Change

Continuing my theme of using song lyrics, these words seem apt:

If I could hold you close,

Like you were never gone,

If I could hear your voice,

You’d tell me to be strong,

But sometimes I just can’t,

I just don’t understand,

Why you had to go,

I guess I’ll never know,

Ain’t it funny how you think you’re gonna be ok,

Till you remember things are never gonna be the same again,

Ain’t it crazy how you think you’ve got your whole life planned,

Just to find out things were never ever in your hands,

Change.

Two years ago tomorrow my life changed forever, completely beyond my control or anyones elses.  Perhaps death is one thing we can never have any real control of – putting aside suicide clinics, none of us can ever choose when, where or how for ourselves, or our loved ones.

With the loss of someone you love, you also seem to lose control over your thoughts, feelings, physical abilities, in fact most of the things we normally take credit for being able to control. Perhaps we never really have control over these things, but can only realise this when they become so extreme we can no longer ignore our lack of control.

In the last two years, I have suffered a prolonged period of dark numbness, following the immediate unbearable grief of losing my dad. Going travelling somehow seemed to help this although perhaps it was the intensity of the experiences and the loss I felt that provided a combination that meant my body could no longer block out what I was feeling.

I think my lowest point came in the centre of Australia.  Bags of time on buses meant hours and hours of time to think, and watch the scenery. My Mum and Dad had planned to make this trip, they had never been to the centre of Australia and it felt so unfair that this had been taken away from them. So unfair for my dad, and so unfair for my mum as well. His dying in some ways took away two futures, not just one.  Every time I spoke to my mum I was reminded of the fact that I had left her, all on her own, half way round the world, and I was desperately paranoid that something would happen to her while I was gone. Somehow it also became harder to know that my Dad would never pick up the phone to hear how the travels were going. I didn’t do a lot of things my dad wanted me to, always preferring to assert my teenage authority by doing the exact opposite, but he had always wanted me to go travelling. I missed the stories he could have told me about the places he had been so much. Those few days in the centre of Australia were probably the lowest I have had outside the month after my dad died. 

Following the receding of the numbness, and the crippling low that followed it, things did get better. I found it easier to be away from everyone, with people I had only just met and who were bright and lively and fun, and most of all who didn’t know. Not because I find it hard when people know, but because when people didn’t know I couldn’t feel a burning resentment that they no longer seemed to care, or remember, that I was suffering below the surface. When you have known people for years you expect them to recognise that you are in pain, and when they don’t, or fail to acknowledge it, it is impossible to help feeling abandoned and alone.

Being back in England has been better, than it was before, certainly. I finally feel that I have regained some semblance of who I am (I no longer hate Disney!).  I can remember the good things and smile. It makes birthdays and Christmas better to remember all the good time. At this time of year though, it seems to become harder, perhaps because as opposed to bringing back the memories of my dad it brings back the memories of his death, and I cant help but rehash the same thoughts of him lying there in the road, dying, all alone, and wish it could have somehow been different.

This spring, and the spring after that, the pain that goes with it, is something I think I will have to endure every year from now on.  At least if the rest of the year improves it will perhaps become bearable.

In the past year, I have come a long way. I hope my dad would be proud of me, would know that I haven’t forgotten him just because life does eventually have to move on, and time will not stop ticking, no matter how much you sometimes wish it would. 

Ego

‘The Saturdays’ new song “Ego’ is one of my favorite dancing tunes lately, mainly because I find the tune catchy and upbeat but also because after liking the tune I started listening to the words and found they contained a message that I have thought very hard about (probably too hard given that it is a pop song and not intended to give people revelations!!!)

“Now you wanna pretend that you’re a superstar.

And now you want us to end whats taken you this for.

Don’t tell me that you’re done as far as we go,

you need to have a sit down with your ego .

When everyones gone and you are by yourself,

 you know that you’re gonna come to me from help.

