the holes left behind

When something suddenly disappears there is a time when nothing is left behind. That sound of the sonic boom is the air snapping closed around the hole in the air left by the plane.

They say that nature abhors a vacuum and so the hole left in my spirit and in my life will gradually have something else seep in to fill it.

By this I mean that my life is normally filled with many things and thoughts as well as with Anita. For me in my life I did not go very long in the day without thinking about her. At work (in conversations) I would make comparisons with things we have done / were doing, or things she/we liked, when hiking I would either be talking with her or when alone see something that she would like and show her. Even to just be grumbling about conflicts or issues we've had.

So the sudden removal of her from this world (and it was very sudden) has left me with empty spaces, a sort of vacuum in my life.

Its hard to explain but if you take this image as a sort of representation of my life, with each colour being something that occupies my mind (Anita, my work, hobbies, home repairs ...).

• at work I would think of things or see things I wanted to share, I still think of these but that leads me to remember she isn't here
• driving in the car I look over and see she's not there
• on my motorbike I can't feel her behind me
• noone sits across from me at the dinner table

I have tried to represent Anita with the blue. If you look carefully there are smatters of blue in almost everything and sometimes joining things together (for instance when Anita was the bridge for me into an activity).

Now I have removed the blue and you can see the gaping holes left by her sudden removal as well, as the thinning out of areas where there were smatters of her influence or just me thinking of her.

This is the vacuum of which I mean. Those large empty ares of white which are now empty times in my life, but there is also now less substance in all the other areas too. But worse than empty they serve to remind me that she isn't here.

Some areas become almost invisible and unstable without her, while other areas just have points of time where I am reminded of her. When Anita first passed away I was totally consumed with her loss. I would say I almost had nothing in my life except for a great wrenching sadness of her passing and wondering things like "why" and "how".  In this later stage I find that when trying to do the normal things (even those which don't involve her) her absence still has an influence.

My life has more 'substance' than air, so I'm sure it will take a long time for those emtpy places to be displaced by life in comparison with the bang of air rushing in to fill the empty space left by the plane.

the crying

For sure one thing I've been doing a lot lately is crying. Not just having tears in my eyes either, but great body wracking sobs which go on for some time. Fortunately its been getting better. The moments after I got off the phone from my sister-in-law to say "she's had a cardiac arrest and has been transferred to intensive care" in particular was bad, but so was the funeral and many other times too.

Often its simple things that set me off, sometimes its a delayed reaction. Something like seeing a couple holding hands and recalling her hand in mine. Then its off. There seems to be no way to avoid it only to delay it.

Babies cry and certainly seem to have that whole body reaction too ... I guess that they feel like shit as well.

I have been wondering if there is any relationship.

Lately I've been wondering if it is exactly the same thing as what babies feel. They react by crying (often inconsolably) when they feel bad. They can't express what's wrong and the only thing that they can do is cry horribly to express themselves.

It seems like its a natural reaction. Certainly its a reaction which one does not need to learn, as often from the moment they are born they are doing it.

I believe that that reaction stays with us all our lives, even if its something which we attempt to learn out way out of.

From birth we start to learn about the feelings we have, simple stuff at first:

• I feel cold
• I feel hungry
• I feel uncomfortable

eventually we learn other behavior which allows us to solve our problems or express our problems more effectively.

Grief is something which we just don't know in the first years of life, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that when we encounter something as powerful an experience as the death of someone we love that (having learned nothing to help us cope) we can only cry uncontrollably as a reaction to feeling like total crap.

One thing I have learned in this process is that its like sweating, if you feel hot you have to do it. You may not even notice you're feeling hot but you body starts sweating for you and then perhaps you start to be conscious of "gee, its a bit warm".

So you just have to go with it and cry like a baby when ever you need to. Anyone who doesn't get it ... too bad, they aren't really much of a human even if they are of the same genetic species.

glimpses of normality

I've been so used to feeling like shit lately that it came as a surprise to me today that I found my reactions to things were more or less normal.

