JAX WORLD: BLOG 273 - Distractions

“Someday I'll forget the color of your eyes, the sound of your voice will be unfamiliar. Someday I'll forget that I once loved you, the feelings will have faded, someday I'll forget." Neil Gaiman

Amazing … I forget things so quickly.

It occurred to me over the past few days that I have no idea how his voice sounded! How can that be... he's only been dead less than 40 days!

But it's gone. I can't recall it at all.I hear the words he used to say often... but I've been noticing lately it's my voice I hear in my head... like an actress reading from a script. His voice is lost to me. Gone. I've certainly forgotten it.

And that is just only one of the nuances of the recovery process. You start forgetting. You start being sucked back into life because life demand that you have to take part and it will find its way to make you start letting go.

I no longer miss the coupley things. I have slotted back into singleton mode with remarkable ease. The lack of queues for the bathroom, the return of mushrooms to the menus, the freedom to watch rubbish TV... it all slotted back in smoothly. Once again I can make forward plans without consultation, and I'm back sleeping in the middle of the bed - turning off the lights because I'm ready to sleep and rising at any hour I choose.

How quickly all that time together fades from my reality and becomes foggy and distant like a dream. I no longer feel connected to that part of my life. It almost feels like something that happened to someone else.

Okay... it still has the power to reduce me to tears with very little notice, but it is less ever present than it was even two weeks ago. I think I am finding a place to deposit the grief and get on with getting on.

I was prepared for the fact that as time passes, the fierce pain of early bereavement begins to fade. The depression lessens and it is possible to think about other things and even to look again to the future. But I didn't expect the process to be on going from the start... I thought it would just turn up wrapped in a safe little parcel in about a years time called "You are so over this now", I didn't think the healing would be on going.

Obviously I am not there yet... lets face facts it really was not an awful long time ago... I'm still counting in days.. but it's amazing how you can feel the changes as they unroll.

The sense of having lost a part of oneself never goes away entirely. but I am beginning to feel that one day it may be possible to feel whole again, even though a vital part of me will always be missing. Though even with that said I often find myself talking as if he is still here with me.

The depression hasn't cleared that's for sure, but my sleep has improved and my energy seems somewhere around normal. I think I may be skirting on the outer rims of letting-go and the fates have ensured that I have no other choice but to start a new sort of life .

The death came alongside some major life changes and they didn't take a break just because I was bereaved. You don't always get to schedule these things in. And yet the distraction these massive tasks offer is not all bad.

House shopping has been a huge distraction, only Manhattan can compete with London for a stupid over blown prices and fees. Monthly rents - payable per calendar month are simply astronomical! Basic studenty starter pads with barely 2 bedrooms a living area and somewhere to cook and poo seem to command almost a thousand pounds ($1651) per month...woodchip wallpaper and 70's bathroom fittings an all! Once you find somewhere with a 21st century kitchen, decent bathroom suite and neutral décor.... the price leaps to a grand and a half ($2475) and again you will only get two bedrooms if you are lucky! Don't even bother to think of looking for somewhere with curb appeal... as that will cost you also! Then agents fees... £200 holding deposits, £55 per person reference fees and then a whopping £120 admin fee,,, and that's just for you registering your interest in a place! There is nothing that consumes more than the moral indignation that goes with being taken for a mug! Thus energy's have been dispensed circumventing the letting trap and talking directly to those with properties to let.

Of course the hunt for a big ticket gig to join all my little freelance tickets is much on the mind also … and I am delighted to say I few options now.... just a case of sorting the timing out. Looking for work is almost a full time job on its own , but it's a welcome thing to isolate and advertise what it is you actually do, and an even bigger joy to be invited to chat about it with folk who think they just may pay for you to do more of it. It’s been hard and yet so rewarding.

But it's a distraction... while taking my mind of my grief I've been moving towards laying the foundations of a new sort of life.

I can now look back on December and even earlier this month and see that I have travelled forward from the acute anguish the loss caused. It's a strange place where I am now... desperately trying to maintain the emotional bond while simultaneously living in the reality of the loss.

It means in real terms separating from not just him, but the unfulfilled plans we had and making resolutions of my own. (Hence that holding on).There are days when everything that we had doesn't seem past tense at all.

Then I realised... I cannot remember the sound of his voice, and realised that for all the holding on ...I am beginning to let go.