Five months since you left...
I’ve just hit the fifth month without Ben, and I’ll
be honest, I thought by now I’d be a bit further on with my 'grief journey'….
When I’m fact, I’m probably right at the beginning.
I’m writing this after two days of continuous crying, and when I
say continuous, I mean probably three hours of one day when I wasn’t crying and an
hour of the other day. I don’t think I’ve cried like that once in the whole
five months since Ben has been gone.
Grieving during lock down has been anything but normal. I’ve been
distracted by this absolute craziness we’ve all been living for the past few
months. I’ve been distracted by being a mum, teacher, caretaker, dinner lady..
And that’s just the kids.. I’m carer for my dad, who at times has found this
extremely difficult. On days I can get up to 11 phone calls a day from him..
I’ve exercised every single weekday with my friend via FaceTime. I’ve not
stopped…and I've also not worked, until last week when I made that step forward by returning to work. I’ve been in an actual bubble.
At times that bubble has been hell, for many reasons, but one is
that I’ve been unable to leave the house with so so so many wonderful, happy
memories, that are now just that. A memory. They won’t happen again, and I
can’t laugh and reminisce with that person about them.
It’s also a
house with Ben’s toothbrush still sitting next to mine, a house with the
emptiest, coldest bed, where I snuggle up to the jumper he wore the last night
I saw him, that just about still smells of him; alongside the t shirt that was
sent back from Hamburg that he was last wearing; and a pillow covered in
pictures of me and Ben smiling, loving life and each other. They are what I
snuggle up to now instead of the man that used to laugh with about how cold I
always am and how he’d always be there to warm me up - same way I’d cool
him down with my ice-cold feet, which we’d say was another reason we were made
for each other. I was the cold ying to his hot yang.
I know in the previous posts I have spoken about Ben and what he felt.
But this post I started out with the desire to give you insight into being the one that is
left behind. But I realised yesterday during the tears and physical pain that
it covers both, my pain and Ben's pain. In my first post I said that when
someone ends their life, they don’t end the suffering, they pass it to someone
else, well now I can put that into words for you to emphasise it even more.
Ben told me everything about how he felt. And I listened every single
time, without judgement, not once. He opened up in detail about things he
couldn’t believe he would say to another person. See Ben was known as being the
hard man, actually he wasn’t known, he was. He worked on the doors in
Manchester, Chester and other places and he was the best. And he had told me
that this was because he didn’t care about dying, because he had suffered with
depression (and later when he was diagnosed - PTSD) for years. He would happily
risk his life. At that time in his life didn’t care and that made him
superhuman on the doors.
Pass that baton over to me now and here is where the similarities
happen… how grief and mental illness are the same in so many ways… from my
experience of hearing about and living both...
- I don’t care about anything. Apart from my children. They are single-handedly the two things keeping me going - that’s it. This is a hard one to get my head around because I often care too much. It’s one my USP's, but it’s now gone.
- I don’t want to be here anymore - I’m not suicidal - but the overwhelming feeling that I don’t want to be here anymore gives me insight to how he felt. I get it. And I get living with that on a daily basis must have been the hardest thing ever. I know/hope this feeling I have will pass but it kills me knowing this is what he felt so often. When he used to talk about it I’d say I understood, but I didn’t, until now.
- I feel like a burden - Everybody else’s life has moved on now. And I’m still sat here broken. I feel like people think, jeez, it’s been five months now, get over it. Or, can we talk about something else than how bad you’re feeling. My friends & family would be horrified to think I feel this because not one of them have acted in a way to make me feel that, in fact they say the opposite. But it doesn’t matter - your head still makes you think that you’re a burden… like having a mental illness makes you feel...
- I don’t want to ask for help…. Yesterday morning I was inconsolable- my children were downstairs watching TV and straight after I’d given them breakfast I ran upstairs and cried… I just lay in my bed in floods of tears, unable to breath, feeling that heartbroken feeling in my chest that I have made reference to before. I had my phone in my hand and all the people that have said, ‘Kirsty, call when you are like this, whenever you want or need’ ran through my head… and I was unable to pick the phone up to any of them - who wants to listen to someone howling down the phone - and more to the point - what can they do. And why do I want to ruin their Sunday morning with my sadness…. All the things that Ben used to say to me….
Along with these…
- I don’t feel that anybody can help me... I really don’t think anybody can - this is how I feel right now. I know that statement won’t end up being true but at this moment in time I feel like this is down to me and me only. Same as Ben felt that it was down to him to help himself, which he did like a warrior, with me by his side every day we were together. I don’t have a partner to lean on like he did, but I know I have an army of people waiting to tend to my wounds when I crawl off this battlefield.
- I feel weak…. This is the worst when you’re used to being so strong. Ben told me about a time when he had opened to someone and even cried, and he got laughed at and comment like ‘look at you the big hard door man’. Door man or not, he was still a human being. We are all human beings gifted with the same set of emotions and feelings. Which is why I drum into every post the message about being kind. You don’t know people’s stories - what makes them act in a certain way - what has happened to them to make them feel the way they do. Always be kind and always ask ARE YOU OK. Even if they are a stranger on the street.
- I feel like a fraud because people think I’m stronger than I am… my mum said to me yesterday that I’ve painted a picture of how strong I am and that I now feel I have to live up to it when I’m fact I’m not strong at all right now and I’m broken. When I told my daughter, Isabelle about Ben having depression and PTSD, she cried and said to me… ‘mummy, that makes me so sad that everyone thinks Ben is ‘big hard Ben’ and nobody knows that he feels like that’. That sentence has never left my mind. And here I am now, living that same thing.
- I think people are rolling their eyes every time I post something on social media about Ben and I…. But luckily see point 1, I don’t care. Ben used to feel the same when he’d post something on Facebook about feeling down. Ben hated Facebook in the end. With a passion. In fact he wrote about it here… he moved to Instagram where it was about capturing moments rather than sharing your views and keeping up with the Joneses.
But thankfully, when I do worry about people rolling their eyes, I
channel one of the phrases Ben got me to perfect…. ‘f*ck em’…
What is it they say, you should only look back to see how far you’ve
come. Those posts on social media will one day be the reminder that all the
things I’ve mentioned above, I will overcome, one day, somehow....
My reply:
A reminder of what mental health issues look like... #BeKind #AreyouOK
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