Good Enough

Something no one ever really talks about that occurs during the so-called ‘healing journey’ is the intense self-criticism that arises from a setback.

It seems to come from nowhere: one minute you’re making progress and you’re embracing the self-love and the next you can feel the tears pressing down on your throat again. The familiar prickle of quickened breath. The tension stricken across your face. You turn inward, you check in with your body. And you’re just so fucking tired. Although you have felt these things so many times before, they horrify you more this time. I thought I was getting better, you lament.

After you’ve left the bad relationship, after you’ve spent hundreds on therapy, after you’ve started to make better choices and reap the rewards… You’re still hanging on to the handle of the oven door on a Tuesday night, sobbing because you just can’t fucking do it anymore.

In your logical brain, you know this is normal. Everyone gets overwhelmed sometimes. But a much louder (and more psychotic) part of your brain is waving this around in the air as evidence. We’re still broken, we failed, we still can’t fucking cope, it jeers, dancing around in circles, vindicated at last.

I’ve said fuck a lot of times already. Bear with me. Of course, as an English teacher I have an extensive vocabulary, but sometimes only fuck will suffice.

This morning I have rationalised; our brains love to revert to the toxic thought patterns that they’ve always relied upon. I’m not good enough is my brain’s default. I’ve told myself throughout my life that the reason people cross my boundaries (and worse) is because I am not worth respect. This started when I was very little. I felt a strange, delicious sense of relief as I realised I wasn’t coping and I hated myself for it, because getting better is hard. What feels beautifully, deliciously easy is giving in. Confirming what you’ve always known to be true.

That’s no use to anyone, though. It’s not even remotely true, either. When I look properly at the things that made me reach that point last night, I see that much of it is out of my control. I work hard, I care about people, I will always help people if I can. I don’t deserve most of the bad things that have happened to me. Karma is not as clear cut as that, anyway. And some people are just pricks.

I’m not sure what the point of this post is. I think it’s just to reiterate to myself that I’m not a failure and I can cope. I got upset one time. That’s valid.

Recognising your own dangerous thought patterns and trying to rewrite them is a big step. I’m much further along in my healing process that I give myself credit for, because now I can see that my worthiness is not tied to single events or actions. But, I deserve to respect myself and advocate for myself in the same way that I would for someone I love. That’s true self-love. If Chlo or Meg or Britt felt this way, I would (literally) fight for them, so why won’t I do that for myself? If they told me they felt really down, I would believe them and validate them. So why do I gaslight myself in to thinking what I feel isn’t that bad? Why do I let myself suffer for so long? Hum.

Love always,

Char

Cut With Silver Scars

 Several days after my car crash moment, I went to my second referral appointment at Southmead for a series of very painful steroid injections. They took half a minute each and I had to have 6, directly into the surface of what was a very angry keloid scar. It felt like someone was holding a lighter to my cheek. The nurse assisting Jonathan held my hand and counted back from 100 with me, but I remember I was just whimpering random numbers in the 90s. “98, 97, 95, 97, Ahhhhhh,” then I puked in the bin. Fucking hell it burned. But fucking hell did it kill that scar.

A year on, after another round of steroid injections and, more recently, laser treatment (still with the same wonderful Dr), the scar no longer gives me pain or discomfort. When I run my finger along it now, I can feel the flattened skin as if it was any other part of my face, whereas before its rigid surface was completely numb. When someone would touch me and accidentally brush my scar I would cringe away because I felt the pressure but not the contact.

On a whim, my GP had referred me to Dr Jonathan, who is a specialist and a researcher in scars, at his ad hoc clinic. It had taken a lot of grovelling to even get to that point. Last year, my scar was still active – still thickening and getting wider even 3 years after I was bitten. It itched, and pain like toothache would bolt through my jawbone when it was cold outside. 

I was 25 and a young woman so I definitely felt the social pressure to be pretty. And learners would ask me about it. Or people would keep glancing at it instead of looking me in the eye. One time, a learner with additional needs (obviously not their fault) said “What the hell happened to your face,” pointing in horror. I never let these looks or comments bother me, but I reflect on them now and I see how it ground my confidence down.

