Aftermath

Aftermath is a word I have always taken to mean, the immediate effect of something happening. It is nearly a year since my elder sister died and in the last week I have been waking up in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking, and spending the next two hours at least calming myself down from the indefinable nightmare that woke me. At some point it became clear to me that these nightmares were somehow connected to my sister. She didn't feature in them at all. They weren't about her. In fact they were totally random and entirely unrealistic scenarios related to my work or places I had been to or planned to visit. Still I felt certain that there was a connection in there somewhere to her. Last night I came downstairs at around 3am having woken from yet another dark dream experience, and over a warm drink I thought about it. Gradually it came to me, that the connection between my sister, and these dreams, was pain. I was feeling intense emotional pain in these dreams. I was, in fact, reliving the experience of the month running up to her death, which was exactly a year ago. I thought about September 2012, and had another realisation, which was, that although I was living one of the most emotionally intense periods of my life - the impending loss of my sister, the terrible experience of watching her fade away from me, powerless to do anything to stop it, with so many others to help and support - I was experiencing it as if from behind a window. The actual pain was so dulled I was numb with it. A bit like when you chop vegetables and the knife bites into your thumb. The few seconds before you experience the pain of the cut - I was living those few seconds that whole time. In fact I was probably numb for a very long time afterwards. And what was happening this week, was that I was only beginning to really feel the aftermath of her death. Actually feel it, like a deep knife cut, and this was playing itself out in my head and heart the minute I went to sleep. I don't know, I always imagined grief as a linear thing - there have even been occasional moments in the last year when I have congratulated myself on coping so well, on escaping relatively lightly compared to others I have read about or met or heard of, who have experienced loss and have struggled to re establish themselves afterwards. Now I realise of course that my own journey has been a longer one to that inevitable pain. What about this pain then? It is terrible. It makes me clumsy, although of course lack of sleep is an obvious contributing factor. It makes me dazed and confused, tearful, deeply nostalgic for my childhood. I spend hours lying on my trampoline looking up at the stars at night imagining that I can see her. I sit over cups of tea while they slowly get cold. All year it's been about coping strategies for me, but in some way I think instinctively that this feeling, however long it lasts, needs to be experienced, to be met and allowed into my life. Not avoided or denied. That if I don't allow myself to feel this pain, I will be numb for the rest of my life. So. No furious kneading of dough or bopping to very loud music, no comfort retail therapy or long walks. Just very protracted periods of aimless introspection and the reliving of memory after memory after memory. This is my aftermath.