Ski Holiday

I can hear Kay laughing in my head, right hand side, just around and behind my right ear. That part of my head feels different from the equivalent area on my left side. It permanently feels a bit like I've just been lying on my right hand side. I suppose that there are lots of explanations for this feeling, but it coincides with where I heard Kay talking to me in the days after she died and with where I hear her now, laughing and acting all excited because we've arrived on ski holiday.

My sense of her is very vague, not as crystal clear as after she died, and certainly difficult to distinguish from a memory. But it's what I sense. The reason I suppose is that we're back in Schruns, Austria for a week's skiing. This place holds so many, many memories of the girls, of Kay, that I feel physically sick with fear of the recollections that will undoubtedly come in the next days. They started yesterday already with the drive, my mind kept flicking to memories of being here but I kept my equilibrium by diverting it to something else. When we arrived and drove through the village, everywhere I looked triggered a memory: here we played Madonna very loud in the car while waiting for Mama to do some shopping, there we rented skis for the girls the first time that they skied.

In some ways we have avoided being confronted by too many memories: we are staying in a different hotel by coincidence, we will use a different lift to get up the mountain, etc. However recollection will be unavoidable when we join our friends tomorrow and start the week's skiing. Already I feel the huge, massive absence of Kay. She was such a physical child, loved skiing, loved swimming in the pool afterward, was such a monkey, so very very funny.

Although I hear her laughing, her excitement about going skiing again, I have no idea if it's a memory or if it's Kay here with us. Whatever, I'm already achingly, painfully, grieviously missing her.

Dirk, Kay and Nattie. Schruns 2009.

Schruns 2009