At my first appointment, I had told Dr Jonathan the truth. I said, I don’t want this rock-hard angry thing on my face. It’s ugly, it hurts, it reminds me of a time when I was so depressed that I don’t want to look at my face anymore. I miss who I was before I went to Nottingham. To my shock, I started to cry, really fucking hard, right there in the doctor’s chair. I hadn’t cried once about being bitten. Not once. Not in the confusion of when it first happened, not when I was lying awake and alone in a hospital bed on a drip all night because they didn’t even know if the dog was vaccinated, not when I had to go back to a city I hated for surgery, not when I was having my stitches cut out after they had embedded in to my face, not when I spent my birthday with a big padded dressing covering a hole in my face, not about the way it hurt or the way it looked or what anyone had said to me. But at that first appointment, the truth of how I had felt all along just rushed out of my body. With the altruism and patience of a saint, gentle and genuine, Jonathan patted my arm and promised that we would try to make it better now.

He was patient as he explained why the scar had become hypertrophic. Why I still had stitch scars because they had knitted it too tightly and left the stitches in for too long. He explained his research (with a PowerPoint which I LOVED) and what he wanted to do to help me. I listened, my face wet with tears and my hands clasped tightly together like a child. I trusted him, and I was right to, he is a phenomenal doctor.

 

Anyway, the point in this post is to reflect on my feelings about all of this, but I wanted to explain the above for context. When grandad died, post-‘car crash moment’, I began to reflect on many many aspects of my life. For a long time, I had been told that I must be strong. Maybe it’s a Northern thing, maybe it’s an eldest daughter thing, maybe it’s a my family thing, I’m not sure, but I was raised to believe that I shouldn’t dwell on injuries, losses or pain because that would be pathetic. Moreover, in my early adulthood I was conditioned to think I was ‘playing the victim’ by trying to express that something (abuse) was upsetting me.

I started to suppress my feelings a lot. I didn’t bring things up because I knew I would not only go ignored but probably be berated. Then, when I was bitten, I began to believe that I deserved it. That I’d done bad things and I had to carry the evidence of them on my face as punishment. That it was wrong to even want to improve how it looked or felt because the scar was rightfully mine to bear.

Writing those words just made me tear up. Like Jonathan did when I finally told him how I felt, I want to pat the old me on the arm and say how sorry I am for thinking she deserved any such thing. I want to tell her how brave she is and how proud I am. She managed to get her Master’s degree literally bleeding, depressed and thinking she deserved it. I want to promise her that I’ll make it better now. Because I realise now that not wanting to wear a scar that was hurting me, inflamed and worsening, a stamp on my cheek reminding me of the most painful chapter of my life … that didn’t make me weak or vain. I wasn’t ‘playing the victim’ I was the fucking victim. Of a literal dog attack. Jesus Christ.

Recognising that the people who told me I was playing the victim and made me swallow my tears did so because of their own guilt and discomfort was liberating. It has taken much therapy, mind you.

Jonathan offering to help me with my scar changed me. His promise not only made my face better, it made me think I deserved for it to get better. I believe that the people who reach out their hand to a stranger and change the course of their lives are the pinnacle of the human experience, in part. May we be those people ourselves whenever we can, and may we have the courage to accept a pat on the shoulder from an outstretched hand and know that we always deserve love.

 

Something I wrote a long time ago, long before I was bitten. It doesn’t really have a title so in the interim I will call it, ‘Staring at the sunset (babe)’

Sitting, quitting, not admitting

romantics never learn

cricket choirs and creeping cold

the sky begins to burn

Screams, dreams, grand schemes

silence ‘midst the show

free and yet forgotten

the blades of grass aglow

Sit up, chin up, buttercup

for you are all you need

a wistful, wishful, wily wolf

at peace as dusk does bleed

Painted, tainted, captivated

cut with silver scars

broken, black and brilliant

with fables in the stars

The Car Crash Moment

 I have realised things in stages. Processed the ball of twisted thoughts in disconnected moments, the frequency of which have intensified, their significance gaining traction. Sitting in the Law classroom with one of the personal tutors and one of my learners, helping them process their tornado of thoughts, I processed one of my own.

