Good Grief 353

It all feels rather unrelenting.
Last week’s sort out set the scene.
Then the car.
Then hearing that a work colleague’s wife had died and rembering the utter awfulness of those appalling early days of this Dantean journey.
The saturating heaviness of work and a bit of conflict thrown in today.
I avoided the team meeting and went up to the admin office with chocolate to share with some more familiar and friendlier faces of older colleagues. I wanted to leave a card for the colleague (even though these condolence cards drop like lead and I hated them ... and yet I’ve kept them - such conflicted things and feelings).

And then I came home with the plan of holding out ...one more day to go to the end of the week.

There was an email waiting for me via my brother regarding the finalising of the probate for mum and dad. Why does it come as such a blow? It’s been going on for all this time.
We get used to these little limbos and think we’ve got used to the idea and then along comes another thumping great whack, a body blow that you know is there but still manages to come with all the force that you feel it can’t possibly have because you already know it exists...as if that should somehow stop it carrying force. ‘I can see that coming straight for me so i won’t feel it’. Where does that little bit of absurdity come from?

What great sadness I feel for them both. An inarticulate sadness.

I was remembering going to the funeral of the very, very dear friend of my first partner. He had been so kind and so supportive after my partner died. He in turn died years later and it was after I had married P. P and I went to his funeral together. It was a very small funeral. Only the few remaining family and the two of us. I sobbed uncontrollably and felt a little embarrassed but I realise that it was the only time that I have ever had someone right by me, someone there to hold me up and to pick me up and stay by me. It was okay to feel the full overwhelming, knock you off your feet, incapacitation of grief and to know someone was right by me.
Every other grief, including P’s now of course, has been so deeply solitary.