Tuesday, 26 October 2010
Growing Collection
Yesterday can be added to my growing collection of very bad days. In fact it was one of the worst so far. I hope there are fewer of these days in front of me than behind. Like Kay, I feel that every attack leaves me weaker and less able to respond to the next one. Later in the evening I infected Marion, so there were two of us in a bad way. Fortunately Nattie stuck her head round the door and asked if she could bring us something, "Room Service!" she announced with a smile. Such sweetness was enough incentive for us to pull ourselves together. Bless her.
Monday, 25 October 2010
No more Kay Cuddles
I've been struggling with another build up of grief the last 24hrs or so. This morning when I came down I looked at Kay's photo and had an overwhelming need to put my arms around her and give her a hug. And then I was hit by the obvious and I could feel the hug vacuum between my arms and my heart, the cuddle-hole that can never be filled. I turned away but the feeling has left me deeper in grief and depression, the stupid realisation that there are no more Kay cuddles in this world.
So after breakfast, feeling worse and worse, I asked Nattie if she had a cuddle for me. The only thing she had in store was a quick, cursory hug and then she had to go back to playing Sims 3. And rather than help this made me feel worse.
So I've borrowed Marion's shoulder for a bit and I'm now a few tears lighter, which hopefully will compensate for the rich French breakfast we just had. But still I feel so so extremely low and miserable. I just want to curl up under the covers and wish this Kayless world away.
So after breakfast, feeling worse and worse, I asked Nattie if she had a cuddle for me. The only thing she had in store was a quick, cursory hug and then she had to go back to playing Sims 3. And rather than help this made me feel worse.
So I've borrowed Marion's shoulder for a bit and I'm now a few tears lighter, which hopefully will compensate for the rich French breakfast we just had. But still I feel so so extremely low and miserable. I just want to curl up under the covers and wish this Kayless world away.
Sunday, 24 October 2010
Where is Kay?
I'm struggling to find things to write about, not because of a shortage of material but because I'm boiling over with so many and diverse conflicting emotions and thoughts. Last night when we went to bed Marion had a major meltdown. She so wants to touch Kay and feel her body, she regrets not spending the last night with her (I dragged her away because she was exhausted and all advice that I got was to make sure the Marion got some rest), but perhaps mostly she wants to know where Kay is now.
This is a subject that I'm finding very hard to resolve in my mind. I have not had the clear sense of communication with Kay that I had during the week or so after her passing. I still have a sense of her presence and I still feel her warmth and love. I vaguely hear her talking to me, reassuring me. But equally I cannot be sure that these feelings are real. For instance I only hear/feel Kay when I think about hearing/feeling her. As yet I've not had spontaneous awareness of her presence.
Part of my mind sees my sense of Kay's presence as a symptom of deep grief, of my mind manufacturing comfort, supported by the fact that I only have this sense when I think about it. But what if this is not the case? It is surely more comforting to accept these feelings as some kind of reality, to believe in the metaphysical. But my problem is, essentially, that I’m not easily a believer. So I’m torn in an extremely painful way: if I dismiss the metaphysical I’m left with the terrible, terrible thought that there’s nothing left of Kay, that her last moments of consciousness, which she spent in anger and fear, were truly it. That everything after that was nothing at all.
There’s a lot of common sense and supporting evidence for this point of view. It’s Occam’s Razor to the max. But it is also the most utterly painful and nihilist view of Kay’s death. That there’s really nothing more than I perceived. That every time I kissed her, stroked her hair, held her hand, that she was effectively already gone, unreachable to me. That her continuing presence is nothing more than a sop invented by my subconscious to help me get through the day.
I really find this nihilist view so so so very difficult to swallow. But the alternative seems to go against my nature, to simply believe in something for which I have no evidence. The only evidence I can find for the alternate explanation, that Kay’s soul is loving us and looking after us, is that I feel better when I think such thoughts.
Fact is that “life is hard and then you die”, a point of view that seems to neatly summarize our experiences to date. In this context we end up back by Occam’s Razor again: there’s nothing, Kay is gone forever in every possible way.
