The Grieving Jester

This last week or so has been a mixed bag and some bits have felt tough. I wondered whether I had been trying to distract myself too much, trying to put on a brave face, and thereby ignoring my pain. So perhaps I needed the bad sad days. There weren’t any obvious triggers, I just missed B, felt sad, and cried. The pain is still there! Perhaps, I was hoping that it had disappeared… After a while, though, things started to improve again and, on the whole, I felt rather happier. I was able to enjoy times with friends, going to a gallery, choir practice, the lovely Spring weather, even mowing the lawn (which was much needed). Sometimes, there doesn’t seem to be any reason as to why I should feel particularly sad, whereas at other times something just hits me and triggers my sorrow. A thought might ping into my mind, or I hear someone say something, or sometimes it’s a situation I find myself in, though it doesn’t help when I am tired. It feels a bit like how I imagine Alice felt when she f...

I have been reflecting a lot this week (and it’s only Wednesday!), and I have come to the conclusion that I have, probably, been trying to deceive myself… On Sunday morning I woke up feeling sad, not for any particular reason, I just felt sad. Perhaps, a more honest way of putting it is that I felt sadder than what is, now, just the usual background sadness and, perhaps, I noticed it more as I have had some less sad days recently. It didn’t occur to me not to go to church, which it might have done previously, so I went along as usual. The Gospel reading was about the raising of Lazarus, and the sermon was about emotions, what happens when we hit the wall and reach our emotional capacity, and the communal owning of grief and holding of pain. Our minister also mentioned that, as well as crying for the loss of his friend, Lazarus, Jesus might also have been crying for himself, which I found helpful, as I do sometimes think this regarding myself (I feel bad / guilty when I see all the te...

Since my last blog post, I continued to feel like ‘my old self’ for three days. I ask myself what I actually mean by that, and I suppose it’s that I felt more like I did before B died, I felt content, perhaps like a non-grieving Jackie. On the Sunday, though, my grief hit me full in the face again! I was at church and all was going well, I sang in the choir for the first time, which I felt good about (this is progress, I thought), but then a couple of small things upset me and my grief came welling back up. Of course, I was hoping the happy state would remain but, obviously, I still miss B. The background sadness is still there, rearing its head every so often. Anyway, the good thing is that the effect of the anniversary of B’s death has, at last, worn off It is difficult to explain what the difference is, but I guess I am now able to feel happy as well as sad, again, as opposed to just morose. I did have a small epiphany, though, as it occurred to me that sad days aren’t necessarily b...

Last week, I had what I call my first ‘non-sighting’ of B. I was half-expecting that something like this would happen at some point and, lo and behold, I was coming out of a choir practise and for a split second I thought I saw B – there he was with his slightly wavy, white hair, in his fawn jumper, slightly turned away from me. I was just about to go over to him so that we could go home together (although him being at choir practise was an illogicality) when I realised that, of course, it couldn’t be him. I had thought that something like this would upset me but, although it was a bit of a shock, somehow it was actually a comfort as, for a moment, it reminded me of the physical him… I have just come back from spending some time with my family. While I was with them, I felt a bit more like my old self. It felt as though I was back on an even keel again, which is somewhat of a relief. I wondered why it seems so much easier with them than at home, and realised that there are several fa...