Tag: loss

Tick tock

Cushioning the weakness within on those lonely nights she embraces her pillow. Smuggles it under the blankets to feel warmth. Hugs it close creating the illusion of love once held in the same measures. There’s no room for pain. Or tears. The bulk of him still weighs her down. Collapses her breath. Dulls her pulse. Heightens her senses. Tick-Tock. Tick-Tock. Damn clock. The quilt is heavy. Shrouds her in darkness; covers the lie she creates every night. He’s not there. Not really. Subconsciously she knows he never was there. Not really. Now asleep; the dreams she had in waking hours can come alive. She embraces the ‘him’ she had hoped he would be. The pillow falls to the ground cold and unwanted. Awake in the morning. Without him. No shroud; she too is cold and unwanted. 

She embraces nothing.

Lola

I wrote this following piece in December 2020, more than anything I wrote it for me, I never shared it. For reasons I’ll explain later, I’m posting it today…

It’s a year to the day. If it was any other year I’d do the usual, where has the time gone speech. But really, where has the year gone?

Day after day sat on the sofa, watching the news, waiting for updates, fearing the worst, hoping for the best. But seriously, how has a year passed?

Time should have slowed down, it feels appropriate for the world to stop spinning when you are grieving. That the whole world will acknowledge your pain. The loss. The despair.

Lola was our dog. Our family. Our unconditionally loving friend.

The cats scattered everytime the doorbell went because Lola would bark and run through the house like a charging bull.

There was a dirty, slobbery, biscuit mark left by her muzzle on the front door. It was about a foot up from the floor, on the edge of the door and inside the frame, it was brown and sticky and gross. It was made everytime we came home and didn’t, by her standards, open the door fast enough. She’d squeeze that big ol’ head through the gap to get at us quicker. We were home. She was happy.

Her tip tapping across the tiled floors when dinner was seconds away from being hers. Her teddy that she chased up and down our garden. Never ripped or torn but carried back soaked with drool. Her bandana that made her look badass. Her youthful looks that despite her age had people asking if the figure in years was actually how old she was in months. Her loving looks at my husband. Her special hugs, sitting straight back into our arms, bobbing her paw if we stopped scratching her white chest. Her twisted claw, that never grew back quite right, after too many wild moments over the fields. Her loud, hurried crunching noises at her bowl and the fact she guzzled a whole bowl of water in seconds and trailed it through the house afterwards. Her legs kicking when chasing those dream rabbits and the hilarious snoring that caught us muting the TV to sit and laugh silently and deeply.

Her contentment at us being home.

I miss it all. I miss her. We miss her. The cats miss her. Everybody does. Why are there no other words to describe this pain. I’m not even questioning it. I’m demanding to know why there are no other words to describe this anguish. This loss. This grief. It’s a weight that holds you down. Yet without it, I fear she’s gone entirely. When the grief doesn’t catch you off guard and batter you and bruise you does it mean you have forgotten her? If love was enough, death would never have come.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, I feel guilty everyday for the times I yelled for the mess, for the noise. It is my punishment now to live with such a void. The silence in the room. No snoring. The ticking clock. No barking. The clean kitchen. No dribble.

A part of us died that day. It’s like taking a breath and never really feeling that deep breath of calm. Your lungs expand but it’s half arsed. It’s the tight, cold feeling inside the middle of your chest. It’s the shaking of your whole body when you cry those loud animalistic sobs. The sound issued from your mouth as your lungs fight to push the breath out despite your mind being overcome with grief. Your eyes expelling tear after tear with the pain of what was and now isn’t. It’s her not being here. And it’s the thought that there is no rainbow where she waits for us. There is no after where she runs. There is nothing. There’s only the sucking in of breath as you feel your insides go into shock. Life stands still.

And yet, it doesn’t, everything carries on. No one sees the destruction that is your mind and others ask when another will come. Angry. That makes me angry. Maybe it’s the process. That the anger will turn to hope. But right now, no. Tomorrow, no. A week, a month, no. No.

Her smell is gone from her collar. Her mark is gone from our door. The cats are settled in the silence.

And now in May 2022, reading that back, it’s unchanged. The pain is as fresh as ever. But it’s in the background. Like a scar. It’s present and it’ll never heal fully. It’s a reminder of what was.

This morning on my way to work, a huge truck passed, and from the passenger window a collie dog was barking at each car it passed. Laughter erupted from me so naturally that I couldn’t stop. They do that. These furry angels. They possess such a beautiful quality that lights up your life that it’s hard to let anything else darken your day. It’s not being able to tell them we love them in the conventional way that makes it so hard to say goodbye. To tell them they were so much more than they realised.

There is a psych analogy that says, ‘ Grief is like a box with a ball in it and a pain button on one side. In the early stages, the ball is very big. You cannot move the box without it frequently hitting the pain button. It rattles around on its own in there and hits the button over and over again, sometimes so much that it feels like you can’t stop it – you can’t control it – it just keeps hurting. But as time goes on, the ball gets smaller. It doesn’t disappear completely and when it hits the pain button, it’s just as intense, but generally, it is easier to get through each day.’

