Early stages of grief

by dahl2013

Ok.  What do you do?  The first week or two come and go in a daze – you dream of him; you wake up thinking that it was the worst nightmare in the world.  You spend ages in his bedroom soaking up the smells and memories of fun, snuggly, warm times – times that you can see in your head and wish you could capture with your arms and your lips and your eyes.  Yep – photographs.  Wow.  Photographs keep you ticking over.  Your eyes need to devour every photo that you can get your hands on. Its a little, I am sure, like a drug – you need more and more.  You print off copy after copy of photo and cover every wall space and table space with framed beauty. Thank God for Facebook – vacuous in so many ways but cathartic in the number of photos that his friends posted for us; for themselves. 

At this stage I feel I have two choices.  I can either follow him over a cliff – not a hard thing to do, or I can try to make some sort of sense of the whole hideous thing.

I have dreams about him.  I have things that set themselves apart from dreams – things that seem more real than dreams: things that play on my mind as being more ‘real’.  I think I am beginning to learn a difference between these things.  A ‘dream’ I had 10 days after Rowie left us falls into the second category.  He is in his coffin, being carried by his friends, but he sits up and cries to me ‘Mum, please, I’m not dead – help me – I’m not dead – please’.  Nightmare?  I think not – this seems too real to be a nightmare.

Bear with me – I need to think a little about the next bit of this story…