It’s been a dreadful five months, but we need to begin to look forward.
Grief has overwhelmed me, MS has hitched a ride on the back of it and shaken me to the core and as a small family, we have to gather ourselves together and celebrate life in all it’s glory.
No one is ever forgotten, they are carried with us throughout life – my dad, who died in 1978, my brother more recently and many others in between.
The best way to honour their memory and legacy is to aspire to be the very best within our capabilities and more importantly, to do no harm.
All shocks have repercussions, good and bad; MS forced me and The Teenager to create a whole new life – new job, new mum, new identity. We got through it, wobbles along the way, but we did it. I’m happy to say that he is thriving at University and I am beyond proud of all he has achieved.
Grief, seismic shifts and time passing creates a re-evaluation – someone came back in to my life after a long absence. There is never a good time to meet anyone and people always told me it would be at the worst possible time. They were right, but it worked.
It’s not serious – they would be the first to say that – but it works, just now, for us.
I have nothing to ‘admit to’, or ‘come clean about’. It just is. I just love this person.
When you attend your sibling’s funeral, decades before you really should, life shifts and reorganises itself. What seemed important is less so, and vice versa.
Life is a continual series of lessons, the most important of which is, you never know what someone else is going through. Be kind to each other, be aware that someone so happy and vibrant is just as likely to be as depressed as the person who ‘looks depressed’.
I’ve confirmed on Twitter these last few weeks and months that I have never found it to be anything less than supportive. Perhaps I’m lucky, but having seen me through MS, The Teenager, Grief and beyond, I do think it can be a force for good.
The unexpected bereavement of a sibling is quite honestly the toughest trial I have ever been through.