Going in circles - two years on..

“For in grief nothing "stays put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?

But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?

How often -- will it be for always? -- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss till this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time.” 
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed


Today is a beautiful spring day.  Still crisp; but bathed in a hazy sunshine and topped by the brightest blue sky.  I love the sky.  Blue -  Chloe's favourite colour.

My pain sharpens, becomes more jagged, on days like today.  Daffodils spring to life; and my eyes rest on my young daughter's picture.  My young daughter who is dead.  So final.  So without any hope at all.  So unlike those daffodils - the symbol of spring.

 The sunshine  makes the enormity of the loss so much clearer.  It is the contrast; I think.

Chloe died two years, one month and two days ago.  It seems like yesterday; it seems like a lifetime ago.

"for in grief; nothing stays put".

And that's what I am learning.  One moves a little forward, one tastes a little hope, one almost feels fleeting moments of  - dare I say - "happiness".  But not for long; never for long.  The sadness creeps back.  A friend once wrote to me "grief is like being run over by a truck.  It then reverses and runs you over again and again".  

How very true.

But I don't write to depress.  I write to share.   Reading C.S. Lewis A Grief Observed is a beautiful experience.  The words speak to my battered soul and whisper "you are not alone".  Through them I feel a connection with another being who has survived.  Despite the most viscous of all losses; he walked, he talked, he lived.

And so do I; although is some kind of weird haziness of a life.  A life torn apart; a life missing a centre. " While there's life, there is hope." says Stephen Hawking.  And I know that he is right.  Despite having plunged the deepest depths of despair; I can still appreciate a sunny day.  If somebody had told me I would live after my child had died I would never have believed it.  

Does time heal? I'm really not sure.  Some things feel worse.  I find it impossible to look at baby photos of Chloe; to watch any video of her; to touch the huge piles of her clothes I have stored in many many boxes.  It just hurts way too much.  

I believe totally that one must feel the grief; sit with it; talk about it and roar in anger at the utter unfairness of fate.  And when that is done; do it all over again and again and again.  The real danger lies in packaging up the grief in a box, in a room, in a place and hiding away.  That is the road to nowhere. 

Maybe I will never look at those photos and that is only because my daughter mattered so very much to me. But I will keep trying to live; trying to love; trying to survive.   And I thank all of my precious friends and family who walk beside me with all of my heart.