Bridget McNulty Posts

Things have been pretty hard and sad around here, as you can tell from all the depressing blog posts. But then Mark got hit by a car on Friday, and all of a sudden I was longing for the hard, sad days of before.

He’s okay – or he will be, after 6 weeks of bed rest, when his broken back heals itself and his sprained wrist comes right. He’s lucky: it could have been much worse. But being knocked off your motorbike and skidding across the road till your lumbar spine hits the pavement is pretty bad, let’s be honest. And it has made one thing very clear to me.

Four weeks since my mom died, and I am deep in the fog of grief. I just heard the term this weekend, and it so perfectly captures what it feels like right now. “What happens is that our grief gets so heavy that it surrounds us, clouds our minds, and interferes with our ability to think clearly. We’re on overload,” writes Kenneth C. Haugk.

“The special days are the hardest,” they said. “The birthdays, the holidays, Christmas… That’s when you’ll miss your mom the most.” Except in the 3 weeks since my mom died, it’s been nothing but special days… This is birthday season.

A lot of lovely people have been asking how I’m feeling lately, and it’s a difficult question to answer. Not only because I feel different every day, but because the feelings don’t fit into words as easily as they used to. I usually settle for: okay.

I wrote this post two months ago (almost to the day) as I was on a train leaving Lancaster, having just spent 24 hours with my dear friend who was dying. She told me then that she had two to six months to live, she died last night. I woke up feeling sad yesterday – sad enough to write about it… And then she died. I’ve already written about some of this so it may be repetition, but I decided on the train that I would only post it after Camilla died, and now she has. What is so strange and surprising to me is that if you let yourself feel the sadness, it does pass. It washes over you, and you emerge out the other side. If you don’t bottle it up or resist it, it passes. I’m sure most other people know this already, but I feel like I’m just learning it…

How do you feel about sadness? It’s an odd question, because surely we should all feel comfortable with all the emotions, but I’ve come to realise (particularly in the last few months) that that isn’t true for me. Here’s what I’ve unpacked…