Journal

It’s been some time since I last wrote in my journal and the last few months have involved a lot of thinking and a lot of decision making. Those of us here have gone through a traumatic event that has changed the course of our lives forever. For me, this has shattered my very picture of the world. Certain beliefs no longer seem true and many goals are no longer important.

Strangely though, I now feel in some ways much stronger and have developed a new and different confidence in myself and my capacities – if I can survive this – the worst thing that could happen already has -  what can I now do to go on with my life?  I have greater feelings of compassion, I’ve learned to appreciate anew what I have, especially the small things in life that I maybe used to take for granted. 

Slowly I’ve tried to make some sense of life as it is now and rebuild it to reflect how it now is, my views of it and even my views of the “new me”. What’s crucial is my attitude towards my new life as that’s all I can control. I am a different person now. I don’t worry as much about what seem to be trivial things that ultimately don’t really matter that much. I have a different sense of what’s really important in life – my family, my health, my friends etc. I’m less materialistic now, valuing experiences not things. I can just imagine Pam telling me, “I told you so” and smiling. She always had a more down-to-earth approach and sureness about what really mattered. It saddens me to realise that it’s taken her death to get me to understand this fully but I try not to have too many regrets. I now regret less generally and try to focus on the things I have to be grateful for in life.

 I realise I can never become who I once was, only who I want to become and that this is solely down to me and the choices I make but they have to be choices that are feasible, realistic and attainable. It’s now nearly four years since Pam first became ill, over two and a half years since she died and I just don’t feel I can leave my life on hold any more. Well, I suppose I can do but it is a choice I make and I’d rather try to push on and try to make as much of my life as I can. I know only too well that Pam would want me to be happy; it’s all I would have wanted for her if our roles had been reversed.

Happiness won’t be life how it once was but it can be something different. Life isn’t either happiness or sadness but an inevitable mixture of both and I think I can cope with that now. I don’t have any wild ambitions for my future. Outwardly my life hasn’t changed much but mentally and emotionally I am now a different person. I can cope with the bitter sweet moments of life. I can look back with some sadness but some comfort and affection also. I can push myself to be more positive and optimistic. I still have those deeply sad moments and days but I can now accept those and also remind myself of all the good things in life also and the things I can be grateful for. Work will continue to keep me busy for the foreseeable future until I retire. I’ll keep travelling and seeing new places. I could do with finding and developing a wider social network but that may come in time.  

I now feel I’m ready to sell this house and move to a new place, a place that’s mine and not just a memorial to the past – that memorial’s in my heart and I’ll take that with me. It was over two years before I even touched anything of Pam’s or even anything in the house. I now realise that most of it is just “stuff”, random, chance, serendipity – or whatever you want to call it. I’ve started to de-clutter, to sort things out as a prelude to getting the house up for sale. Not great timing I admit with the economy as it is but it will take as long as it takes and that’s okay.

What really matters now is my state of mind and that is much changed. I now have much more peace and calm in my life and hopefully that will continue.  DS has been a huge part of my life and the support and friendship I have found here has helped enormously to get me to where I am today. Most of the people I met here nearly two and a half years ago now rarely or ever come here anymore and that’s great if it’s right for them. I still enjoy keeping in touch with the friends I have made here. I still find comfort and support on the “widows and widowers” group and plan to continue to use that. I think I will remove myself from the “bereavement” group– it just feels like the right thing to do now.  

It’s all in the mind really and my mind is in a different place now. Many of us here have achieved so much over the last few years. Probably more than we could ever imagine. I suspect we’ve much to be proud of. We’ve proved to ourselves, if no one else, that we can survive, we can make it through and we can slowly build our “new lives” and our “new selves” and if anyone had told me that back in March 2007 I simply wouldn’t have believed them.   

I’ve just returned from a week away with both my kids and during the week it was my 55th birthday and what would have been our 32nd anniversary on the same day, and also my son’s 21st birthday.  Another round of those difficult “special” days  but a week of a lot of thinking about where I’m up to and where I’m going.

