Being away, being Home, it feels like bleeding poison from a wound.
I spend most of my days still in some kind of fog…. I’m there, as Mum, but for anything else… I am on the outside, looking in.
It’s not a nice feeling. Sometimes I wonder if this is how Tony felt, just Before.
I think I’m OK. I marvel at myself sometimes, at what I’ve been through, and I’m amazed that I’m still able to act like a normal person.
But then I look at myself, at how disconnected I still I am, at how different I feel from the rest of the world. It occurs to me how much I think about dieing, and death, and I wonder if I’m normal at all.
I stood, two or three times, on a chair in my backyard. Stretched myself on my tippy toes.
So I could see what he saw, last. Before….
Me, I think. Me leaning down to scoop up in the Bump, who was standing in the back doorway, between Tony and I. I leant down to pick her up, I broke eye contact for a second…
And it was Over.
Some days, I wonder how close to pyschosis I am. Not so much, now I’m back Home… but especially when I was living in the Purple House that was not purpke anymore, but still felt purple.
My mind would snap at me, play tricks on me. I would see Tony from the corner of my eye.
It’s a relief to grieve. I feel like my mind finally started to wrap around this, seep it in.
Take the poison from my blood, and wrap it around my soul.
But I’m grieving, normally. I’m remembering Tony, and absorbing those memories, rather than pushing them away. I can talk about him now, think abiut him… approach his memory in conversation with my son, rather than the other way round.
I help him create a book of memories of his father, as we all struggle to forget the pyshicality of him. The space he no longer fills.
It’s easier, when we’re not filling that space too.
But it’s so hard, when he was so big and strong, and dependable. How can you not ache for the pyshical presence of someone who was more than twice your size?
In the days just after Tony died, in the days he was in the ICU, I felt him everywhere.
Things would happen, that were too much of a coincidence to be one. I felt him, there, I felt the shadow of his atoms, as he ran his hand down my face and kissed me goodbye.
Logically, my mind tells me that this is a socially acceptable borderline pyschosis. That this is what the mind does, when confronted with such suffocatin, shattering pain.
Surely that’s more than possible. The hormones released in the body during childbirth… the body’s own euphoria makers, to deal with the pain you go through. People with brain tumours report religious euphoria, brilliant visions of gods….
Surely, logically, this is the same? I asked my pyschiatrist- does this make me pyschotic? Does this make me crazy? Because I feel crazy.
No, she assured me. This is normal. Normal, acceptable. Healthy.
But then there other things… the ring in toaster. A message from a friend, which came from a pyschic, that used a phrase that only Tony would use, and made perfect sense to me…
Those kind of things… they make me wonder.
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