Girl, Interrupted.

It's been 5 years since anybody I was close to died, but I was kind of due for a respite. When I was 18 to 19 three close friends, my grandmother and my aunt died over two years, I sort of held my breath for a couple of years after that waiting for something else to happen.

I had forgotten you see, what I'm like when I'm dealing with something like this, and I have had no experience of dealing with it and having to work full time at the same time, painting a smile on every morning and all the while combating an aching sadness that seems to seep out of your chest, into your stomach and leave you stuck for words in very inopportune moments. I find that I either talk a lot, I mean, an awful lot, I seem to have to fill every minute with dialogue so that I can think about anything else but the thing which fills my brain, or I am totally disabled, I literally cannot make a single decision. Take last night, I went to Ikea to collect some living room furniture that (luckily) we had already decided on, and talked every single second of the hour or so we spent there, I talked about work, TV cabinets, Glenn, my mother, my grandparents, my weight, the mirror we've put in the bedroom, the car, it just went on and on and on. Then later at home, I couldn't decide whether or not to go to bed, I sat on the sofa at 11.15 and could not decide whether I should go to bed and try to sleep, or stay up and wait until I knew I could definately sleep, would I risk getting overtired if I did that? Would I spend hours lying awake if I went to bed? So I just sat there for about an hour, no TV on, just sitting and wondering what I should do, until finally Glenn came downstairs, I explained my predicament to him and he gently but firmly told me to go to bed.

So today was Uncle John's funeral and as someone said to me, it would be nice to think of funerals as celebrations of a persons life but there is so much emotion involved that it's very hard not to feel that pressure on your chest, weighing you down as you try and make cups of tea which people push a spoon around and watch their tears fall into. I looked through the photo albums of him as a young man on his wedding day and spent 20 minutes trying to decide whether I should sit down or not.

It's over now though, so eventually I expect I can start to feel like a normal person again, rather than a loose parcel which might fall apart if anyone pulls on the the strings too hard.