Their tutor and I were talking them down. Telling them that if they don’t accept help for their mental health now, they will have a ‘car crash’ moment. A moment of culmination; a moment in which the monster will go from breathing down their neck to snaking his fingers around it. We told the learner about our own ‘car crash’ moments. I told them about an actual car crash, because I do tend to smash the Fiesta into things when I’m overwhelmed, but it got me thinking. What was my actual ‘car crash’ moment? The real one, the one that’s too messy to share with a vulnerable young person and my colleague. I knew straight away because I’d filed in under ‘The worst day of my life’. Am I exaggerating? It doesn’t feel like it, honestly.

The date was 4 days later than 17^th August 2022, the day my grandad got his wings. Theo’s gender reveal. I had been entrusted with making cupcakes, pink and blue, and I’d promised everyone that I’d make a balloon arch, too. I had a vision of what that day was going to be – I felt part of something life-changing for us all. It promised to be so full of love for the little one but also among the people who had already come together because of this new life. Then grandad died.

4 days after being ran over by the last train on the Northern line, I didn’t feel so full of hope as I had in the weeks prior. I felt like a zombie. I didn’t realise how dangerous my situation was until much later (maybe I’m still realising). The grief coupled with going back again to a man who was abusing me mentally at the time (which turned physical by the end) out of pure loneliness and desperation set me up for my tragic fall that day.

Like any great tragic hero, I grappled with a hamartia, and that day it was prosecco. My loved ones could see that I was battling to stay present, my mind barely able to graze the surface of this very special moment. The solution? Have a glass of prosecco, Charlotte. Aka the stupidest idea of all time and one which I should’ve immediately vetoed but did not because I was desperately seeking an escape and other people were telling me to do it and I was so bloody weak.

I knew Theo was a boy. I saw him in the back seat of Nana’s car in a dream once. So I was wearing blue. I watched the cannon blow, raining pastel confetti, cheering the loudest, moved by the joy on my brother and sister-in-law’s faces. “It’s a boy, Grands! A boy!” I sent the thought up to heaven as hard as I could. It was full of overwhelmed elation, teetering across a fine line into something more sinister. A feeling of pessimism that we were celebrating new life days after my very favourite life had ended. A feeling of injustice that grandad had been robbed of knowing that baby, who had been made while he was still on this earth. A screaming feeling that I wasn’t coping, awash with guilt because it was Dan and Britt’s special day.

I picked a fight with mum. I directed my annoyance at not being able to express myself at her because it had been her in the past who had silenced my emotions. The party had quietened down and people had started to leave, and I knew I had to go home. I had enough wherewithal to ask Britt to take me home, and bless her, she did. I thanked her profusely and apologised for not being myself.

When I got back to my house, my ex was there. I had promised to help with his application for a job, but I underestimated how much the gender reveal would impact me. I was decently drunk, and I took a bottle of prosecco into the garden and poured myself another. It was too late to stop drinking, I was spiralling and I knew it. I was sitting on the grass with Willow, sobbing almost uncontrollably by this point, and he was standing at the back door, annoyed that I had gotten in to too much of a state to help him with his admin. He snatched the prosecco out of my hand, began to shout, and I just continued to cry. Notably, friends, if a man (or anyone who claims to love you) can watch you break your heart and either treat you unkindly or not react at all (e.g. fall asleep), RUN.

The next part is a blur. I had started to disassociate when he did this, plus I was numb with grief. Of course, the blur was exacerbated by the fact that the glass I’d drank from the second bottle had now entered my bloodstream. He shouted so loud, he called me names, he told me I brought nothing to the relationship, and he wouldn’t let me walk away from him, that much I know. He would never let me leave, never, not until he was done. Sometimes this took hours. I also know that I was on the kitchen floor, sobbing, hitting myself in the face, unable to take anymore but unable to get away. There was blood. I remember that. An eerie calm came over him, the savage yelling stopped, and he started filming me. Then, he called my brother. He told Dan in the most pathetic voice I’ve ever heard that I was a mess, I was crazy, I was out of control. Said he needed help because he didn’t know what to do or how to stop me.