Don’t tell me that its time for going solo,

you need to knock some sense into your ego. “

My fiancée tends to get a pretty hard time in our relationship………partly from me (of course) but he also gets a lot of stick from our friends about his ‘less appealing’ personality traits – in main his ability to forget absolutely anything important you tell him within 30 seconds along with all the other unimportant stuff you tell him – in fact absolutely everything he doesn’t write down excluding completely useless car facts he picks up off Top Gear and that no one EVER needs to know!

Add to this forgetfulness a complete inability to organise himself let alone anyone else and it is easy to see where the room for jokes lies……we are inevitably late for/completely absent for any event he is left to organise because he has forgotten about it/arranged something directly before it such a distance away it is impossible to be on time for both.

On top of this he gets endless stick for the fact that his deepest thought on any given day is probably ‘do I need new hub caps?’ which he could probably spend an easy 30 minutes contemplating, He is definitely not a thinker or an academic and would rarely contemplate picking up a newspaper let alone a book.

I on the other hand, am probably the polar opposite. It is incredibly rare for me to forget anything I actually want to remember, I am organised to within an inch of my life and much more academically orientated. I would mostly enjoy a good book as much if not more than TV.

It is very easy for me to consider that I have the upper hand in the relationship, that I am putting in the most valuable effort – in other words to let my ‘ego’ get in the way of the truth.

Because the truth is that I cannot judge someone against the things I value in myself because that is an unfair comparison. What I would be asking for then would be for someone more like me, and I would be forgetting all my ‘less appealing’ (lets face it downright unattractive!) personality traits.

I am obsessive to the point of insanity over tidiness for no reason I have ever been able to understand let alone explain to anyone else (although of course I would expect them to meet my exacting standards).

I am basically pretty selfish, stubborn and can be downright mean when I want to be. After years of bitching about my fiancée for putting work above me, I now do exactly the same and have realised that work will always come first over social events, birthdays and most other things as well. I have a very short temper and tend to get exasperated and crotchety very quickly.

I also make some very questionable decisions and there is no denying that I will never be a easy and predictable person as sometimes even I can’t predict what I will do next.

(Despite all of the above (and countless other failings) I should probably note that I am not actually all bad. )

Going back to the song, what it made me realise is that it is all too easy to shout at someone, chuck a relationship away because you want someone ‘better’ – someone who thinks more, tidies more, remembers more; all without remembering what is important.

In my fiancé I have found someone who never treats me badly, never shouts, makes me tea, breakfast, lunch, dinner and cleans the cat litter out at night. He is truly brilliant at sports while I will never exceed terrible at anything which involves even a modicum of hand-eye co-ordination. Anything mechanical starts working effortlessly the moment he touches it (we will exclude the time when he forgot to check which way the jump leads were on my car and nearly melted the entire electrical system!). His spatial awareness is truly legendary and he can explain anything he understands himself whilst I couldn’t explain ice to an Eskimo. He is loving, kind sweet, trustworthy (as much as a human being ever can be) and I know he will always look out for me, take care of me if I am ill. I can talk to him about anything and he will try and act interested even when he isn’t (whilst I would just tell him I didn’t care and to stop talking!)

In short he may not be all of the things I would normally judge people by, that I value as my own best features, but he is probably twice the person I will ever be and I expect that if I spend the rest of my life trying to make up for all the things I have ever done wrong and he spent the rest of his life making up for all of the things he had ever done wrong he would be finished significantly earlier than me – and that is not even counting the mistakes I have yet to make.

He may not be as academic as me, as organised, as tidy, or as thoughtful, but I do know one thing for sure – there is no way I deserve such an amazing fiancé, I will never know how I convinced him to fall in love with me, to ask me to marry him.

There are thousands of people out there who would connect jump leads the right way round in the first place. But there probably aren’t that many who would spend Sunday afternoon as Halfords in -2 degrees checking each and every electrical fuse a car has to find out which ones have melted. What more could anyone ask for?