It has been a while since I put pen to paper. Often times, now that some of what I write ends up on the Thinking of Oscar website, I hesitate writing down how I am feeling because there is nothing new. What am I meant to say when someone asks me how I am? I got caught out the other Friday by the guy at the petrol station who asked me if I was all finished now for the weekend and I looked at him completely blankly. Then I realised that David and I don’t really differentiate between a week day and the weekend in the same way that holidays are no longer special days either. A day is just a day. We start it, live it and finish it.
Fundamentally though what David and I really appreciate and quite frequently have our breath taken away by, is how much positivity we are surrounded by. The number of people who are motivated to be involved with Thinking of Oscar and who want to support us. We are constantly meeting people and doing things that we would not otherwise have done. David has said that he has never enjoyed a job as much as the one that he is doing now and that is due in part to it being in a completely different area to where he was before (which fits with old life versus new life) but also that there is some overlap between his work agenda and our charitable agenda and so it is easy to see that what he is doing is worthwhile.
The other question that I have kept coming back to over the past sixteen months is about happiness. Since Oscar died I have been obsessed with asking parents, who are much further down this path of losing their child than us, whether they are ever happy and how they survive. I’m not expecting to feel happy right now – that would be odd, but it would be good to know that where we will be in ten years time will be somewhere different to now. Maybe somewhere where we have learned how to be still. We don’t tend to relax of an evening because we find that very difficult and so we throw ourselves into Thinking of Oscar. Having then found myself slurring my words whilst reading a story yesterday morning to Holly, after a particularly late night, I knew that I had probably pushed it a bit far. Anyway, in this ongoing quest for some kind of contentment further down the line I had spoken to a friend who had experienced more than his fair share of untimely grief and what he made me realise was that there is no magic bullet. Time is a healer is an expression that I find overly simplistic and I really don’t find it helpful if someone suggests that to me. But what I did come to realise was that you just have to get on with it. This is it. This is life. You just have to survive. And whilst most people are unlikely to experience loss quite like ours there are so very many people who have a story, who are not living their ‘plan A’ life. Everything that we now are and everything that we now do is because of Oscar. Another expression that we heard a lot at the beginning is that Oscar lives on in our hearts (what use is that to me? As I write this it is 10pm. He should be tucked up in his bed upstairs). But I do understand the sentiment of the saying and it’s certainly how David and I are choosing to manage now. As I read somewhere this week “In every sunny life there are rainy days.”