I feel that there are two parts to my mind, the logical part and the emotional part. In my daily life I have to decide which part to listen to. I can not totally succumb to either for I believe that would be an imbalance and I somehow feel that there needs to be a harmony or a balance in life.

Certainly there are times when such imbalance is created by the rocks which get thrown upon me from above - like the death of my lovely wife Anita.

Despite my mood and the daily reminders of her absence I have sometimes found myself behaving normally, as I did before Anita's passing. Reactions to things as well as reactions to what I hear going on around me. This is somehow encouraging (but I'm not yet convinced) that I will be able to recover something of a life after her death.

I find it impossible to stop the logical side of my brain from posing questions to me:

• what will life be like after this?
• will I just remain alone?
• what do I want to do?
• can I ever love another?

Some of these questions are simply too difficult (read painful) to contemplate.

I also know that I can not really predict the future with any more certainty than I could have predicted meeting Anita in South Korea so many years ago. But what I can be more certain of is that as my age advances the type of relationships and the capacity for me to do certain things becomes different.This is likely to have a strong influence on many things.

For instance, you don't meet many late 50 year olds engaging in a cross country ski trip towing sleds, and no I'm not 50 yet.

But it remains unclear if I will be blessed with such good health as I had just as recently as 2006 when this shot was taken (before going out on exactly that sort of trip).

Grief is a complex thing. I don't believe that its only about the loss of the person (although that is certainly #1 on the scale), but also about the loss of so many thing in your life. I mean after all, I built my life around Anita, so when I lost her I also lost so much else in my life. That Anita is not with me in my daily life hurts. That she is not there to share the things that I can still do reminds me that she is not here and it goes back to hurting again.

So the nature of the loss that one grieves about is related to the depth of life changes caused by the death of your loved one. This all takes time to sink in and so for me forms an 'maturation' of the grief.

So yes, it sort of gets worse before it gets better (hoping here that it gets better).

This goes back to what I wrote earlier (on another post) that relationships with your parents can not be the same as the relationships you have with your partner because you live different lives with your parents than you do with your partner (well I hope you do).

I think it was around the time of her Funeral when I was thinking of things we did together that I realised that it would seem impossible I could ever do those things again with another person. Not just because I am worried about doing the same things with another, but because I probably can't do those things again as I age. Unlike break-ups which were part of my relationships before marriage, the death of my wife not only devastates my life short term, but essentially creates a clear severance with my life with Anita and what happens after.

While my life may go on, parts of my life are simply memories now. Memories which I alone carry. Memories which noone else shares. Memories which I can not talk with to anyone who will understand in the same way as those who were there (like my wife was).

I have no idea what I will become, but I know that I can not "start again" I can only "continue" and see what happens.

I will forever miss Anita like no other person who has ever entered my life

No matter how close one is to someone there are always parts of yourself which are independent from the relationship you have. Perhaps it is how absorbed you are in that relationship which governs how long it take for the parts which are removed by their death to be gradually replaced with new things.

But now that some months have passed and I have forced myself to go back to doing something other than sitting and crying I find myself doing things which of course didn't really have Anita in them. Simple things, like helping my in-laws to sort berries or fixing my motor bike.

But her absence leaves a vacuum in my life, empty spaces which when ever I turn to them out of habit or out of desire all I find is that she is not there. While I am doing those things which normally don't involve her and normally have very little influence of her in my thoughts or activities (and they are few) I am gradually able to feel glimpses of normality. Like life was before the pain.

I believe that it is important for those grieving to realise that the pain they feel is actually as real as the pain from anything physical. Studies have identified (ref) that the same parts of the brain which process and let you know about physical injury are involved in emotional injury. I also like this authors grasp of the problem at this link.

As one who has recovered from injury and (quite major) surgery (which is a type of controlled injury) a number of times I know logically that I will heal. Equally I know that I will always bear scars and aches and pains and reminders of the injuries I have had.

Life goes on no matter what happens to me, so its up to me to make the most of it.

So now I'll get up for the rest of the day and start trying to live as I can for today. I'll let you know about tomorrow later.

betting this goes viral

sure is interesting viewing and an interesting story in the background too

ORDOS from Charles Lanceplaine on Vimeo.