No more numbers. Taking it personally.

Enough numbers already! Ten years since I last tried therapy and it didn't go so well. Tip: don't have "therapy" with a non-accredited counsellor of the opposite sex. Really. Ever.

So (it's been ten years) since I last tried to unravel some knots and here I am again. Because I'm still hitting my head against the same walls. Still feeling like a failure. Still thinking there's something wrong with me. 

So, on Tuesdays it's an hour of just me and another woman in a cream room with a box of tissues to hand. Talking... mumbling, purging, admitting, dreaming, saying, stating, discovering, deciding, realising... Going over the same things and suddenly, unexpectedly taking what seem like complete tangents. 

In the midst of all this, realising one very stark fact. That I took my father's suicide personally. Which sounds ridiculous. Of course I did... He was my Dad and he chose to die (THEREFORE) I was not worth being here for. And at the same time, how could I? It was his life to take. It was nothing to do with me, it was all to do with him. That second argument still sounds so much less convincing.

I'm a mother now. I know what it means to have a child and how important I am for her. I don't want to pass this on. I know it's my responsibility to make sure it ends here. At the same time, feeling parental love makes it harder to understand. Maybe I have to accept that I will never understand.

 

14. New Year, further on still

It's mainly time that helps with grief - at least, that's what I've found. 

But sometimes we get stuck and can't grieve and then time becomes irrelevant - things go on hold and we grow older, many things in our lives change, but part of us - part of what happened, of our grief - is frozen in time. The longer it waits there, ignored, banished, frozen out, the greater a shadow it casts. Even this shadow can be ignored, it mixes with the palette of our everyday life, muting the colours, touching every corner in a way that can be so subtle that we start to accept that our life is simply a little duller than it might be, somehow there is less life, less light. But that's OK. Better than looking at what's casting the shadow, surely better than touching the cold?

How to unfreeze that grief when it is so terrifying? How to melt away the shadow and let vibrancy in? 

You are stronger than you think.

You have already survived the worst.

You must believe you can do it. You can.

13. Unlucky for Some

Dad was born on the 13th of August. Whether we believe it's down to fate, reincarnation, the "inifinite's" plan or just plain luck, some of us do draw the long straw with our families and some of us really don't - and there must be millions in the middle, who have an OK time of it - some things are tough, but generally they aren't too bad... But for those who get a short straw, the effects can be terrible and last years and years. Generations even.
I recently saw a picture of my grandad, my father's father, taken when he was in his 20's. Now I can laugh at his moustache and slightly scary mafia demeanour, but he was a pretty intimidating character. He ran away with a married woman and they had my dad in Scotland, out of wedlock - scandalous - August 13th, 1946. My dad was his only son. My grandmother (became?) a manic depressive, or "bi-polar" as they call it now. Maybe it was the fallout from leaving her husband and daughter and handing her life over to my grandad. Or maybe she would have been that way anyway, who know. I do know that she ran away when my father was about 6 and also that she tried to kill herself in the family home, slitting her wrists in the bath. My grandfather found her I think. So I sometimes wonder if my father really stood a chance. If I think of him, not as the man who was my father, but as the boy who was my grandad and grandmother's son, I feel terribly sad and sorry for him. As Philip Larkin said... "They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad...". And although I feel we should all take responsibility for our lives, I know, for certain, that it wasn't all his fault. I know that what I have had to live through began before my father was even born... although when exactly, I can't say. But I do know one thing for certain - there was more than one finger on that trigger.