Two years is no better than one year

Two years ago today the world fell apart and it's showing no sign of mending. My heart is just as broken now as then. I still keep hoping that this is some kind of nightmare from which I'll wake up. But alas. 

The first half of the day, and in fact the whole of this week leading up today, has been dreadful for a host of reasons that I can't explain here. It feels like some kind of awful conspiracy has been taking place, designed to metaphorically stick knives into the most raw, painful and unhappy areas of my psyche. The result is that I'm sat here feeling utterly bereft of Kay, bereft of happiness, bereft of any simulacrum of quality-of-life. 

On Monday we had an appointment at the Radbout Hospital in Nijmegen. The appointment was with Esther, the psychologist who supported us during Kay's sickness, and took us back to the very place where Kay died. It was an incredibly difficult thing to walk those corridors again, to think that the last time I took those lifts was to leave the hospital without Kay. I was beset by memories, many of which I'd rather forget. (Why is it that I have so many memories of Kay-the-patient and so few of Kay-the-healthy-child?). I remember so clearly talking with Esther in the ICU about Kay's potential death and more or less begging her not to let us become The-Family-Who-Lost-A-Child. And yet here we are, The-Family-Who-Lost-A-Child and it's even worse that I could possibly have imagined.

I'm sat here with tears flowing down my face, almost unable to write at all. The sea of churning emotions inside me no longer lends itself to written expression. There is so much confusion, so much pain, so many things that cannot possibly be aired for the sake of making things worse. My goal is to maintain the status-quo and that is hard enough. Don't even think about trying to make things better. "Talk to someone", I hear you say. Been there, done that. I think that I was starting to make my psychologist depressed - how very Woody Allen. All the "easy" stuff has been dealt with, EMDR for post-traumatic shock and memories and plenty of therapy for all the first degree psychological consequences of Kay's death. It's no longer these things that trouble me most. What troubles me are the "Why's?" and the implications of the "Why's?", specifically the implications of the fact that there are so many of them and they all remain unanswered. For example, why out of 356 days per year did what happened this morning have to happen this morning? Today, of all days! 

When I look at the pattern of events over the last years it almost seems to be proof of the existence of malevolence, a malevolence that focussed on us in October 2009 and is still acting on our lives today. Maybe one day I'll understand better what is going on, but at the moment I feel like a prisoner being tortured on the rack, unable to comprehend the questions being asked because of the pain and therefore unable to alleviate the pain.

But "Why's?" are not the only problems. Trying to maintain the status-quo is extremely hard, especially when I spend half my time wondering whether it would just be better to let everything fall to bits completely and start all over again. What is it about this life that makes it worth fighting for? It is a life riddled with pain, with sadness, with loss. Trying to keep it all together is so very hard. Part of the answer is that letting it fall apart would cause even more pain and more loss for those involved. Part of it is that there is still much of value in it. Yet another part is that I'm a fighter and I don't like losing and giving up is losing. So the choice is to either fight on to merely maintain a horrible status-quo in the vague hope that things will get better or to bin everything and gamble that what is other the other side is better, bearing in mind that generally it's a fiction that the grass is always greener... So far the fighter side of me refuses to give up and keeps bouncing back. I just hope that somewhere in the near future the malevolence turns its attention to other things.

I have to say a word for those of you who know me personally. All of this stuff that I have written about is going on more or less constantly and, like a nuclear reactor, requires careful, thick-walled containment. It is this containment that allows me to operate from day to day. But thick walls do have their disadvantages in that I can often strike people has being distant or indifferent to otherwise important things or that I can react strangely to certain events. Even Marion sometimes accuses me of being indifferent to topics that she finds essentially important. I can assure you that I'm very rarely indifferent. My seeming indifference actually has its roots in the opposite: that many things touch me deeply and strain the walls of containment, such that I must mentally stabilise them in order not to "go critical". A friend and colleague of mine recently experienced a day when my containment failed - I was tired, ill and very depressed - and I think he was quite shocked at what came out. These last years I have had to wrestle with near constant emotional overload and as a result my walls have become thicker and higher. Thus, if I sometimes seem indifferent or react strangely, please forgive me. I'm trying to maintain normal operations under continuing abnormal circumstances and it's sometimes not easy.

Finally, my thoughts return to Kay. I've mentioned in the past that I feel a connection with her in my head, just above and behind my right ear - it's almost as if her hand is sometimes pressing lightly on my skull, but then in my skull. In the last months this feeling has softened - it's still there, but more gentle, subtle. This morning, as I walked down the stairs for breakfast, I suddenly realised that it is much sharper, much more pronounced today. Sitting here now, the right side of my head feels completely different then the left side. Kay must be here. But I wish she was sitting on my knee, giving her poor old Dad a big cuddle. 

I miss her so very, incredibly, hugely, infinitely much.