Because of the bereavement, I’m still having difficulty concentrating on anything, and this has very odd effects if you are sat at home, as I am.
I can’t do anything work related, or indeed anything leisure related either. I just don’t want to. It helps if I make myself go out and post a parcel (as I did this afternoon — a copy of the Eusebius book), but otherwise I just sit here. I’ve no energy. I don’t care about my projects at all. Things that are ordinarily of interest leave me cold. I can’t read many books at all.
It doesn’t help that it’s cold out with snow threatened. That doesn’t motivate me to go and see friends who knew her. Not when I might be stuck in a snowdrift.
There’s nothing for me to do, no-one to talk to, and it’s rather like being on Mars. Very spacey-feeling.
The sunlight drifts through the window, but I don’t care. Ordinarily I would travel out somewhere, but I don’t care enough to do so.
It seems to be important to make sure you eat properly. I don’t seem to be hungry a lot of the time. But you feel a lot more upset if you feel tired or haven’t eaten, it seems. So … food must be consumed.
I find that things are getting deferred that I ordinarily would deal with immediately.
I can’t listen to sad songs, and indeed what I can listen to is somewhat limited.
I get waves of pain, lasting 1-3 minutes, in which I can do nothing except walk around the house, saying her name and just hurting. Then it goes. At other times I just feel flat. The pain has been increasing for a while, curiously, but my feeling is that the underlying trend is upward.
It has helped a lot to get a short book on bereavement. It indicates some of what I can expect, which is rather helpful.
It’s also helped to have a set of photographs of her, which I begged from people who knew her at college. It’s only a few, but that’s probably all there ever were; there are none at all of me from my college days, not that I recall. You didn’t think of it, in those halcyon days. You would always be young, you thought. Of course seeing the photos brings pain, but it is a good pain.
I took the digital images — scanned – down to Boots on a memory stick and had them printed out on the 1 hr service, and they came out fine. I’ve looked at them a lot.
Talking to some people helps too. I have had some awful regrets; but talking to a college friend, it seems he was no more successful at that age with the girls than I was, and he tried a lot harder! So I am freed from wondering what would have happened if I had tried harder, and that does help.
The main thing seems to be to construct a narrative of her life, to come to terms with it, and to accept that she had a good life and is gone, but that I shall see her again. How the unbelievers manage without that last bit I do not know.
All very weird, this stuff. God, very kindly, has given me space to grieve, time when I don’t have to be working. Praise Him.