I had my therapy session on Tuesday and it was a relief to be able to sit and be and talk things through with her...it was good to put some space around it away from my dad and sister and their immense grief, shock and guilt. T was incredibly kind and caring and had a very calming energy...she said I can text or phone her whenever I want to, morning or night, and that if she can’t answer right away she will get back to me as soon as she can. She had checked in on me every day via text for the few days between we messaging her to tell her what had happened on Saturday and me seeing her on Tuesday. I feel grateful to have her around so that I don’t have to just dump all this on my partner who is very upset herself.
I came home after therapy and it’s been good to recalibrate a bit and to put a bit of distance between me and my family and what has happened.
But then I feel guilty because then I think of Dad and my sister (my sister and niece have lived with my parents for several years) and I think of them being so “in it” with no real escape and I feel so badly for them and so guilty that I have somewhere else to go where I can be away from it all and keep it all “over there”.
My sister has been in bits. She found my mum....she said she can’t get the image out of her head and that she can’t go into the room in the house where Mum died. I don’t know how to help her with that...
Dad is still being largely hyper and chipper. But then there are brief moments where he stops and it clearly hits him and he visibly crumples but then almost instantly gets into frantic doing mode again.
I’m still undecided about whether to speak at the funeral. I really want to...I want to be able to step up and do it for Mum. But I’m still worried I’ll have a massive wobble and won’t be able to get the words out. My dad said the other day that he once went to a funeral where someone was listed on the order of service as doing the reading but that they then didn’t get up to do it and the minister did it. Dad then said that, the thing about that was, that that’s a big failure...that the person who was going to do it but then realised they couldn’t would feel like such a failure. And that everyone who was there would have known that they had failed too. I don’t agree with him. At all. But now he has put that out there, I am in even more of a dilemma.
For now, I have found a reading I like but I haven’t shown it to dad or my sister yet. I’m thinking that perhaps we can put it in but not specify who will be reading it...and I can practise it at home with the intention of doing it but that the celebrant and I can talk about it before hand and have some kind of system where I can show him whether I can do it in the moment or not. That way, if I feel I can’t, the celebrant will just do it himself and no one will know that it was supposed to be me. So, no one will know what an epic failure I am... ?
@blackemerald1 - I’m definitely only thinking of reading out a poem, not doing a eulogy....the celebrant will be doing all the talking about Mum and her life.
We still haven’t got the celebrant confirmed. We are waiting for a call to tell us when he is available to come and meet with us to start gathering his information. I was hoping he might be able to do sometime tomorrow but seeing as it is now lunchtime on Thursday and he still hasn’t got in touch. We don’t even know yet whether he can definitely do the funeral date as that discussion was between the celebrant and the funeral director - I’d like to think that if he couldn’t do it, the funeral director would have called my dad by now to tell him and to offer some other suggestions of people who could do it instead, but who knows.
I’m feeling edgy about that not being confirmed yet. I want to know we have definitely got him to do the funeral and want to know when he can do the meeting with my family as I want to be there for that and would prefer that my wife is able to be there too. Hence, we were hoping for tomorrow or sometime over the weekend. If it ends up being next week, I will likely have to go there without my wife and I may end up having to miss therapy, which wouldn’t be ideal. So, I am worrying about that...even though I know there is no point in worrying about it.
I went to GP today to say what had happened and to ask for some sleeping pills. I accidentally burst into tears, which meant I couldn’t even say “my mum has just died” for ages. He was sweet. Gave me the prescription without any argument.
Yesterday’s post-mortem showed that Mum had a blood clot in one of her coronary arteries, which triggered a massive heart attack. Her death would have been instantaneous, the coroner said, so she would not have suffered. That is some comfort - and hopefully my dad and sister can now stop feeling guilty over whether they could/should have done something differently. According to the coroner, no one - not even a medical person - could have done anything at any point that would have saved her.
Dad said that my mum’s father had died the same way and that he hadn’t been very old either. I told my GP that today and he looked a bit concerned and said that, seeing as my mum was young (72) and so was her dad when they both died of heart attacks, we need to have that on our radar for my future health. He invited me to come in for a health check whenever I feel like it. Pretty sure I know what the outcome of that will be - eat more healthily, do more exercise, lose weight, drink less wine!
I told my dad and sister that I would think about music for the service and draw up a short list of options. When I said it, I felt fine about doing it. But now I need to do it....I just want to go to sleep and ignore it all instead.
I haven’t really been thinking about Mum much. Not really. I’ve been thinking about all this other stuff around it....funeral arrangements, the wake venue, Flowers, clothes, music, re-jigging my diary to accommodate flitting back and forth etc....but I haven’t really been thinking actually of her very much at all. Moments when I have, it just takes me breath away. And all this unreal ness feels hideously, painful real for that instance and then the unreal ness comes back and I start to think about readings or flowers or something again.
It’s like time is in slow motion at the moment. The funeral is in two weeks time. That feels like a lifetime away.