I want you, my lovely reader, to know that grief is natural, it’s not to be ashamed of and it’s not something to be understood. It’s a process. And it’s different for everyone. I truly believe when we lose a pet friend, it’s a different kind of grief, you don’t have words to exchange, only the hope that they know. That you gave them enough to know. I know all too well how hard it is to explain how you feel to someone who doesn’t understand. Perhaps they’ve never had a pet pal and can’t sympathise. It can be a lonely place. I’ve lost so many dear pet friends, our family furries, and it doesn’t get easier. And why should it. They add to our life in such a way without demanding anything back. Please know, you are not alone. It is the price we pay for the love we feel so deeply.

I miss her everyday. Still. It’s getting easier to think of giving a rescue dog a home. I not only miss her and the joy she brought, but I miss the joy of a dog. The unrelenting joy. But the guilt and feeling of replacing her still pushes the thought away. I hope one day we will because the scar she left behind is beautiful and will live forever. She’s still here. Wherever I go. A part of my make up. In the story of my life. Always.

Validate you

When I get together with friends, I’ll always have news to catch up on. That’s the way it works right? Work. Family life. Love. Loss. The bad and the good. More often than not, I have a small collection of stories I have to share. As the saying goes, a problem shared is a problem halved. Joy that is spread, just multiplies that joy in my opinion. Not only does getting together with loved ones entertain the soul it cools a boiling pot of emotion. When I find myself ready to tell my story to friends, I have a small voice in my head telling me that I’m self-indulging in their kind words, hugs and nods of understanding. The small voice grows louder as I approach their front door, as I accept a cup of tea and it even starts screaming as soon as someone says, ‘And how are you?’. I often wonder if my tales are important to tell. Why should my problems and woes command their attention when their problems should go first, or be spoken louder or longer than my own?

During the pandemic, during its most terrible and confusing moments, I felt unable to share how very bad my anxiety had gotten. People were dying, people were grieving, kept apart for months at a time wondering when and if they’d see their loved ones again. How did brain rattling anxiety compare? I felt anxious about catching covid, I worried about my loved ones and the world became a very scary place. I honestly thought people would band together more, I sometimes thought of the stories from WW1 and 2, about milkmen that still delivered to houses that were more rubble than homes. In such big ways, people did so much to help others, the children in the school playground singing loud so the nursing home residents next door didn’t feel alone is just one amazing example. This shouldn’t be dimmed by the few that were selfish and were fighting against the rules. But they were out there, and when you have anxiety you’ll often see the one bad person in a crowd of amazing people. 

It’s all too easy to be consumed by how personal feelings affect us when we are shut inside our own homes with no view of the outside world. It is all too easy to text someone and try to convey feelings, make a phone call and try to explain, but ultimately it’s when a friend is in front of you when the mask may slip and it becomes all too obvious that there’s more to the story. Unfiltered, unshrouded truth. And yet there’s a barrier to be found when you feel that your problems are tiny compared to others. Invalidation of feelings.

It was during 2021 that I started exploring the concept of how invalidating your own feelings can be dramatically damaging to your mental health. The most selfish way of explaining it is this: only you feel how you feel, it is happening to you and no one else. You can’t feel how someone else feels and vice versa. 

The more rounded way of describing this is likening it to a physical injury. A papercut is tiny. It slices the skin in an irritating way and stops hurting almost as fast as it happened. Now imagine the first time you got a papercut, you’d think what the actual hell was that! Now imagine the hundredth time, maybe you shrug it off, maybe you don’t. Maybe you catch it later on, snagging it and reminding you of the irritation. Maybe you forget about it and cook dinner and get some lemon, chilli, salt in it. Each situation produces a different response, from different people. Some people are more thick skinned than others and some people bleed like from a tap. 

A closer look at pain, makes me think of pain management in hospitals. They don’t see someone rolled up on a stretcher with a broken leg and categorise it as a 5/10. They ask each person. ‘On a scale of 1-10, how is your pain?’ This is down to how differently each patient can handle pain. If you were to punch me right now, I’d cry, from shock, from a new trauma and then the pain. If you were to punch Mr W, well first you’d have to run and second he’d shrug it off. We have vastly different histories when it comes to that kind of treatment. So why is it more acceptable in society to understand an individual’s tolerance to pain and not understand someone’s sensitivity to their own mental health?

I’ll say this, the pandemic opened up conversations about mental health and for that I am grateful. I’ll also be one of the first to tell anyone out there that their feelings no matter what. Invalidating your own feelings in favour of someone else does not push your feelings aside and out of the way, it pushes them down where they’ll rise to the surface again to harm you once more. It is compassion that dictates the invalidation we put upon ourselves. Where this can be a kindness to others you are doing damage to yourself. And it needs to stop. Once you start to look on others with more kindness than yourself, pushing the nurturing smile to your face and the care into your eyes, you are taking it away from yourself. Believe it or not, you have enough in you to care for both yourself and others. By looking after yourself and validating YOU, you’ll find yourself a mentally stronger person and in a perfect position to be stronger for others. Win win, right?

I know there is so much pain in this world, so much lost, so much feared and felt. I hope we learn to love as fiercely as ever. To protect. To nourish. To heal. Starting with ourselves first. Giving ourselves the changes we deserve. That the world deserves. You’ll never know how much you can change the world, until you change your world. Protect your mind. Nourish your feelings. Heal your heavy heart. Validate you. 

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Photo by Dave Watson

Please check out his work on https://www.instagram.com/davewatson_uk/ or at https://davewatson1980.picfair.com/