it because otherwise I feel like I'm not going to get through the day. For the last 24hrs I've been feeling sick to my stomach. The pressure of grief in my chest is enormous and my heart is hammering on the inside of my rib cage. The effort that it takes just to walk around whilst feeling like this is huge. The mental cost even higher. I really have no idea how it is possible to live one's life for an extended period while feeling so awful.

I had a dream last night that I had to bury Kay myself in hole, without a coffin. In contrast, when I'm awake I have an underground feeling that now it's enough, she's been away from home long enough, time to return back to us. The emptiness that she's left behind is too great to cope with. I'm lying in bed here with tears pouring down my face, my breathing coming in lumps. Marion's just given me a kiss & hug but she's got to get Nattie to school. Later this week we have to pick up Kay's ashes, a moment that I'm dreading. On top of all this i have the strongest feeling that something else is going to go wrong, something big, something waiting just round the corner to deal us another mortal blow.

But I've got to pull myself together, there are people depending on me and lying in bed solves nothing.

But I miss Kay so much. I just want to hold her, stroke her hair, hear her laugh and fight her way out of my grip. I want to go back and go things differently. Spend more time with her, read to her more often, cuddle her more tightly, breath in her scent more deeply, feel her warmth more completely. I would do anything for this to be different. I can't bear the thought of having to live the rest of my life with these feelings of emptiness, pain, remorse, longing, injustice.

Today is the first day of the rest of our lives. A day that represents our first move towards reentering everyday life. It's a grey miserable day, no colour, no sun, no warmth, no view, no perspective. A day that accurately reflects aspects of how I feel. I lie here aching with longing, screaming with injustice, weeping with pain and I know that life continues to offer us pleasures, Lauren, Nattie and many other things. But I don't feel strong enough to move from here, to face the months and months of pain ahead, to confront all the aspects of Kay's death in the tiniest details, to absorb all the panic attacks that have yet to come. What life offers us doesn't seem to compensate for what it took away.

Oh, how does one do this? How does one continue to live such a massively compromised, painful existence?