I’ve decided to write a little bit about grief every day. The idea is to write for 365 days, though I’m not sure when to count as day 1. It’s been 15 weeks and a day since my mum died – 106 long days. I can’t believe it’s been that long. Sometimes I feel like I want to go back to day 1, when it was so sudden and raw and shocking. I don’t like the time ticking past, the ever-growing gulf between BSD and ASD (before she died and after she died). There’s an ever-growing gulf between now and the last time I spoke to her, the last time I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll have to tell Gug about that’, the last time I didn’t wake up with the ever-present weight of grief on my shoulders.
It’s been 106 days since my mum died, but also only 76 days since I went back to medical school, and 68 days since my mum’s funeral. It’s 10 days until my mum’s inquest…and it feels like once the inquest’s over, then all of the ‘bereavement bureaucracy’ is over and we really have to just ‘get on’ with life.
At the moment I feel very distant from the world, my friends, my course, my normality. At the same time, I feel like I’ve been catapulted into this world of normality: I started back at medical school exactly 4 weeks after flying back from France after my mum’s death, and still 8 days before the funeral. There’s been a real need to put a brave face on and get on with things. I feel like a very different person to who I was BSD, and it’s taking a lot to understand how to be me ASD. I know that gradually I will find a new way to be me, to understand this new ASD life and to forge a new future, but for now the present is very difficult.
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