On Your Own Cocker

People often assume that the hardest part of loosing someone is the moment they die.

For me it wasn’t.

Holding my Dad’s hand as he took his last breath was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do alone. I sat there with dad in that hospital room and lied. I told my Dad that it was ok to let go! I knew what was happening. I knew I was saying goodbye. But I didn’t cry. I didn’t fall apart. I didn’t even really feel grief.

I felt numb.

Three months later I walked into to wake my Mum and found her in her peaceful forever sleep. Again, there were no floods of tears, no screams. Just a strange hollow emptiness. I just stood looking at Mum and I remember thinking how peaceful she looked, and at the same time I was in complete disbelief. It’s a strange empty feeling that is impossible to explain unless you have lived it.

It’s as though inside you stop, while the rest of the world carries on moving. People still go to work. The sun still rises and sets. Time keeps ticking, but inside you’re frozen.

It wasn’t those moments that broke me. It was everything that came afterwards.

One afternoon after Dad passed, I walked into his greenhouse. His onions were still growing. His tools were exactly where he had left them. I started tending to his onions and moving tools around, just as he would of done.

Then it hit me.

It felt as though every emotion I’d been holding down rose from my feet, through my body, all at once. I cried uncontrollably I shook. It was the first time grief found me again.

Then the day the day came they collected Mum’s hospital bed.

For years that bed had become part of the home. It represented the years of caring, the sleepless nights checking on Mum, the routines, the laughs I had with her, the frowns when I got something wrong and everything we had fought through together.

When the man came and wheeled it out the house, the reality hit me!

She wasn’t coming back.

That was the day the dark cloud settled over me. The day my world truly shattered.

Then there were the routines that just stopped.

No more meal prep for mum, no more buying her favourite puddings, no more good mornings with a cup of tea, no more goodnights and a long cuddle, no more bedtime routines, no more nurses coming, no more position changes. It all just stopped!

For years my life had revolved around caring. Then overnight everything just stopped. The routines disappeared, but I was still waking up expecting to do them.

The silence was deafening.

Everyday felt like I was living inside a nightmare everyone else had somehow woken up from.

As hard as losing my parents has been, there has been one thing that has been harder.

Watching my children grieve the same people too.

They still needed meals, hugs, reassurance, clean clothes, routines, laughter and someone to tell them everything would be okay. They still needed their Mum, even when I wasn’t sure how to hold myself together.

Trying to carry your own grief while helping your children carry theirs is something that is not talked about enough. You become the safe space for everyone else while quietly falling apart behind closed doors.

Then there is the house valuations for probate.

People rarely talk about this part on a personal level.

Standing in the family home, the only home I had ever known. Whilst strangers walked around valuing rooms, discussing square footage and talking about market prices felt unbearable. I know they were simply doing their job, but all I could think was that they were putting a price on my parents entire lives.

How do you put a price on Christmas mornings, birthdays, summer BBQ’s, games nights, laughter, family tea times, laughter and tears?

You can’t!

People often ask what the hardest day was… truth is

It wasn’t my Dad dying.

It wasn’t Mum dying.

It was the ordinary days that followed that slowly taught me they were never coming home again. And somehow those were the days that broke me.