I want to start this week with acknowledging something that for me is huge! This post is blog number 100!!! I couldn’t have imagined that this thing , something that started so randomly with no idea of where it would go, would be what it now is. Thank you so so much for dipping into my world each week and letting me ‘word vomit’ the things that swirl around in my brain. I am so very grateful to have found this outlet and for the support that you give me. I know that without you, and this, things for me would probably look very different! Thank you! xx

This week has been a weird one for me. There has been a bunch of anxiety floating around for me, but that is a ‘camp crash’ I have been prepared for. I’ve been needing a whole lot of me time, and I have spent a lot of that in bed reading. Part of me feels a little bit guilty for that, I have a million things I should be doing, but I know I have needed to do that for myself.

I was talking to someone about grief this week, after I mentioned that I had been to ‘widow camp’ last week. She was telling me about trying to support a friend of hers who’s mum had died. Initially the conversation was going as you would expect – comments about not being able to imagine that kind of pain, and not knowing what they would do in such a situation; and then it took a turn I had not expected. The person said that she was finding it more and more difficult to be there for her friend, because the friend was now so different, and she didn’t much like the person her friend now was.

I was shocked. I tried to explain that her friend would never, and could never be the same because she had lost a fundamental piece of who she was. I am thankfully not in a position of grieving for a parent, but I imagine it would be similar to losing a partner and I know what that has done to me. The person who you are grieving has been such an intrinsic part of your life, you almost have no memories without them, and it seems inconceivable that you could ever be the same without them.

I know for me that I have struggled immensely without Claytie, trying to figure out who I am as me now. I can tell you that sometimes it is difficult to recognise yourself in this process, because there is so much to work out! You catch glimpses of who you used to be, but they are distorted by the you that now exists. For me, I feel like I have had to learn a whole new way of being an adult – I haven’t ever had to be one without Claytie by my side. I’m a different person as a parent without my other half too. I am a whole new person with a very different outlook on the world. It is inevitable that not all of that process of figuring yourself out will be smooth sailing – it hasn’t been. But to think that one of the reasons people walk away from you is because of that, because you no longer fit their idea of you, was kind of hard to hear.

I don’t know the person I was having this conversation with particularly well, and I certainly don’t know her friend, but it is easy to put her thought process across to the people who once were part of my world. I know that I now speak from a place of much greater understanding of grieving a huge loss, and I can’t and won’t apologise for doing what I need to do to get through it. Part of me feels sorry for those people that took the easy way out of my life – you’re missing out on this version of me, and I’m pretty proud of her! I’m sorry that for you I’ve become ‘too hard’, but just for one tiny minute I’d like you to put yourself into my shoes and look for some understanding. How could I possibly be who I was when I am missing the biggest part of my world!?

This life now is hard! Sooo much harder that I could ever have thought possible. My past is now filled with bittersweet memories, and my future is a picture that I don’t recognise. All of the big moments in my life are tinged with sad, because the person that should be there isn’t. But you know what… I think I’m doing pretty bloody ok with what I have, and I’m going to keep on as I have been, putting one foot in front of the other and living life for both of us!