I wrote this recently to Esther, Kay's child psychologist and our fantastic and loving guide through her last weeks. Esther basically replied that there's far more to life than we can know, that we simply do not have the tools or ability to probe these subjects in a quantitative way. She repeated something that I really like, "Feelings are Facts too" and therefore encouraged me to treat my sense of Kay's presence as if it were in fact real because firstly there's no separating one view from another and because it is indeed what I felt. Plus, my own thinking leads me to reason that if the nihilist view is indeed the 'real' one, then there's no harm in accepting the idea that Kay's with me. Whereas the opposite view, that Kay is here and I deny it, is harmful to me in the sense that it will take me down a longer and more painful road to recovery than otherwise would be the case. So the conclusion is that the best thing to do is to accept my experience of Kay's presence as reality and whether that's a nihilist manufactured reality or a metaphysical reality is by-the-way.
I guess the danger lies in what one does when one reaches the conclusion that our children have souls and that they stay with us when they die. I don't plan to do much more than accept that as the way things are. I don't necessarily see it as leading to the conclusion that there's a god, especially after all the other counter experiences that we've had. If I were to conjecture I guess that I'd say about as far as one could go is to imagine a sea of souls with perhaps a distributed hive intelligence. That would match my experiences to date: no single divine consciousness (with throne, beard and penchant for the concept of "glory" and virgin birth), just a collective mind that behaves in ways that an individual mind can't understand.
Still, all this intellectualizing really doesn't contribute too much right now, except perhaps to point the way forward. Right now I remain in a state of shock and denial. Here's an example: yesterday as I was framing a photo of Kay I noticed that there is some light lens flare on the print, partly over her head and face. My thought was, "Oh I'll just reshoot it when the sun's out again". Then the next second, BANG, the hit of electric shock across my chest as a realised that that's not possible. Then BANG as I realized for the first time that my photo collection of Kay is complete, finished, never to be added to again.
Repeatedly I suffer the shock of realizing that Kay's life ended in terror and pain, without us having been able to say goodbye, without the last kiss or last hug. Denial because I don’t want to accept that she has become a memory, that my photo collection of her is final and complete. That my only route to her is through metaphysical terrain.
So, my conclusion is that I/we have not moved on very much in our weeks here. And I cannot imagine how long it’s going to take before I/we move on from this phase and how much pain we have yet to feel before we start to feel less.
This is a subject that I'm finding very hard to resolve in my mind. I have not had the clear sense of communication with Kay that I had during the week or so after her passing. I still have a sense of her presence and I still feel her warmth and love. I vaguely hear her talking to me, reassuring me. But equally I cannot be sure that these feelings are real. For instance I only hear/feel Kay when I think about hearing/feeling her. As yet I've not had spontaneous awareness of her presence.
Part of my mind sees my sense of Kay's presence as a symptom of deep grief, of my mind manufacturing comfort, supported by the fact that I only have this sense when I think about it. But what if this is not the case? It is surely more comforting to accept these feelings as some kind of reality, to believe in the metaphysical. But my problem is, essentially, that I’m not easily a believer. So I’m torn in an extremely painful way: if I dismiss the metaphysical I’m left with the terrible, terrible thought that there’s nothing left of Kay, that her last moments of consciousness, which she spent in anger and fear, were truly it. That everything after that was nothing at all.
There’s a lot of common sense and supporting evidence for this point of view. It’s Occam’s Razor to the max. But it is also the most utterly painful and nihilist view of Kay’s death. That there’s really nothing more than I perceived. That every time I kissed her, stroked her hair, held her hand, that she was effectively already gone, unreachable to me. That her continuing presence is nothing more than a sop invented by my subconscious to help me get through the day.
I really find this nihilist view so so so very difficult to swallow. But the alternative seems to go against my nature, to simply believe in something for which I have no evidence. The only evidence I can find for the alternate explanation, that Kay’s soul is loving us and looking after us, is that I feel better when I think such thoughts.
Fact is that “life is hard and then you die”, a point of view that seems to neatly summarize our experiences to date. In this context we end up back by Occam’s Razor again: there’s nothing, Kay is gone forever in every possible way.
I wrote this recently to Esther, Kay's child psychologist and our fantastic and loving guide through her last weeks. Esther basically replied that there's far more to life than we can know, that we simply do not have the tools or ability to probe these subjects in a quantitative way. She repeated something that I really like, "Feelings are Facts too" and therefore encouraged me to treat my sense of Kay's presence as if it were in fact real because firstly there's no separating one view from another and because it is indeed what I felt. Plus, my own thinking leads me to reason that if the nihilist view is indeed the 'real' one, then there's no harm in accepting the idea that Kay's with me. Whereas the opposite view, that Kay is here and I deny it, is harmful to me in the sense that it will take me down a longer and more painful road to recovery than otherwise would be the case. So the conclusion is that the best thing to do is to accept my experience of Kay's presence as reality and whether that's a nihilist manufactured reality or a metaphysical reality is by-the-way.
