Chapter 13 - Flanders

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I was in the Mount St Helen's category and in a way I am glad. This form of grief involves a complete immersion in the death but allows you to start living a normal life after the dust has cleared.

Max's illness and death were phenomenally stressful. The death of a child is one of the most stressful events a person can ever encounter, but cruelly and with the 20/20 hindsight of time, it is nothing remotely like the aftermath. The grieving was the start of something far worse. It was pure pain. Pure agony, anguish and suffering. These words tell you nothing.

My grief started out as a quiet void which grew and grew. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so into this void were drawn a cacophony of emotions which also grew and grew and created an ever growing whirlwind of pain which rapidly span out of control. This tornado of grief was gradually replaced with hurricanes and gales that appeared unpredictably. Gradually these winds quietened and after two years I was able to start rebuilding my life.

Sara and I cleaned Max's room the day after he died. We dismantled his bed and shampooed the carpet and then moved Paula's bed back into the room. Sara sorted and packed away all his possessions and distributed his toys as he had requested in his Will.

I felt nothing but quietly empty. There was a sense of enormous loss, a vacuum, a huge vast endless desert of emptiness. I wanted to hug him and to have his little arms around me. I wanted to stroke his head, comfort him, talk to him, watch him sleeping, smell him, listen to his voice, anything that was part of my life with Max. Max's life and needs had permeated our lives for so long and in ways that I had never even realised. His laughter, his tears, getting up in the night, his video games, they are things which we had lost. There were also the events which were tinged irrevocably with Max. Mealtimes and watching television were two that stood out. We needed a new pattern, a new way of life.

It was strange not providing the care anymore. No more pills, sick bowls, cleaning his vomit or wet beds and everything else which had become part of our normal lives had also gone. It was now that we realised how abnormal our lives had become. There was so much adjustment needed to return to the real world.

There was no more worry, no more watching for the next symptom, the next temperature. No more total preoccupation with his cancer.

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