Brr. 'Now the winter of our discontent is not made glorious summer by this son of York' - or anywhere else for that matter. It's freezing and has been for days. Fog, frost, screaming cold southerlies - my feet haven't been properly warm for a week.
We're on the eve of small daughter's second birthday - which is of course also the second anniversary of my sister-in-law's death. Some 20 hours separated Frances leaving in the wee small hours and small daughter arriving just prior to midnight on the 30th. As the tiny wrinkly little person entered this world at 11.55pm, I remember saying to my surgeon through the haze of epidurals and other stuff they gave me for the caesarean, "I wish it had been five minutes past not five minutes to midnight" so that there would be a slight degree of separation of the days - for her sake as she got older and was able to understand about birthdays and other things, and the sake of my brother. Because I wasn't at Frances' funeral (being still in hospital with my wee in a bag tied to my leg following the surgery), in some ways her death wasn't quite real to me - I was too busy trying to figure out how to deal with a small, hungry baby who would never stop crying and whom I could not feed, and so I'd never had time to stop and just realise that France wasn't there. In some ways it wasn't until her ashes were committed last year that I was able to say goodbye.
Although I've been looking forward to giving the little person her presents and a happy day tomorrow, there's always one part of me that cries for the wonderful person we lost, whom I loved and who my daughter would have loved too. And if I cry tonight, I know there will be others crying with me whose loss was greater and more terrible because they were closer to her.
Pachyderm
No comments:
Post a Comment