Life, the Universe and the Melancholic

Life has been propelling me forward and I have found myself in a quiet, simmering reflection about the past six months of my life. Simultaneously feeling lost, yet found. Unbearable, lonely grief for the loss of my parents, yet cautiously hopeful for the future without them. Navigating a world without them is incomprehensible. Navigating a world without the 24 year partnership that had been my stability and security in life, is daunting. The loss of my relationship has further compounded my experience of grief. I've lost more than I ever thought possible, all at once. I still think a part of me is numb, a survival mechanism of sorts. Nothing is more finite than death. There is no arguing with death when it arrives. There is a before and there is an after. Getting caught in the inbetween, the what ifs and the if onlys, is futile. So I try to exist in the after, all the while feeling tremendously lost. I had a moment this past week where I was thinking about the prospect of finding l...

My Dad died. He took his last breath around 4am, 17th December 2021. His death was so peaceful and quiet. He just drifted away from this realm to the next. Exactly 100 days since Mum took her last breath...Dad took his.  He got sick from an infection. MRSA. Originating from a wound in his toe. He had osteomyelitis the previous year in the same foot. He had a fall at home after becoming quite dizzy and ended up in hospital with septic shock from the infection. IV antibiotics were started. He was in and out of ICU. He was ventilated for two days. He had multiple heart attacks. Pneumonia. A clot on his lung. His kidneys began failing. He spent just over two weeks in hospital, before it was decided that active interventions were seeing no improvements. Doctors transferred him to the palliative team and within 36 hours of that decision, he was gone. For the majority of the two weeks he was in hospital, I spent as much time with him as possible. Actually out of the fifteen days or so, th...

The father of my children moved out three weeks ago. We had effectively been together for 24 years. All those years and children together. We watched our children grow as we continued to grow up. Somewhere along the way I think we started to grow apart. I became a mother to many children and got lost in the whirlwind of all the things. I can't speak for him, but I suspect he also got lost in fatherhood, trying to provide for us. He has spent much of our years together with undiagnosed ADHD. Essentially, his entire life undiagnosed. In hindsight, its impact on our relationship was insidious. It became a running joke that he was my extra child. Eventually it wasn't funny anymore. For either of us. The more I tried to address issues and things that I felt we needed to work on, the more he would shut down. It felt like he slowly disappeared and trying to actively engage him with working on our relationship became pointless. I felt ignored, unseen, invisible for the most part. On th...

My Mum died. Her last breath of life left her at 9.37pm, 8th September. I held her hand and kissed her forehead as she left. I had made a "Mum" playlist of all her favourite songs I could remember. She slipped away listening to the song Could I Have This Dance by Anne Murray. It was hers and Dad's song. The next song that played was Over The Rainbow by Judy Garland. She would sing this to us when we were babies. And then to the grandbabies. They say babies decide when it's time for them come, to be born. My beautiful mother picked her moment to die. She had impeccable timing. If she didn't. It was one hell of an extraordinary coincidence.  I am heartbroken.  Bereft.  Distraught.  Grief stricken. All the words and feelings and states of being that convey loss. Somehow it's still not enough. Two days leading up to Mum dying, I  would go outside in the evening and look at the sky. Silently praying for a miracle. Each night I seen shooting stars...falling stars. I...

Life is a cause for disillusionment at the moment. I was going to write a post about all the disillusioned things when I realised I had a draft post waiting in the wings from a few weeks ago. So here it is... The weather has been dreary drizzle where I live. It's also the final stretch of school holidays, so I am a slightly bit battle fatigued from all the children being home. Yesterday I went for a walk in the rain to get milk. I needed the walk and milk was in short supply in the fridge. We run out of milk and bread at a rapid pace when everyone is home. Walking always gives me breathing and thinking space. It also gives me opportunities to take photos which I put on Instagram, my visual gratitude diary. Or "life isn't so bad if you can find beauty in mundane things" diary. While  walking in the drizzle, I was reminded of when I was a kid and use to stand outside the front of my childhood home when it was raining. Not pouring rain, but the dreary, cold drizzle. It w...

It has been a couple of weeks since life dissolved into primordial goo. Kind of like the caterpillar in the chrysalis phase, about to become a butterfly. The butterfly stage of my life may as well be light years away. I feel like I will be stuck in the primordial goo forever. It's not clear what the future holds. For a very long time I have told myself that I wasn't scared of being alone. Doing life alone. Concentrating on my children. here I am on the precipice of such circumstances, and I'm terrified. Terrified of being alone. Yet I have the opportunity to not be alone. After causing each other considerable hurt and pain, working on our relationship is something that is on the cards for myself and my partner? Ex-partner? Inbetween partner? I don't even know what to call him anymore. Father to my children seems a bit odd. Person who I have spent 24 years of my life with and we have 6 children. He loves me with a big open heart and catches me when I fall. But much of th...

The past month has been devastating. It is impossible for me to explain without adding further hurt and pain. Simply put, my relationship with my partner of 24 years has ended as we've known it. And it's unclear where life will go next. I'm grieving all the aspects of life that I had just 10 days ago. It will never be the same. I wake up every morning with that feeling in my tummy like I've lost something important and can't find it. I have lost something very important. Imagine your life like a deck of cards, a game of life...My cards of life have been thrown up in the air and who knows where they will fall. I'm in a heartbreaking suspended animation and feeling desperately alone. Yet I am still hopeful about the future. Even if it does feel like the Earth has fallen out from under me. And here I am drifting in a place where I am too much and never enough. One saving grace, is that my mental breakdown has equipped me with the tools to cope with the whirlwind of...