Death can knock you sideways. One minute life is going on as normal and you’re getting on with work and play and your head is full of stuff that seems important – what to cook for dinner, what article to tackle next, the car tax needing to be paid, a pet due a vaccination, how long it is since you blogged or tweeted or Facebooked or what to do about a dodgy filling or what to get as a wedding present for someone in two months’ time and the next such everyday things are hurled into insignificance when utter tragedy strikes. Someone you love has died. Suddenly. Incomprehensibly.
And now no Sunday morning will ever be the same again because it’s the time you got the news that your nephew lost his life in an accident the night before. It’s a beyond grief experience. Looking back now it’s hard to understand how everyone has managed since, facing the stonewall finality of it – wake, funeral, aftermath still ongoing…
Here, it’s like losing a child, by one remove, your heart going out to your sibling and sister-in-law and their older child and you can’t find the right words to take away the pain nor make sense of it all yourself. You’re so grateful, though, for the friends and neighbours who braved the wall of grief then, and since, to extend a hand or hug. “It could happen to any of us,” they said.
And it could. And does. You know that now… And as days run into weeks and months, there’s some kind of thankfulness, too, for the daily, mundane tasks that erect scaffolding within collapse and take your mind away, even briefly, from what’s impossible to believe. Until another reminder comes… And now my prayer is that Wayne, only 23, will rest in peace and that understanding – and acceptance – will somehow come. Eventually.