A couple of things I’ve read in recent weeks have set me thinking a great deal about the future. So far, for the last 2 years 5 months, I’ve been trying to keep busy and avoid thinking about the future, the future I didn’t plan on having nor the one I particularly want but it is the future I am now facing. I read in a book a character describing life as 1000 months (our average lifespan now) and calculated I’ve already now had 660 of those and as we all know here there are many of us who never get those 1000 months. I’ve spent the last 29 months deeply grieving Pam’s death and I began thinking whether I am to spend the rest of my months deep in that grief. The more I thought the more I came to the conclusion that it would be my decision how the next maybe, 300 or so, months go. As each month goes by it will never be there again and I realise I have to accept some responsibility for shaping however long I have in life. I do believe this life is all we have and it is up to me to make what I want of it.

Just before I went away, I read a discussion posting on the widows and widowers support group put on by a friend of mine here that talked about  wanting to live life and have some happiness in life again and learning to live life without our loved one. This really struck a chord with me and I’ve been thinking a lot about this for the last few weeks. I miss Pam terribly and would still give anything to have our life together back again. But I also know that this is not to be and never will be. Last week on my birthday, we had a lovely meal in a beautiful place, after which we walked alongside an Alpine lake in the warm evening and listened to a French Canadian folk group playing on an open-air stage overlooking the lake. We had a few beers and generally had a wonderful evening. I did actually feel very happy and thought a lot about the past, the things Pam and I had done over the years and how much she would have loved that place and that evening. For perhaps the first time the memories filled me with warmth and comfort alongside the sadness and maybe for the first time I realized that life can be so sweet and so sad all at the same time.I think I now understand that you don’t get over sadness, you work your way right to the core of it to fully come to terms with it. Before Pam died I never knew how deep and raw sadness could be, how lost and alone I could feel but now I do and I think I can now learn to live with those feelings as I try to get to know the new me and develop the new life I now have.

I’ve avoided facing the future but am beginning to think it is something I have to face up to and the answers are in my hands. I feel I now need some sort of plan to try to begin to make some sense of the future. We never really had a detailed plan for the future but it all seemed set out how we would move towards retirement and enjoy out time together as the kids grew up and moved away. I have five years to go before I can retire. My son has one more year at university, so that’s the next hurdle. Once he’s finished I think I need to sell this house and move to somewhere smaller to stop rattling round this big house and spending so much on what is only bricks and mortar. We’ve had many happy years here but I can take the memories with me as I build a new life in a new place. In a couple of years I may cut down work to part-time to move towards retirement and that may help to force me to find other things to do with my life. I plan to keep travelling as long as I’m able and can afford to do so as I feel I need to experience new places and new people and trust to luck that I can find new things to do with my life. I know I could just carry on as I have done, looking inwards and struggling through each day, each month. I could sit here and turn into a “grumpy old man”, although I can here Pam telling me I’ve always been one of those!! I still feel that it’s maybe the fear and guilt holding me back and I still struggle in coming to terms with those feelings. I do feel guilty when I enjoy something or somewhere, knowing that Pam can’t share this with me but I also know that she would want me to be as happy as possible and do the things we’d planned to do together. She certainly wouldn’t begrudge me those things, so why should I? I still need to work some more on that one.

So maybe I’m beginning to turn some sort of corner on this journey and develop some sort of new optimism and realization that my future is mine to shape. As we all know now, we certainly don’t know what tomorrow may hold but either we have to try to shape our tomorrows or we just give up and I don’t think that’s the option I want to take.

An old friend of mine here on DS sent me two quotes a long time ago about happiness that at the time I couldn’t relate to but maybe now I can. She wrote, “When one door of happiness closes another opens but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us” (Helen Keeler). Perhaps for the first time I’ve seen that other door. I just need to work out how to go through it now. She also wrote, “The grand essentials of happiness are something to do, something to love and something to hope for”. I think perhaps I’m ready to try to work out what those things are for me now.

I’m sure I will have set-backs, days of darkness again but I’ve got to believe I can get through those days and try to remain as optimistic as I can do about the future, especially knowing the support I can call on from my friends here on DS. I know there will always be part of me missing now that Pam has died and I’m not expecting the future to be easy but I have to try to take some control of whatever’s left of my life.

I’ll let you know how things progress but I wish you all as much happiness as possible in the future.