Random Stream of Consciousness Thoughts

I have just checked the stats for my blog and it has had nearly 6,300 page views since I started it just over a month ago. That is amazing!  I hope my thoughts and words have helped my friends and family understand what we are going through as well as helping any readers with their own experiences of grief. From some of the messages I have received, this latter has been the case, so this brings be some comfort and strength. This blog is definitely a good medium for me to detail and expunge my grief.

So here's a positive, in the first few weeks following William's death, the house went untidied, uncleaned, un-cared for. Eventually we found a cleaner who did a huge once-over and then came for a couple of hours every two weeks, just to keep on top of things like the floors and bathrooms etc. She rang this week and asked if we still needed her and I realised that actually, no, we didn't; I've been cleaning again. Uses up a bit of time.

Since we moved here, we have allowed ourselves (or I have allowed myself) the luxury of an ironing lady. I hate ironing with a passion. It's too hot half the time and I find it mind-numbingly boring. So every time the basket is full, we call our lovely lady Cathy who comes and picks it up and then delivers it back a couple of days later - all for 20€! But get this, today I needed to iron some bits for my trip so I stood and did an hour's ironing, Olivier's work shirts and all, and to keep my brain occupied I finally had the courage to watch my Sky +ed recording of 'Soham - A Parent's Tale - 10 Years On'. So I ironed and sobbed through that. I felt such a resonance with their journey, but it was so positive too to see them ten years on - and that's what I wanted to get out of watching this programme. To see how things could be later on. Holly's parent's are such strong people. And get this, both couples are still together - against all the statistics - BOTH couples have managed to stay on the 10% side (it is well-documented that nine out of ten couples separate after the death of a child). That is fantastic and gives rise to more hope. It was also good to see Holly's parents at a bereavement group, making candles, as I think we'll be doing that this weekend. All mental preparation for me.

I am off to the bereavement weekend alone due to linguistic and cultural barriers as well as gender grieving norms. I am wondering what the dynamics will be there - how many singletons will there be? Will there be more women than men as women seek help more readily then men? Will there be more single people because relationships have floundered in the short or long term after the death of a child? Or do the couples that seek help through bereavement organisations have a higher chance of staying together because they have done just that? We shall see...

Something else I finally brought myself to do this morning was enter the pool area and unplug and squeeze all the air out of the blow-up boats, rings, floating armchairs etc. I've hated seeing these as I hang my washing outside (we moved our outside eating table out of view of the pool into William's Garden behind the house and then never ate outside, but we had to take my washing line down to create William's Garden so now I have to hang my bloody washing to dry on an airer next to the pool) but could not bring myself to deflate them either. So that job is done. I also had a small garden tidy and weeded William's flower bed, around the agapanthus we planted. (If Annabel is reading this - thank you for your lovely card with the agapanthus on it that we received this week - perfect timing to give us a boost and such a coincidence as these are the flowers in William's Garden.)

We also have several packets of Sweet William seeds and Forget-Me-Not seeds which we will sow in spring-time to fill up the bed. I think we may need to do some grown-up gardening like propagating so I might have to look that up! Anyway, let's hope all that works and that the garden matures and grows as our constant reminder of our beautiful boy. 

All we need to do now is continue our fight with the company from whom we bought William's bench (Roimage) and the delivery firm - it arrived so completely broken and irreperable (at least so it would still look nice). I don't know whether it was the delivery guy dropping it when he saw Pepsi and started running around screaming 'Get your dog in! Get your dog in!' (is it just me or is this guy in the wrong job if he is that terrified of dogs?) or whether it happened en route. Anyway, he freaked me out so much that I had a panic attack and refused to sign the delivery slip, but Olivier arrived just then and signed it and the guy drove off. It was only on un-packing the bench that we realised just how broken it was. So now of course, they won't even hear of a reclaim as we signed the delivery slip. It's so unjust - this is the bench paid for my my lovely Girls' Night group and bought especially for William's Garden. So we're sending photos and a registered post letter and going to wait and see if that changes anything.

I'll blog from the hotel over the weekend. Time now to go and make those huge decisions about what clothes to take in my 10kg bag regarding the weather in the UK for the next few days. This time I'll put socks in for sure.