Dan and Britt came to the house immediately. Dan was upset and angry with me, struggling to regulate his own emotions, trusting what my ex had told him and taking the situation on face value, which is fair enough. Britt, pregnant, seemed much more doubtful. Then, somehow, my mum was on the phone, also yelling at me. My ears were ringing, and time warped as horror poured from my broken heart. Very slowly, I retreated the three steps towards the back door. I looked at their faces in turn as I moved, my face painted with panic and my own blood.

And… that was it. My car crash moment. In that moment, I internalised the disgust on my brother’s face, the concern of my pregnant sister-in-law and close friend, the mock fear and sadness on my ex’s face, simultaneously hearing my mum’s voice on the phone affirming his lies… And then, finally able to escape since we were in the presence of an audience, I bolted. I ran up my cul-de-sac in my blue dress as if the devil himself was chasing me.

I often think of the women who helped me that night, picking me up off the concrete where I lay and sobbed. One of them gave me a blanket. They told me I wasn’t crazy. That I was just grieving. That I should get signed off work, but that I would be ok. I didn’t get signed off work, but that’s a story for another day.

So, what did I realise in that moment in the law classroom talking to my learner about car crashes? I realised that I forgive the girl whose soulmate died, which lead to her getting too drunk that day. I love her. I grieve the fact that she wasn’t seen by those closest to her in her darkest moment. Britt came very close, but she was carrying our special boy and I knew I couldn’t lean on her as much as I maybe needed to at the time. I tried hard to protect her from that moment, but my ex didn’t have that same respect unfortunately.

It's not often that the tragic hero doesn’t die after the climax of the plot, to be honest. I teach literature, I would know. But this tragic hero remains to establish a new status quo. And, for the first time in a while, I’m excited to see what that looks like.

Confessions in the Black

 Over the years, you confessed
You said: "How do I know other people are real?
Some people aren't real. You might not be real.
I think I'm destined for more than you
because I'm more aware than you"

Even as I write, I'm desperate to find the words
Lest you misunderstand and go for my throat
Even though you aren't here, your ghost
Paces every room in this house
and every recess of my mind

(And it pisses me off to admit it, too
because I know it'll make you happy
that you fucked me up this badly
and that healing isn't easy)

"You don't know me, you only know what I have shown you"
- a sloppy confession, and
"All of the things we have in common were my things," and
"You're not having a panic attack, you're manipulating me"
I only knew the mask, you say, but God knows I've seen
the darkness underneath it one too many times

And I'm the one who likes liqueur coffee after dinner
and my steak rare and Greece and cats and red wine
Who are you?
What a relief it is to find that the you I loved so much
Was actually me

I was panicking so hard, by the way, still am at times
I thought I was a good liar but nobody lies like you
The things you thought I didn't know
Please understand, it's because I didn't want to

Such was your chokehold, you confessed so much
naming the demons that sit on your soul
but you named them after me

All this time, you said I never listened,
but what you were shouting and screaming  
was never meant to make sense
For hours and hours you told me I never listened
as you baited me to my death
but part of me was never yours
and so I didn't quite die
which made you want to kill me even more

That part of me finally died with grandad
and you cried with me, so very hard
that the reaper's fingers traced circles on my spine
as he whispered,
"He's copying you"

Then, one day, in another realm, I heard
my haunted shriek as you said his name in vain
Lurching towards you, a broken woman, just how you liked me
and the grin that cut the sneer on your lips
as your pupils swallowed amber
drowning it in black

Women and Madness

I recently started therapy – I’ve been saying it to everyone because I think it’s important to normalise it in all of my circles (my classes, my staffroom, my family). I’ve been shocked by the conservativism of some of the people I associate with; I thought we lived in a much more liberal world. A few of my nearest and dearest seem to have misinterpreted what I felt like was a sincere acknowledgement that I needed to do something to feel better as an admission that I’m crazy. As if I’ve said, “yeah I am a train wreck actually”.

