Chapter 13 - Flanders

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The flashbacks acted like a huge magnifying glass, amplifying the vast numbing reality of my loss. The blinding intensity and pain of these emotional reactions is almost impossible to describe. It is very difficult to explain flashbacks to anyone who has not lived through them because they are so distant from everyday experience. Of everything that I have lived through during the cycle of Max's illness, death and my bereavement, nothing compares to the pain I suffered from the flashbacks. They were relentless and unremitting.

The flashbacks occurred virtually every day in one form or another for about one and a half years before they started to subside. In many ways I think that they were a necessary process for my recovery. They were an outlet, a release of a pent-up backlog of everything that had happened to me over the previous four years and which had been consigned to the depths of my mind in the interests of immediate survival.

As each flashback receded it was followed by tears. I experienced these flashbacks most days early in the morning as I drove round the M25 to work and also in the evenings after I returned home. This crying was not childhood sobbing but gut wrenching cries and streaming tears which left me emotionally wrecked and very withdrawn.

In addition to the flashbacks were the dreams and nightmares which were far less frequent but just as unpredictable as the flashbacks and almost as upsetting.

I had many disturbing dreams.

During one dream Sara turned to me and asked in desperation "Could they reverse the polarity of his blood?"

I became angry.

"What do you mean Sara, he is dead."

She burst into tears.

"I know, I know, but I keep thinking that he's just gone away for a little while."

Many of the dreams contained the line "For God's sake, don't you realise he is dead" to whoever was talking about Max.

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