It’s been 9 whole years since my Oliver died.

Each anniversary is slightly different, but over time they mostly blur into one tear stained mess.  It gets easier, but I don’t think it’ll ever become just another day of the year.

This year, I had a good day with Tilly on Saturday and then I watched Game of Thrones until after midnight.  Foolishly, I had almost convinced myself that if I was thoroughly distracted I’d skip the danger zone and be fine.

Needless to say I was wrong.  It lasted about 2 hours in the end, the sobbing relentlessly interrupted by licky dogs.

I miss him.  He was cheeky and annoying and unpredictable and he broke my heart more than once.  Taio Cruz’s Break Your Heart was one of “our songs”.  Yes really.  It was one of the songs we used to sing while driving around London with the windows down and stereo cranked to the max.

I still catch myself thinking “I bet he’d love this” when I hear a song – I know he’d have loved Miley Cyrus’s Midnight Sky and I can almost feel him next to me while I watch Game of Thrones.  He’d have loved the nudity and the swearing.  And he’d have looked like a naughty school boy caught stealing sweets if I brought the show up in front of my parents.  I’ll never forget how embarrassed he was when we watched 40 Year Old Virgin with them.  If he could have crawled out of his own skin, he would have done!

My book

As many of you know, I started writing a book so that nobody else in my situation would ever need to feel as alone as I did.  A couple of years have passed since I started, the first draft has been read and commented upon, but something was holding me back from finishing the edits and sending it away for publication.

I was struggling to express who it was for.

Some people heard me talk about “people in my situation” and they thought it must be for women widowed with young children – Tilly was 10 days old when he died.  Sometimes I would explain more, and sometimes I just didn’t have the energy.

A Clear Message

Messaging is something I’ve been working on a lot for my business this year.  Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to sum up what other people do than your own “niche”?!  The challenge level was no easier when it came to my book.

Then I had a message out of the blue from somebody in my writers group.  Another coach, who I’d been on group calls with but didn’t really know, reached out.

“Am I right in thinking that your book is about grief and not entirely having the space to grieve?  I have a friend who has just lost a partner, but ‘it’s complicated’ and she’s cut out from the traditional grieving process.”

She went on to ask if there were any resources I could signpost her friend to.  I replied that sadly I’d never found any, and that was why I’d written the book.

And that’s when the thunderbolt hit me.  My super simple message about the book is that it’s all about grief when “it’s complicated”.

It’s Complicated

For me, “it’s complicated” covers our seven year on-off-friends-lovers relationship, addiction, his family, the other women in his life, legal issues and a death that had its own inquest.

For other people, “it’s complicated” could mean that they were having an affair with the person that died.  It might have been a torrid and passionate fling, or it might have been more of a Camilla situation.

They might have been a same sex partner of somebody who was publicly heterosexual and even married with children.

It might be that they’d broken up with the person years earlier, and therefore felt no ‘right’ to grieve.

They might have been desperately unhappy in the relationship, or even abused in it, and their support circle cannot understand why they grieve.

They might even be the person who felt responsible for somebody ending their life.  Or the person who others blamed for it.

Life is complicated and relationships are even more so.

Please Know This

If any of the above struck a chord for you, please know this.  Love is not rational, and neither is grief.  Neither can be plotted on a graph, nor predicted.  There is NO NORMAL when it comes to either.

We may struggle to understand ourselves and our own reactions.  We may struggle even more with the behaviour of others around us – I know I have.

Forgiveness is the key.

Forgive them for what they did in life.  Forgive them for dying.  They are dead and holding onto anger at them is pointless and only hurts the living – especially you.

Forgive yourself for everything you are struggling with.  Forgive yourself for all the things you did or did not do or say when they were still around to hear you.  You’re doing the best you can with what you have.  Carrying guilt only makes your life harder.

Forgive the other people around you who do not understand.  Forgive the other people around you who aggravate you.  This doesn’t mean you have to have a big heart to heart with them, it just means you stop giving your energy to them.

To sum it up with humour, I wouldn’t be bothered if a certain person fell down a mineshaft, but I wouldn’t bother to push them.  We may laugh about it but #NoFucksGiven saves lives.

Back To The Book

The other thing the aforementioned reaching out message reminded me of was that my book is needed.

So my big challenge as we enter a second lockdown is to complete the edits of my book and have it away to the publisher before Christmas.

If you’d like to be kept in the loop, please sign up here to my new mailing list (the old one sadly didn’t work, but this does. Promise!)