It is known that women have been not only disadvantaged but failed by the field of psychology and psychotherapy through history. Women in the West were committed to asylums for defying their husbands, having sexual desires, speaking out of turn, witchcraft, having an affair, suffering a loss and feeling anxious and depressed as recently as the mid-1900s, when my grandparents were young.

Literature reflects this, as art imitates life, and portrayals of women have damaged society’s perception of femininity ever further. I teach my learners that female characters in classic fiction exist within three archetypes: the virgin, the whore and the mother. A ‘good woman’ who bends to the will of society, think Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, versus Fitzgerald’s Myrtle, Tom Buchanan’s poorer, sexier mistress. The doting, nurturing older woman who now lives for her children (or else risks being demonised as a mean old hag).

Beyond this, though, women are used as plot devices. They commit suicide or are murdered to build tension. They sometimes get naked and wander around being a perfect sexy, skinny, soft-breasted young maiden. They are also quite often debased by madness.

Which brings me back to my own story. I’m not sure if I’m ready to tell it yet because it’s still really confusing, but I’ve started talking about it more and some of it is becoming clearer. Frustratingly, the fact that I can’t think about what happened to me properly because of the confused haze falls in line with the mad woman trope. This bothers me because I started off being assured that I was mental, then I realised I was being deliberately gaslit which was making me mental, then I concluded it didn’t matter and I was now 100% fucking mental regardless. That sentence made me laugh. My therapist says I use humour to downplay trauma. Ha.

There are things and people that I cannot talk about here, which further clouds this account, but try to stay with me. My childhood has engendered the way I feel about myself, my boundaries and my understanding of love. I have learned to accept conditions on emotional support and barter for affection.

I give love so feverishly; my mind is full of poetry and whimsy and passion. I pour love on others even when they are too closed to accept it or if it’s a little too heavy for a light-hearted occasion. I know how much it means to me to feel love, so I don’t ever want the people I love to think I withhold it or to be confused about how I feel about them. But, to receive love, I know I have to try to be good enough. I have to jump as high as I can to reach the hoops. That’s how I envision it in my head, anyway, what I mean is, I have to try to meet that person’s needs, usually by betraying my own. I say ‘try’ because in the abusive dynamics in my life I never seemed to meet their expectations, but that’s because they weren’t designed to be met. They were designed to keep me jumping. This is a revelation to me that has come out of therapy but upon reflection is so obvious.

There are, of course, those who never expected me to jump at all and love me openly. These relationships are special to me. The person who offered me love first and most freely was grandad, and for that reason, what we had was sacred to me. I sometimes struggle with the healthy relationships because on some level I still feel like I need to try harder to provide value for them in order for them to still want to have me in their lives. I am unlearning this but it still makes me anxious. I quite often lie to my loved ones or just omit things that I think will make them angry or disappoint them. I’m sometimes worried that if I tell the truth they’ll shout at me or stop talking to me or bring it up again and again. It’s tiring. I can’t tell people how bad I feel sometimes because I think they want me to be happy and perfect and bring something positive to their lives, which means I suffer alone a lot. I cry in the car outside my house because I don’t even want Willow to see how much of a mess I can be. As you can imagine, in this constant state of tension, it is very easy to convince me that I’m crazy because it feels very plausible.

After growing up with these conditions, it felt very predictable and safe to continue to seek out these transactional relationships. I know how to jump really high, now, and that’s because I was with someone for a long time after I left home who made me keep jumping. I started to feel so exasperated. I knew something wasn’t right, I was hurting, but I was also reckless and flawed myself so I wondered whether he felt the same way as me and I was causing both of us to hurt. So, I kept jumping. Just as before, now and again I would claw my way through a hoop, but that never lasted and the next one would be far too high. But, the idea that if I tried really hard then sometimes I would make it kept me looking up at the hoops.

While I was looking at them, I lost sight of how the cycle was changing me. I didn’t see the bruises on my body or the way I looked older or my bloodied fingernails. It wasn’t one moment in the past few years that made me look down. It was a stolen glance. A twinge in my calf that forced me inspect a bruise. A gradual thing.