I guess the danger lies in what one does when one reaches the conclusion that our children have souls and that they stay with us when they die. I don't plan to do much more than accept that as the way things are. I don't necessarily see it as leading to the conclusion that there's a god, especially after all the other counter experiences that we've had. If I were to conjecture I guess that I'd say about as far as one could go is to imagine a sea of souls with perhaps a distributed hive intelligence. That would match my experiences to date: no single divine consciousness (with throne, beard and penchant for the concept of "glory" and virgin birth), just a collective mind that behaves in ways that an individual mind can't understand.
Still, all this intellectualizing really doesn't contribute too much right now, except perhaps to point the way forward. Right now I remain in a state of shock and denial. Here's an example: yesterday as I was framing a photo of Kay I noticed that there is some light lens flare on the print, partly over her head and face. My thought was, "Oh I'll just reshoot it when the sun's out again". Then the next second, BANG, the hit of electric shock across my chest as a realised that that's not possible. Then BANG as I realized for the first time that my photo collection of Kay is complete, finished, never to be added to again.
Repeatedly I suffer the shock of realizing that Kay's life ended in terror and pain, without us having been able to say goodbye, without the last kiss or last hug. Denial because I don’t want to accept that she has become a memory, that my photo collection of her is final and complete. That my only route to her is through metaphysical terrain.
So, my conclusion is that I/we have not moved on very much in our weeks here. And I cannot imagine how long it’s going to take before I/we move on from this phase and how much pain we have yet to feel before we start to feel less.
Saturday, 23 October 2010
Staying up late
It's difficult to write at the moment, my mind is a storm of emotions that I'm trying to control by avoiding. Otherwise I'll spend too much of my time here in sorrow and not enjoying or at least appreciating the good things around me.
Natasha has been going to bed pretty late since we've been here, 10pm or so. Normally I'd be pushing for her to be in bed at a more normal time but I find myself looking for reasons to keep her up a little longer: "if you sit on my knee quietly for a bit you can stay up a little longer". Hmmmm... To whose benefit is this now?
I realise that every minute we have with our children is precious and thus synchronising our sleeping patterns is a good way to maximise that enjoyment, those golden seconds. They are gone way too quickly, prematurely in Kay's case. And we can never know if or when that will happen.
Kay burns in our minds. I completed putting up new photos of the girls, of Kay today. This has been a real labour of love and enormous pain. But necessary. Kay is now all around us here. Confrontational, but also beautiful. It makes her presence more present, if you follow my meaning.
Marion is lying in bed next to me and is struggling with tears. I need to give her some support, but it's so difficult to face her pain whne I'm overflowing with my own. Nevertheless...
Natasha has been going to bed pretty late since we've been here, 10pm or so. Normally I'd be pushing for her to be in bed at a more normal time but I find myself looking for reasons to keep her up a little longer: "if you sit on my knee quietly for a bit you can stay up a little longer". Hmmmm... To whose benefit is this now?
I realise that every minute we have with our children is precious and thus synchronising our sleeping patterns is a good way to maximise that enjoyment, those golden seconds. They are gone way too quickly, prematurely in Kay's case. And we can never know if or when that will happen.
Kay burns in our minds. I completed putting up new photos of the girls, of Kay today. This has been a real labour of love and enormous pain. But necessary. Kay is now all around us here. Confrontational, but also beautiful. It makes her presence more present, if you follow my meaning.
Marion is lying in bed next to me and is struggling with tears. I need to give her some support, but it's so difficult to face her pain whne I'm overflowing with my own. Nevertheless...
Thursday, 21 October 2010
Natasha
I think that we're very fortunate with Natasha. She has always been a self contained child, able to play on her own for long periods. She has a very active imagination, which also keeps her very busy. I was very concerned that when we came here she would be lost in some way without Kay, her life long playmate.
But my worries have so far not been founded. She's constantly busy with something. She is either reading (Kay's backlog of Donald Duck comics), playing on my iPad or on the PC. She has been in the pool for quite long periods almost everyday. She & I have been doing maths exercises on the iPad and I have to say that the child has a mind like a calculator, she's occasionallly faster than me with division and getting faster all the time.
Her active imagination has led her to design a complete entertainment complex that when she gets older she intends to build. This complex started with a shop, "Nattie Fashion", and got extended to a resturant, fun park and geld-pakhuis (money warehouse). She's got all the details worked out and is working on drawing a site plan. She's even promised that Marion & I will be able to visit for a discounted rate - not free mind you.
