….the way life used to be…..

I’m still really unsettled. It happens every year on/around my birthday and our ‘Life Laundry’ exercise has made it all worse. I keep wandering around corridors and being shocked/frightened/confused because there is stuff missing. Stuff that’s been there for ever – well, it seems like it to me anyway.

Yep – it was all junk and needed to go but blimey – it seems so strange.

An example. Years ago, I decided the best way to stay in shape was to buy myself a full-length mirror that I couldn’t avoid looking into each day. I bought one – quite pretty, bevelled edge, pine frame and generally it looked good. Well, until I hung it on the wall that is.

It had a flaw that meant it was like a fairground ‘hall of mirrors’ mirror. It made your left side look really slim and your right side look like a baby elephant. For some bizarre reason, I didn’t take it down and send it back, it stayed hanging on the wall on our landing for probably eight years or so.

It’s gone now and that is a GOOD thing but it’s still spooking me each time I walk along the corridor. I feel a bit like a little ghost in my own home, walking around and functioning as I did before but unnoticed and unseen….does that sound weird?

And then there’s this – it’s Toby’s collar. When he was cremated, they asked me if I wanted to keep it and in my grief-stricken state I said ‘yes’. What I didn’t think about was that he hated being without it – if he had a bath, he’d actually nudge his collar to tell me to put it back on. I wish now so much that I’d only kept his tag and not the whole collar. I wish I’d left my baby with his one possession.

I came across it yesterday, staring out at me just as though his skeleton is there in the deepest recesses of my wardrobe and each time I look at it I feel as though my heart is imploding. The crushing misery now, six years on is still there and I doubt it’ll ever go fully. Don’t get me wrong – I love Rosie and Archie completely but I’d still trade almost anything for one last cuddle and one last slurpy kiss.

What do I do with it now? Do I take it and bury it at Crantock, where his ashes are? Do I bin it? Do I keep it in the hope that one day I can look at it and remember happy times instead of the gaping hole of loss? I just don’t know, for once I am lost for a solution.

You can see me and Tobes here!

In a couple of days I’ll get back on the straight and narrow hopefully and this air of despondency will lift. Birthdays eh? Who’d have them?

Last year I was still on top of the world and two years ago we were rising to the occasion!