Once, when he finally left me again (or put me through so much that I couldn’t take it anymore for a while and told him to leave, I can’t remember) I felt so worthless and numb that I dared myself to look up abuse. So much of it resonated with what had happened to me in that relationship and before. I still have screenshots of websites on my phone from this first time, which was years ago.

He quickly dispelled these thoughts by telling me I was doing something called projecting (I now know this to mean positing your own bad qualities or actions on to another person to exonerate yourself from blame) because I was abusive and a narcissist. This became his favourite thing to scream at me in an argument, after that. So, the next time he left, I looked up narcissism. I thought, I might’ve caused all of this because I’m a narcissist.

I felt even more crazy, then. Some of the traits and behaviours I looked at did seem to align with me. Or did they? He told me I didn’t know love, but is that true? Do I lack empathy? I mean, I cared for my grandad to the end, I cry when Megs cries, I would do anything for Dan and Britt if they needed me, no matter what. I can’t accept that as the truth. So, I began to question other things he’d said, and I noticed just how black and blue I was.

Projection is the most confusing trap because coupled with other manipulation tactics it can make you believe you are to blame for what happens to you. The biggest stab to my mental health through all of this has been feeling so awful about myself (he would call me names constantly, say no one else would want me, say I was stupid, ‘not as fit as I think I am’, emotional, ignorant, crazy…) and feeling like it was caused by my own actions. That he was just reacting to me being difficult. I’m still untangling that, honestly. It feels like bullshit when I say it out loud to people but there is also a deeper part of me that believes I am hard to love, so why wouldn’t being around me make someone lose their shit eventually?

And so, what am I but a real-life rendition of the women and madness trope? The patriarchy makes it so fucking easy for men to gaslight women in to thinking they’re crazy. Post-modern society should, in theory, be free from this gendered trap, but alas it is not. In some ways, it’s worse because now men can convince us that not only are we crazy, but the very idea of the modern woman and feminism is extreme and wrong. It literally altered my core beliefs for a while. I’m still piecing together who I really, truly am as a result.

The Wing'd Inner Child

 Once upon a time, a child,
with golden hair was told
she was too much but not enough:
"Little Miss Always Right," they said
Slapping her forehead with a paper crown.
As the body grew around her wings,
she found she could no longer fly
and as she flapped, her feathers
lacerated the walls of her hanging cage
rattling around, "you're not clever,
this is your own fault,
you'll never get any better"
On your grandad's life - 

Painful as it was, a wiser me,
through red mist I never did make out
picked up the feathers for that little girl.
She welded them to my aching ribs
encasing red vessels in molten metal 
bitter, vengeful and shouldering a massacre
she found she was practiced
at mopping up blood
spilled by others
with cutting looks
and fatal words
and head splitting caresses in the screaming dark

Sawdust

How do you get a ball of thoughts on to a piece of paper? Which thread do you pull out and stick down first? Especially when there are a lot of loose ends in that tight ball of chaos. I recall my creative writing workshops from university – Lania told us: “If you’re struggling to find an ‘in’, talk about the setting. The weather. Fixate on a character.”

The setting is an empty classroom in January. Sunlight streams through the windows I’ve just exposed, gently contracting the blinds to satisfy my craving for vitamin D that has intensified these past few rainy weeks. It’s cold outside but feels like June now on my back. I’ve been asked to cover I.T. this afternoon but they’re all ‘working from home’. And so, I am at a loose end.

Fixating on any given character in the narrative would lead to a rather depressing encapsulation of my childhood trauma, and anyway, besides that, my fixation on people always leads me back to grandad.

On Sunday the 14^th August, I told grandad to let go. I walked into his room at the care home that day with Willow in tow. She would barely be coaxed across the threshold. Willow has an especially emotive face and so I couldn’t ignore the bolt of horror stricken across her eyes as she became aware of the other figure in the room. Grandad lay on his side, unconscious but looking overall like he was sleeping. Until you really looked. His knee was poking out of the bed sheets and as I moved to cover it back up, I saw how exposed it really was, the fat and flesh having peeled back to reveal an almost spherical joint attaching his thigh to his calf. His thigh and his calf were the same thickness, his skin pale and sore. I covered it with the duvet slowly and deliberately.

