Lost for Words

Today’s blog is quite hard to get out of my head into print, it’s the effect that Julie’s first, I think people call spiritual birthday has had on us. It’s very common to hear how hard the first of any event can be but having experienced my own birthday then Christmas and New Year, I think maybe I wasn’t expecting this day to much different, but it was.

We gathered around for dinner; I had been thinking all day about what to say without making it even more difficult for everyone. As our dinner went on I found it impossible to touch on anything too serious, just kept looking up the other end of the table to the empty chair and realising how hard it is to mention the word birthday without saying the word happy and at that exact time there wasn’t a place for happy. As the night went on I felt that everyone else might have been having similar thoughts and before I realised it was time for everyone to go and we hadn’t wished Julie anything, I felt so pathetic.

The last three days we have all been feeling down again and if I hadn’t had to go out and do an urgent building inspection this morning, I might literally stayed in bed all day. It’s not depression I don’t think, it’s maybe some suppressed anger at the cancer we hated so much. Just before Julie passed she said to me that she was about to get her revenge on the cancer and kill it, as she was the only person in the world that could do that and we sat and cried at that thought but we knew it was true. I hadn’t gone back to that memory for a long time.

I think I might need a belated birthday cake and go back and address this issue and then going forward I need to mark the day properly. As with everything I know Julie will understand and if she could, make a joke and tell me to smarten up and I would agree and then go and do it, but in my defense I would say, well, what do you expect when you leave me unsupervised, you know what I’m like? On that note I’m off to smarten up.