But all this is not to say that she doesn't miss Kay. I configured a new account for her on the PC here and the first thing that she did was access Flickr and download a photo of Kay and set it as her screen background and login icon (I didn't even know that she knew how to do this!). She talks about Kay in quite a normal way, more normal than I can manage at least. She was extremely pleased when I hung a photo of Kay above her bed here. Once, before we came away, Marion told me that she found Nattie cuddling her huge teddy bear and when Marion asked, she said that she was missing Kay.
She's also able to comfort Marion & I in indirect ways. We don't confront her with our tears, but she knows that we're upset every now and again and, in her own way, she'll come a give one of us a cuddle. Last night the three of us curled up on the sofa here in front of one of Marion's favourite films, Notting Hill. It was lovely, Marion snuggled up on my left, Nattie lying on my chest to the right. Both Nattie & I feel asleep during the film, Nattie was well gone. It was so very nice to feel her body pressed against me, warm, deeply asleep, the smell of her hair. Something that I did with Kay so very many times during the last year.
I think that of all of us, Nattie has the most balanced atttitude so far. She knows that Kay is gone and seems to accept it. She is able to talk about Kay and refer to memories of her. But her life goes on and she's filling it in perfectly without her big sister and playmate.
I only wish Lauren, Marion & I were doing quite so well.
But my worries have so far not been founded. She's constantly busy with something. She is either reading (Kay's backlog of Donald Duck comics), playing on my iPad or on the PC. She has been in the pool for quite long periods almost everyday. She & I have been doing maths exercises on the iPad and I have to say that the child has a mind like a calculator, she's occasionallly faster than me with division and getting faster all the time.
Her active imagination has led her to design a complete entertainment complex that when she gets older she intends to build. This complex started with a shop, "Nattie Fashion", and got extended to a resturant, fun park and geld-pakhuis (money warehouse). She's got all the details worked out and is working on drawing a site plan. She's even promised that Marion & I will be able to visit for a discounted rate - not free mind you.
But all this is not to say that she doesn't miss Kay. I configured a new account for her on the PC here and the first thing that she did was access Flickr and download a photo of Kay and set it as her screen background and login icon (I didn't even know that she knew how to do this!). She talks about Kay in quite a normal way, more normal than I can manage at least. She was extremely pleased when I hung a photo of Kay above her bed here. Once, before we came away, Marion told me that she found Nattie cuddling her huge teddy bear and when Marion asked, she said that she was missing Kay.
She's also able to comfort Marion & I in indirect ways. We don't confront her with our tears, but she knows that we're upset every now and again and, in her own way, she'll come a give one of us a cuddle. Last night the three of us curled up on the sofa here in front of one of Marion's favourite films, Notting Hill. It was lovely, Marion snuggled up on my left, Nattie lying on my chest to the right. Both Nattie & I feel asleep during the film, Nattie was well gone. It was so very nice to feel her body pressed against me, warm, deeply asleep, the smell of her hair. Something that I did with Kay so very many times during the last year.
I think that of all of us, Nattie has the most balanced atttitude so far. She knows that Kay is gone and seems to accept it. She is able to talk about Kay and refer to memories of her. But her life goes on and she's filling it in perfectly without her big sister and playmate.
I only wish Lauren, Marion & I were doing quite so well.
Wednesday, 20 October 2010
Can't say anything
I had plans to write all sorts of things on the blog today. But both Marion and I are having a very bad day, we're both either on the edge of tears or in tears. We're being confronted with memories and discovering that we're not really up to them. I'd ordered a bunch of photos of Kay/the girls to hang up here. We bought some frames for them today and this afternoon i started matching photos to frames to wall spaces, with Marion's help. But we're not strong enough, the pain of looking at these beautiful photos is just too much.
I'm also concerned that I'm just going to start repeating myself on the blog. My thoughts are going round and round, revisiting the same themes over and over and it all aims to be getting worse and worse.
That's enough for now.
I'm also concerned that I'm just going to start repeating myself on the blog. My thoughts are going round and round, revisiting the same themes over and over and it all aims to be getting worse and worse.
That's enough for now.
Tuesday, 19 October 2010
Natasha is Kept Busy
We have friends staying with us for a few days so I haven't had chance to update the blog. But I thought that I'd quickly post a few photos showing Nattie have a lot of fun playing Monopoly with Joost.
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