Chapter 13 - Flanders

139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162

I knew what I felt, at least I thought I did. What spewed forth surprised and frightened me. I started to see the past years objectively. I had never realised the true intensity and complexity of my relationship with Max. I was his father, but I had become his brother, his best friend, his nurse and his doctor. We had become so close, and I gave him all my love and affection. I depended on him for the only love and affection which I received because Sara and I had grown so far apart. By the time Max died many of the traditional aspects of a parent-child relationship had become reversed. A child normally looks towards the parent for their role model. In our case our roles had switched. My son had shown a courage and fortitude which I found incredible. I wanted to be as strong as him and to have a faith which could confront the unknowable with so much strength and peace. All of this and more came out in the counselling sessions but what stood out so clearly more than anything else was the fact that I had lost more than a child. I had lost my will to carry on.

The sessions with the Counsellor helped my depression and the voidal emptiness, but these slowly started to be replaced by something far more frightening. About five months after Max's death the pain changed. The flashbacks started.

I had always thought of flashbacks as a living dream, a demented film loop which endlessly replays some terrible event. For me the flashbacks were not the technicolor reality of hallucination. There was nothing to see, no sounds, just an intense internal playback of emotions.

They rarely focussed on the worst moments Max and I had lived through together but were fragments of my life with Max. They were long forgotten conversations and snippets of events which I did not even realise that I knew. Many were totally innocuous in their content, but they were so terrifyingly real. I was there, experiencing each moment in its entirety. The flashbacks were a total emotional immersion. The memories themselves were usually happy ones, but they intensified the loss, they amplified the fact that I would never see Max again.

These were not ghosts, they were living nightmares which reared up without warning. They were a crushing, numbing, reality which was so hard to face and that left me emotionally wrecked and quivering inside.

Often they came in cascades, the first triggering the second with no apparent link. The pain came from the fact that emotionally I was there with Max and this was a lost world which was being replayed in full and in real-time. Sometimes the flashbacks were not real events but imaginary situations which were conjured up in my mind's eye. Again these were not the flat fantasies of normal thought but events which were lived through moment by moment.

145

Copyright © 2001