No-man's Land

As with their equivalents last year, these weeks are a no-man's land of emotion, a territory between fronts of desperation and grief. Kay's entry into a coma on the 4th of September last year heralded two weeks of pure, distilled hell for us. We hung between her life and her death, hoping and willing her to live, clinging to the faintest chance, the smallest sign of improvement. A year later it all seems to have been an exercise in futility. My opinion now is that the writing was already on the wall for weeks before Kay went into intensive care and that there never really was any chance that she would survive - the transplant had in fact already failed for all practical purposes. Kay had complained for a while that she felt that her body was giving up and from this distance and perspective I think she was right, although at the time I found and believed every reason to disagree with her.

This year, the days leading up to the 1st anniversary of the coma were absolutely some of the worst days that I have had and as such were completely unexpected. Since the 4th I have yet again entered into a no-man's land. The last week has not actually been so bad from a moment to moment perspective, except that I have been ill with a 'flu bug for most of it. But at the back of my mind I know that we have yet to face the 19th. I was caught out by the run-up to the coma and I have been surprised by the relative emotional calm of the last 8 days. So I'm now practically frozen by fear and the uncertainty of what the 19th will bring. I suppose, rationally speaking, that really it's just another day. But there's not much rational about this process and the portents are not good. Lauren has already asked me to arrange for her to be excused from school for the day so that she can spend the day privately with my parents. Nattie is excused, I have blocked the day in my agenda. We're all battening down the hatches in preparation for a storm. 

Marion has been asking me how we should approach the day and I have to say that I really have no idea. I told her that we should simply try to fill the house with people, as we did the hospital and our house on the day that Kay died. I think that we're simply going to have to be borne by our friends and family for a day or so, there's no other way I can imagine getting through.

As I sit here and write this I have begun to realize that I'm rather scared, scared of what comes after the 19th. We will have completed our first year without Kay and that makes me feel even more distant from her and I don't want to be any more distant from her. Last week Marion came to me in tears: Nattie has outgrown most of the clothes that she inherited from Kay. Marion saw this as yet another sign that we're leaving Kay behind and she's right. Time moves on but Kay doesn't move with it. I once wrote that I felt as if I am on a ship sailing out of port, inexorably leaving Kay behind and powerless to do anything to stop it. The idea of leaving the first year and starting the second turn of the wheel of grief is almost too much to bare. It emphasizes the extent to which the remainder of our lives will be measured by the turn of that wheel, that our future is one in which, time after time, we will be confronted with the milestones of loss, that we have to repeat everything that we have been through in the last 12 months. 

True, it should get easier. True, time is healing us, albeit very, very slowly. But the rate at which we're able to adapt, to heal, is much slower than the speed with which the wheel is turning and sometimes I just don't feel strong enough to cope, to absorb the difference.

So I suspect that we will (continue to) need everyone's support during the coming days. That, just as last year, we will be drowned and helpless under a tsunami of grief, albeit one of lesser proportions than 12 months ago.