It seemed easier to resurrect one of my old blogs than to take over a comment field on another blog.
(disclaimer, this post will almost certainly involve swearing, religion/my faith, typos aplenty, more information than you might possibly want to know about me and a certain amount of the release of random thoughts that have been spluttering around my head for ages now)
Grief is (a word I'm struggling to accurately type at the moment)...WEIRD.
I've been self-censoring myself recently on Twitter which is silly, given that I started properly using Twitter as I was censoring myself too much on Facebook. It's not ideal when any status update which could indicate that you're not in the best of mental health results in an almost instantaneous phone call or text from your mother along the lines of "Are you alright dear?". Now, I try not to post to stop my friends worrying. And it turns out that they're all doing the same. Hmmmmm.
This week was due to be a difficult week. I got engaged to Gavin pretty much exactly 3 years ago, even down to the hour. We were due to get married at 2pm this coming Saturday at my home church. Unfortunately, one of the many side effects of his chronic kidney disease and heart failure and the drugs to fix said conditions was very high blood pressure. On Sunday 27th March this year, I left a smiling, sleepy Gav cuddled up in bed while I went off to church and came back to find him collapsed, unconscious on the floor. He was rushed to A&E and, thence, to ICU. He never regained consciousness and his life support was turned off in the early hours of Tuesday morning and he passed away at 4.20am on the 29th of March.
It was, quite frankly, a complete and fucking kicker that it was like this. On the Saturday (I believe, or at least, I think I believe; my sense of time passing has been a bit screwed up over the past 18 months), we went to the marriage prep course. On the Sunday, I was sat in the waiting room in ICU trying to make all the appropriate phone calls when my mobile had no battery, I was swiftly running out of change and the pay phone wouldn't phone mobiles anyway. Seriously? I know he was ill but we should still have had more time together than that!!! In an odd way, I'm glad it was something that the doctors said he wouldn't have suffered much with rather than for him to have been slowly going downhill for ages with pneumonia or 0% kidney function or something.
And this is where my world got turned upside-down.
I hate it when women define who they are in relation to everyone else, but it's a useful shorthand. I mentally screamed, "IT'S NOT FAIR!!!!!" at the first official form I had to fill in that needed my marital status. I've planned half a wedding, kept watch by a hospital bed, got back home as the sun was rising, let jsut about everyone know, planned a funeral and a memorial service and the subsequent gathering at his local and the only tick-box I fit in to is still "Single, never married". That just doesn't seem fair.
Since then, I've had good days and bad days, lonely days and shite days, days when "normal" seemed possible and days when all I could do was hide from the whole wide world. They tell me it's normal and to be expected and stuff but there are still times when none of that seems to count. One of the worst things at the moment is that I can't pray properly. God as healer? I'm sorry but I can't trust those words at the moment. I asked him to heal Gav and He didn't. .I've been given a lot of His strength over the past few months and I can ask for help for other people but I struggle to pray for myself. It's horrible really.
I was going to witter on some more but it's nearly 2am and I have to be at work in the morning.
to be continued
