Pearl of the Stars

 Tomorrow is the funeral and I am so anxious because it means this whole thing is actually real. Until now there have been times when I could almost pretend it wasn’t happening, like it’s just another time when I haven’t spoken to my parents for a couple of days. But tomorrow is looming oppressively, like a final chapter of a book that I’m just not ready to finish yet. I have no idea how I will react. I’ve been to many funerals before and have held it together reasonably well, but this one… I have no clue. I’m sobbing just thinking about it. The one thing people keep saying to me is that it takes time. Well I guess time is the only thing I have. But then the other thing people keep telling me is that they are still sad, after three, five, even twenty years. I don’t know how to imagine that sadness, stretching on and on for the rest of my life. It’s terrifying. 

 Telling people about the death of someone close to you seems to elicit some strange reactions. At least they’re strange to me, and I’ll explain why. Bear with me here because there’s a little bit of context… I have Conplex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. As a side note, I always think it’s odd to call it a ‘disorder’. A stress response to traumatic events is a normal thing I imagine most people face, and just because everyone copes with it in different ways surely doesn’t make some of them ‘disordered’? Anyways, I digress… One of the characteristics of people with CPTSD is that in an attempt to be sociable, they will often over-empathise. By that, I mean if I’m with people and someone is telling a story about something that happened to them, my initial response is to impart a similar experience of my own, to show I’m listening and I can relate. However, according to the ‘societal norms’, this can apparently be interpreted by others as an attempt to ‘one-up’ their story or make the...

I didn’t even know there was a term for this until I joined the Macmillan online forum. It refers to the grief you go through before a person has passed.  When my dad was diagnosed, it came as huge shock. We were under the impression (following multiple G.P and A&E visits) that he had some kind of urinary stricture. Having had a PSA test (he previously had, and beaten, prostate cancer), which came back as virtually undetectable, we thought our worst nightmares we over. Turns out prostate cancer can recur in rare cases as small cell carcinoma, which doesn’t show up in PSA. As a side note, throughout this whole saga, nobody once felt it necessary to do a simple digital rectal exam, even though we discovered two days after his death that an enlarged prostate was noted on an unrelated colonoscopy he had in July. But that’s a whole other story…  We found out in the most horrific way. Another story I don’t wish to go into at this point but let’s just say a doctor accidentally to...

 I guess that death and grief are not generally the things that inspire most people to start a blog, but I have had an overwhelming urge to write things down. A hope that it can help empty my mind of the thoughts that keep me awake at night lately. Will anybody ever read this? Probably not, but it matters not in the grand scheme of things.  I lost my Dad on 31st March 2023.  It was a whirlwind. In the space of a few short months, we went from holidaying in Rhodes to planning a funeral. From strolling on the beachfront to keeping vigil beside a hospital bed placed in the living room of my parent’s house. What seemed at the time like a torturous, never ending decline, was suddenly over in the blink of an eye.  And so, I will record my thoughts as I try to make sense of the world, now that there is a painfully bleak dad-shaped hole in it.