Turmoil

I'm suffering from some sort of writers block. For the last week, while we have been in France, I have been unable to form any thoughts clearly enough to express them in words. My mind has been awash with everything to do with Kay. With life, with sickness, with death. With every aspect of her absence. My thoughts have been going round and round and nothing substantial has come out. Or perhaps, tons of stuff has come out, too much to be converted to the written word. Depends on one's perspective, I suspect.

In theory we came to our house in France for a week's holiday. But the word 'holiday' should really be put between quotes: "Holiday". In reality we have spent the week repairing, cleaning, painting and problem solving. Much of this work has been tedious. Power spraying the terrace took most of a day and painting the terrace wall took most of another day. These were long hours of mindless physical activity which left a lot of space in my head for 'meandering'. And these days 'meandering' is equivalent to thinking about Kay. Thus, for the first time in many months I have spent hours and hours moving from one facet of grief/loss/memory/pain to another. From her last moments to her laughter to her difficult nature to her strength to my feelings of loss to our role in her life to the philosophy of grief to the meaning of life and death to the implications for our future, etc, etc.

The only conclusion that I have been able to draw is that very little has changed since Kay's death. I have found no answers, I know no more, I have not been able to explain anything, I have reached no conclusions, I have reconciled nothing. My pain remains the same, the sense of loss has not diminished, her absence remains unbelievable, I still feel that I'm living someone else's life, that this cannot be my life. I continue to wonder Why? Why Kay? Why Me? Why Us? What did we do? What did we not do? What did I do? What did I not do?

In addition to this more and more memories of Kay are coming back. This is equivalent to more and more pain. I hear her more often, see her more often, am reminded of her more often. And the impossibility of her absence becomes more and more impossible; the hole she left behind, bigger and bigger; the whole that we were, more and more distant. For example, for the first time on holiday here, Natasha has been bored. Her boredom has been a screaming pointer to Kay's absence: if Kay were still alive, the two of them would have kept each other busy all day.

After hours and hours of thinking and feeling, there are few points of substance that remain. Perhaps the most substantial realization that has emerged is that I am never going to recover from losing Kay. Like I man who has lost his legs, I will simply have to learn to live with her loss. It's never going to be any better than it is now. The pain is permanent, will never leave me, will never diminish. I will never heal, will never be the person I once was, will never be able to live my life in the same way that I did a few years ago. You could liken it to a loss of innocence, and perhaps in a way that is exactly what it is: the world is a far harsher place than most of us Westerners actually realize. 

It's a shock to think these thoughts, to substantiate them by writing them down. By writing them I give form to the truth of the matter: I'm permanently damaged, will never be the same again. And this is a facet of a larger realization: that I have reached a moment in life when my options have started to narrow. For most of my life to date I have had the sense that my options were unlimited, that I had the freedom to choose and that my choices were only limited by my own vision. But now I realize that decisions that I have made in the past cannot be revisited, that I have to live with the consequences of those decisions irrespective of the fact that I really had no idea what those consequences would be when I made them. 

I suspect that those of you who are older than I will be nodding sagaciously and thinking "Get used to it boy" and that those of you younger than I will be wondering what the hell I mean. Wisdom versus youth.

The second constant factor in the turmoil of my thoughts is that I'm no longer fearful of death. In fact, I have a feeling that when death presents itself, I will welcome it.  There are many reasons for this, amongst which the fact that I find life to be a heavy burden. Now, before you get the idea that I'm suicidal, let me state categorically that I'm not. I recognize that the feeling of "heavy burden" is circumstantial and that improved circumstances will lighten that feeling. But still, on the balance of Quality of Life, this feeling weighs negatively. More importantly and significantly, death will bring answers, one way or another. Either my soul will pass on to the next plain of existence, in which case I'll learn something and perhaps be reunited with Kay, or there will be eternal oblivion, which of itself is a very definitive answer - but one of which I will by definition not be conscious of (Yes, I know: "never end a sentence with a preposition". But I'm too tired to work out how to write that sentence more neatly). 

Frankly, I don't much care which of these outcomes becomes manifest, in either case the outcome will bring an end to the philosophical turmoil that has now beset me for 18 months or more, if not longer. (And the thing that bothers me is that if there is an afterlife, what form does it take? Will I be reunited with Kay? Has Osama bin Laden been granted his 24 virgins? What criteria should one use to separate "fact" from "fiction" when it come to the afterlife?)

Apart from recognizing that my life is permanently damaged and a lowering of my abhorrence of death, I can't actually think of any way in which I/we have healed/improved/moved on in the last nine months. This week has seen tears every day, memories every hour, pain every minute. We're both struggling so hard to just get through the day that it seems like it's only momentum, the arrow of time and the beating of a heart that gets us through the day. 

I'll end on a happy note for once: we have a pool here, but for various reasons the pool heating is not working and since it's still early in the season, the pool is naturally on the cool side, to say the least. However Natasha seems to have to constitution of a Polar Bear and is impervious to cold water. So she's been in and out of the pool all week. But as I mentioned, she's been feeling bored and has been pestering us to join her. Marion has reptilian genes and is warmed only by sunlight or by leaching from other people, namely me. She spends most of the winter complaining of cold and will only go in a pool during high summer and then only if it is above 30 degrees. However, the local water sports shop sells wetsuits for around €19,- and so a deal was struck that if I got Marion a wetsuit she would go in the pool with Nattie. 

Thus, this afternoon, while I was working on the house, Marion donned her new wetsuit and toe by toe lowered herself into the pool in the slowest and worst way possible - best just to jump right in, in my book. Within a few minutes she was swimming around and she and Natasha were laughing their heads off. In fact, as I worked away, I realized that this was the first time that I had heard uninhibited laughter from Marion in a very long time. It was great to hear. But it only lasted a few minutes - even with a wetsuit, Marion didn't last more than 2 minutes in the pool. And it's probably the first and last time that that wetsuit will be used. But I reckon that uninhibited laughter is worth € 9.50 per minute, at least.