Monday 22 October 2012

Dear Paul

It has been a while coming but today feels like the right time to write a final post, officially as it were as I have hardly posted at all in the last three years. I thought I should let you know first of my decision to wrap this up. There have been times where the suggestion of moving on would be met with fury inside. Why do I want to fucking move on, doesn’t that mean I am trying to forget you? I like this pain; it is familiar and comforting and I can consistently hate and rage against it. But then there comes a time when the raging subsides a little and you realise you will probably never move on in the way you thought. You don’t wake up and it’s over, you don’t sidestep grief and pain but the relentless waves ease and rather than moving on you learn to live with the ebbing and flowing.

Three years? Yes it is three years since you left us. You would think anniversaries get better with time but they actually just accentuate the time rolling out without you. In the bad old days this blog kept me alive, kept me focussed on the fight being something that spread further than our lives .I spent so many nights alone, waiting for a miracle while the children slept and you lay in your hospital bed fighting for your life with all you had. Now I see those dark nights from the outside, looking down at myself sitting shadowed but for the electric glow of the screen. Sometimes I would just sit there, immobile and entranced, then something would trigger a thought and I would write. Sometimes I would be hunched and sobbing, sometimes I was alert and defiant,  but I always wrote the words in the hope you would read them too from your high up room and sometimes you did and I suppose I am hoping you might be doing that again tonight.

I remember one of the first nights I spent with you in the hospital. The diagnosis was new. The drugs were the first to course through your veins and you were sick with them quickly. You slept and the room up there on the 13th floor was calm, I lay with you under a dim light and the twinkles of London were reflected in the glass. I remember thinking;

‘Once we were part of those twinkles, we were the soul and heart of those lights, we danced in them till dawn broke and daylight swept us home. This cannot be it. This cannot be our lives looking down on the beginnings of things and thinking they might end. This is not what we planned’.
But now I know that the life you plan is not the one you end up with.

And I was cynical then that the hand we had been dealt had destroyed any hope, but I know now that it’s gossamer threads had lingered beyond your death. Hope I could make it through funerals and gloomy blooms and nights of tears and too much wine. Hope I could run and cook and still read a story to Cassidy and Kitty with fun and laughter and that I would not simply die one day of a broken heart. Because it is sore.  Grief is fucking sore. Did you know your heart can actually ache with the pain of loss? Who knew?

There are many things I wish. I wish I did not see your light disappear in front of my eyes.  I wish I had never seen the darkness take their blue, take the eyes that had had reprimanded me, captured and consoled me. Those eyes, those eyes, the ones your son has now.  The eyes I like to think blossomed in my presence.  I wish many things but I never wish I did not know you, meet you and love you.

It can be very hard to see any positives in this journey at times, I say that as if I have come to an end somehow. But things are never that cut and dried. What I think I mean is the positive thing is we are here, we have survived, a little war torn and battle worn, but we are here. Life does march on despite everything and I want you to know we have achieved what you would be most proud of; laughter and light. But there has to come a time when a line is drawn. You would agree I am sure. So this is the line under the T – Cell chronicles because that journey is well and truly over and if there is one thing you taught me in your death, it is how to say goodbye with dignity.

All my love always and forever H x