| 360 Being alone
30 October 09
The Great Oracle, aka my therapist, tells me that the essential thing we have to come to terms with, is being alone.
I have never been alone, apart from a short few months when I worked in the Transkei before I was married- when my loneliness crippled me. Luke always... |
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| 359 Funeral Processions
28 October 09
It's funny how your psyche protects you from really horrible stuff, until you're ready to deal with it.
Yesterday I was having my weekly massage and at the end I found myself telling her about how Luke died. How it felt as though his soul was so huge that moving... |
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| 27 October 2009
27 October 09
It's the 25th anniversary of the founding of the End Conscription Campaign this weekend.
25 years ago we'd just got married and moved to Oxford. We watched BBC news and saw footage that was never shown in South Africa. I remember watching the Trojan Horse attack in Landsdowne Road, where soldiers... |
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| 357 Resolution (hopefully)
24 October 09
This morning I woke up, and there was Luke lying behind me in bed, cuddling me, full of love.
And I understood.
He hid his shadow side because he was ashamed of it, and thought that if people saw it they would despise him.
When he got sick he couldn't keep... |
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| 23 October 2009
23 October 09
So today I met with Luke's therapist, to talk over our conflict. I left feeling soothed in one way, and frustrated in another.
I regained a sense that Luke loved me deeply. That was enormously helpful. But I also felt that nothing had changed, and that I hadn't made any... |
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| 20 October
20 October 09
Three months today that Luke died.
I still find it hard to grasp that he is gone forever. Most of the time I don't think about it. This week has been much much better.
I'm not buried in depression.
I think I'd got stuck last week in grief. Two things... |
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| 18 October: Brave Women
18 October 09
My friend came to see me today. She's the one whose partner is battling the same cancer that Luke had. I'll call her partner Kate.
When Luke's cancer reappeared in his pelvis, around his bladder, he was not given the option of more surgery. The surgeon made it clear that... |
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| 16 October Oxford
16 October 09
Luke loved living in Oxford. He was just happy, happy happy. He loved the long winter nights, working in the Bodleian library until 4.00 and coming out to find it was night already.
He loved patristics best - and studied under a Jesuit who was a world expert. I've forgotten... |
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| 351 Ghosties and Ghoulies and Long legged Beasties
15 October 09
Earlier this week I felt desperate. Then I did two things - I found a fabulous masseuse, who came to my house and beat the shit out of my tense neck muscles - and the rest of me as well. I didn't feel good straight away - and I shouted... |
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| 350
14 October 09
Being widowed feels like being in a very small boat on a very large sea, and the port has been lost. You can't land there anymore. You have to keep drifting, keep your boat afloat, trusting in the tides and currents and the workmanship of your boat.
At some point... |
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| 349 the love story continues
12 October 09
So I can't keep writing about how miserable I am because that would be boring. So I will have to go back to the love story and the bible stories.
So it was 1985, we were living in Iffley Road, Oxford. Luke wrote his finals in June. Then we went... |
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| 348
10 October 09
I feel as though I have just woken up - after being asleep for eighteen months - and that Luke's not next to me in the bed anymore. It's like I dreamed the whole awful experience of him getting sick and dying, and now I've woken up to find it's... |
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| 347 Front End Loader
08 October 09
11 weeks since he died. I miss him so horribly. It's far more painful than it was in the first two months. I'm realising he's not coming back, and it feels unbearable, though of course it is bearable...
The memories of his suffering at the end are fading from the front... |
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| Integrating experiences
06 October 09
I've been going to therapy for 7 years now - to the same therapist. It seems impossible that I was 42 when I started, and that now I'm 49 - it's obscene, this getting older thing.
He tells me that the point of therapy is to help you integrate painful... |
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| Rage and Forgiveness
05 October 09
I woke up this morning and I understood something. Last year Luke was grieving as well as battling with pain and feeling terrible, and feeling very anxious about being so ill.
Just as I can't do anything about the mudslide of rage I feel towards him now, except work it... |
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| 244
02 October 09
I would have expected grief to be like a tsunami, that rises up in one huge wave and crashes on the shore, destroying what lies in its path and changing the landscape forever.
Instead I find it is a series of waves, and that the waves that fall now, ten... |
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