With September progressing I feel my anxiety levels rise, triggered by the back to school chaos with a child with Autism and my husband away in South Korea for the first couple of weeks of the month amongst other things.  This is a post that has been in progress for a couple of weeks and has undergone change, development and rejection but is one that I felt needed to be written.
Six years ago our daughter, Emilie, died.  It is her anniversary in less than two weeks.  It is the event from which this blog grew and is a defining moment of my life – the point at which ‘before’ became ‘after’.  My life bears no resemblance to that which it did before Emilie’s death and I am completely changed as well.
She changed me and her death made me into the person I am today.
But that is not especially what I am writing about now.
Four days ago my dad died.  He was probably ‘dad’ in name only.  I did not know him well and had not seen him for over a decade.  He made huge mistakes when I was growing up - which are not for this blog – and at the age of 22, after his separation from my mum, I made the decision to protect myself and withdraw from him.  It wasn’t really a conscious decision at the time but became a conscious decision over time.  I did not like the person I became when I was faced with the prospect of seeing him.  I did not like the panic attacks, the anxiety, the obsessions and the lies and when I had my own children I realised that my priority had to be to my own family.  I had to learn to be a parent and work out what that looked like for myself.
But now I am faced with fresh grief – and with decisions that are really hard for me to make.  At this anniversary time I am struggling to isolate one grief from another; the grief of Emilie’s death from the grief of the death of an absent parent.  How should I feel and what is the right way to respond?  If the past six years have taught me anything it is that grief is hugely personal.  There is no right or wrong way to grieve and the social norms and rituals that surround death can often make personal grief hard.
I have spent the past few years thinking that I have finished grieving my (lack of) relationship with my dad yet the news of his death hit me much harder than I expected. Maybe this is because of its close proximity to Emilie’s anniversary, maybe it’s because I have dealt with it alone while John is away or maybe it’s because grief is actually cyclic and, as I have said before, time does not heal all wounds.
Right now I am firmly rooted in the Anger stage of Kubler Ross’ Grief cycle and I’m happy here – it’s easy to wallow in my own self pity rather than having to deal with the acceptance that I will never receive the answers or apology(ies) that I have so longed for.
Yet I feel like a fraud.
The majority of people who know me well will know about the difficult relationship I had with my dad and my grief feels like a lie.  It becomes something I believe I don’t deserve to feel and the hurt, pain and disappointments of the past 35 years are coming back to haunt me.  Is there a correct way to mourn the death of an absent parent and how is it possible to reach a position of acceptance and forgiveness when it is now totally one sided?
I don’t have the answers and I possibly never will – it is something new that I will have to learn to process and I don’t want anger and hatred to surface as I learn to process things.
And then there’s September ... Samuel picked up a conker this morning and I struggled to share his excitement.  They will forever be a seasonal reminder that we are drawing closer to the anniversary of Emilie’s death.  Her death came at such a significant time in the year – that change of season from the heat of summer to the beauty of Autumn and then my grief led me into the barrenness of winter where I genuinely hibernated with the warmth of the air until spring came round again.  And as I enter this new wave of grief I feel myself ready to hibernate again whilst I process everything that has happened.
Hopefully with the promised change of season from winter to spring that seems so far away at present, I will enter a place of forgiveness and acceptance and will be able to move forward.  For now, after days of agonising and wrestling with guilt, grief and anger, I need to be able to be with my immediate family as John returns from South Korea and make choices and decisions that are best for us.  I need to be ‘ok with not being ok’ about this particular situation and that is something that is not easy for me.
But who ever said that grief was easy ...?