7. Dec, 2018

Reflect and regret

As I sit here grieving for my mum, I am convinced 2018 will go down as being one of the hardest years of my life. There are three other exceptions. The year my parents separated, the year I fell ill with a disease that would go on to affect me every single day for the rest of my life and the year that I mentally fractured and was forced to throw in a career of 22 years that I truly loved.

It is at times like this I have occasionally been guilty of playing the victim card. Why can life be so hard? What have I done for such bad things to happen? And at times like these, when I am feeling down, I sometimes wonder whether the struggle to survive is worth all the effort. But then I’ll look into my youngest son’s eyes, or, receive a virtual hug out of the blue from my eldest son and remind myself they make it all worth it.

Much to my dismay, my nemesis is back. My depression has been knocking on the back door, an unwanted visitor insistent on throwing the door aside and plunging down the corridors of my mind. And as much as I have tried to resist the pangs of frustration, the nagging of negativity and the irrational irritability, the tears and the overwhelming uprising of internal anger and anxiety have seeped through the cracks in the corridor’s walls and settled on my heart like a heavy fog on a becalmed sea.

I understand this could be the tentacles of grief creeping forth, stretching out, squirming and suffocating my vulnerable beleaguered mind, but when you have suffered a severe depression as I have in the past, it’s difficult not to fear its attempt to reclaim my soul.

Like the leaves drifting across the surface of my pool, so too do dark thoughts circle my mind. I wish, like my pool I had an able filter functioning to purify them.

When I fell ill around eight years ago, my depression diagnosis was what psychiatrists refer to as an agitated major depression. It has similarities to bipolar but with agitation or extreme anxiety being a key feature rather than the “high” mood commonly experienced in bipolar. So, I tend to have panic attacks. I shiver, tremble and shake, and my heart beats at a million miles an hour and yet I feel numb, or removed if you like, from the present.

The world loses its colour, things I once loved no longer give me pleasure and rose-coloured glasses take on a sepia or monochrome hue.

Blanketed by a thick fog, my brain struggles to read, write or concentrate and life loses all meaning.

But if you are quietly thinking “wake up to yourself” or “get over it your mum passed away four months ago”, well, in all the madness of wrapping up a loved one’s life, grieving becomes a luxury you can’t afford.

I made the mistake of hitting the replay button on the answering machine messages the other day…and no trophies awarded for guessing whose voice came thumping out at me. “Hi Nic, it’s just mum, just ringing in to see how you are. Just back from the hairdressers. Bad breathing day today. You don’t need to ring me back. I’ll catch you tomorrow. Okay, little one…I love you”.

My heart broke once more and I ended up curling up in a ball on the floor sobbing. Mum knew she was dying at this point, it happened quite quickly toward the end, but she knew it, because every time she rang, she would always end her conversation with “I love you”, I think, just in case it was the last time she ever spoke to me.

They were indeed words from beyond the grave, and as we move into the Christmas season any cheer is lost to guilt and a grief so deep because I didn’t spend her last Christmas with her, and now all I have is a voice on my answering machine and a lead weight on my heart because I feel I didn’t do enough.

I wasn’t well and I had to decide to put my health first and I now regret this act of selfishness every single day. I should have sucked it up and been there for her.

I’m tired. My body and mind, or my whole being feels faded and jaded.

Am I feeling like this because of my current mood state? I don’t know, but what I do know is that I want Christmas to be over, because for me, this year, I feel no joy…just an empty unfillable hole where once the unconditional love of possibly the closest person in the world to me sat.

I guess all that’s left is to set mum a place at the table. Pour a glass of Bolly, and propose a toast to her memory, because apart from a few possessions and her voice on the answering machine, that is all I have left of her.

If you are grieving the loss of a loved one this Christmas, then you have my deepest sympathies…cheers to you all and thank you for your support throughout the year. My best wishes to you and your family.