It’s that niggling worry at the back of your mind you don’t talk about. The nightmares you have about death and dying. You try to imagine what it will feel like if (when?) something really bad happens to you.
I believe that we should always remind our family and friends how much we love them, but in the end, they make their own decisions.
It is World Suicide Prevention Day today and I feel obliged to write something deep and insightful to make my husband’s death mean something.
It’s a curious kind of survivors’ guilt. Not the kind that makes me feel guilty for still being alive when someone else is dead, but the kind that makes me feel bad for not feeling bad.
In my imagination I am lying in bed with Duckfish, asleep, in my old flat around the corner from here. It is 3am. An unusual sound wakes me. I see a familiar figure standing at the end of the bed. He is holding a gun.
I have never been pregnant, never had morning sickness, never breastfed and never held my own baby. There is no one on this earth who has my genetic legacy.
I made you into the person I wanted you to be, without taking into account you might be someone completely different.
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” ― Mary Oliver
Eighteen years ago on 11 June 1994 I walked down the aisle and married the man I left sixteen years later.
I am not asking you to like, want or enjoy uncomfortable feelings. In fact, let’s get rid of the whole acceptance word altogether (here and in the self-love world as well). Let’s make room for uncomfortable feelings instead.
It’s when we get stuck in our head and what we’re thinking diminishes our experiences of the present moment that there’s a problem. Ruminating about past event or predicting future calamities can also trigger painful emotions that make us feel like shit.
Today is my half birthday. I am forty-seven and a half today. I celebrate a half birthday on April 16 because it helps me get through April 15 which is the anniversary of my husband’s suicide.
April – It begins with an anniversary — our first date was two years ago today. But when this day arrives, I know that ten days later it will be the anniversary of the day that changed everything.
