Weeks and weeks of being alone with my thoughts, thoughts are always running through my head, thoughts that always include Seth, he is never far from my thoughts.
How could he fail to be in my thoughts?
Normally at this time of year I am busy travelling, working, doing voluntary work, distracted a little by the hub bub of “normal” life. Now there is a new normal; its socially distanced, its solitary, it leaves you with your own company and there really is nowhere to escape your own thoughts.
Being alone with your thoughts can be tough, I know because I have had six years of it, but I have never been so alone with my thoughts as now. Not at any point during six years of the most profound grief. Grief that dominates your thoughts, grief for Seth who died, grief about all the possibilities in your shared futures, possibilities that are gone, grief for the loss of the person you were and grief about the person you have become.
Grief has become my constant compassion. It doesn’t lessen it just changes; it never goes away, but sometimes it subsides just a little so that it doesn’t consume you. Then suddenly from nowhere the grief roars back in, it takes centre stage, it dominates, it consumes, it subsumes the person that you are, it shakes the essence of the person you have become, the person that you really don’t want to be. Most of all grief is just so tiring, it is relentless, it is exhausting, it tests your resilience, it fogs your mind, it tests the core of your being and it just never stops draining your energy.
Since the 13th May I have been reliving the memory of each of those heart-breaking days from Seth’s diagnosis to his death in 2014.
Today 14th June is the anniversary of the saddest day of my life. The day when the worst possible thing that could happen to me …..happened, a day etched in my heart forever.
A day that would change EVERYTHING and FOREVER.
My enforced isolation has been tough, it forced me to embrace my grief in way that would not have happened if there had not been the pandemic. The cathartic nature of 33 days of intense pain, relentless distress and life sapping tiredness has now come to end, and the date of the anniversary of Seth’s death always seems to release me from the intensity of the most heart-breaking of memories. It usually gives me the renewed energy of another year with plans to build Seth’s Legacy I am hoping that this year it will do the same thing.
By coincidence, this week I listened to a podcast where they talked about the concept of mature hope. I am hoping that my hope has matured in this pandemic and that I can come to accept the future but today as always……Seth I will love you with all my heart forever