The carer offered me some time alone with him. I could feel the implication of her words but was numbed by the trauma of his repeated NDEs. I struggled to convince myself that it was actually a goodbye that was warranted instead of a ‘get up you lazy bugger’. Willow was pulling her lead tight, now, in an attempt to leave the room, alerting me to her fear with a low cry which always puts me on edge. I tried to blank her out as I took the situation in. He was murmuring in his sleep.

“Grandad?” I tried after a moment. The invitation hung in the air, crisp and clear against the backdrop of death. I stroked the side of his head, along the dip of his temple, just as I had a million times before, noticing how the dip had deepened and turned every shade of blue. “What you doing you silly goose, get up.” My voice cracked this time. I surprised myself. Maybe I was starting to see the severity of the situation. Or, more likely, maybe I’d never truly become immune to the pain. And maybe every time the big drops and the upside-downs came around on this ride, my heart raced all the same. My heart has become a significant problem, these days. As if every time his would dip out, mine tried to compensate by beating like utter fury, making me sick to my stomach and fragmenting my thoughts. Now that he’s gone, it’s still subconsciously trying to revive him by flooding my body with adrenaline constantly.

I had started to panic, granted, but I am very good at coping with panic. I have seen her before. I continued to stroke his head, and said gently in his ear, “Eeeee god you lazy bugger,” to which he fluttered his eyes and murmured a wordless complaint. This made me smile. I knew his blood pressure had dropped again. I knew he hadn’t eaten or drank for days. But he could hear me. He knew I was there. I thought on this for a second, Willow’s crying intensifying my heartbeat all the while, then I said, “You have to stop now please”. He made an indignant noise. A year ago that dry, gasping mouth would have been tickled by a smile as it formed the words, “You’re bloody cheeky, Charley”. “Grandad. I love you so much, but you need to stop, this isn’t right anymore. I’m ok. You have to go now. You have to stop.” It felt like pushing sand out of my mouth, gritty and uncomfortable across my tongue, but I kept going, with such dulcet Mackem tones that he couldn’t possibly mishear. Then, riddled with memories of his confusion, his growing anger and his emaciated body, I whispered, “you can’t get better from this.” It was the first time I had admitted this.

And so, I told him to go. By the time I straightened up, relenting to Willow’s desperation to leave the death room, I was stiff. I moved like I was in a dream, towards the door. I looked back one last time and I said as loud as I could (he was deaf as a post) “I’ll always love you,” and again he murmured something, and I know he knew I did.

People were crying, then, as I walked out of the care home. Some of them wanted to hug me. Alas, the numbness had sealed my heart once more and all I said was, “Don’t call me. Please, I can’t take it. Call someone else.”

I didn’t cry for hours, until I was sitting in the bath later that night, my phone a bomb once again, waiting, waiting, my heart rushing the seconds as it raced. Then, I fucking screamed. I choked on my grief and my panic, begging God to let my grandad die while already falling into the void his soul was leaving in its wake.

The next day, nothing happened, and the next, nothing. He was dying now of thirst, fitting from dehydration. Give him the fucking morphine, we said.

Then, on the morning of 17^th of August, I was dreaming I was flying. Over the park and Ashbury Drive and Hillside School. I awoke suddenly to the slamming of my bedroom door. It has never done this before, and my anxiety was now so bad that I was immediately in fight or flight. I think, now, that he had come to tell me himself that he had done as I’d said was best, and to check on me one last time on his way to Nannie. Minutes later, Auntie Dawn called me. The words “he’s gone, Charlotte” barely even registered at the time but now they are like a brain worm eating away at me every day.

You see, I didn’t even know what I was going to write about this afternoon, only that I wanted to write, and yet here we are. This brain worm masquerading as a thread is the one I have pulled out. Hopefully things will get easier, now.

Love,

Char

xxx