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| Good excuse to look at Paul Nicholas. Click here for a cheese fest |
As
a child, though, it was a hideous void of anti-climax.
When I was 8 my Grandma (who had lived with us for 4 months of the year for as long as I could remember) had her 80th birthday party at our house. It was 29th December and, as Mum and Dad were not exactly party animals, a big “do” like this was a novelty. Relations I hadn’t seen before (or since, come to that) came from all over the country.
The following day we were due to go out for lunch
with my cousin and his family but
Grandma didn’t feel up to it. She took to her bed and died a week later. (If
you read my last blog you may see a pattern emerging!)
When I learnt as an adult that it was only a
week I was amazed – to my 8 year old
self it had seemed an unsettled eternity: Everything had been different and
uncomfortable.
To begin with I made still lemonade for Grandma but then she
became too ill for that.
I didn’t see her again after the morning the lunch plans were cancelled.
Didn’t know
she was dying.
Didn’t get to say goodbye.
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| Me if gold injections had carried on (Oh OK OK but I can dream can't I?) |
On the first Friday of term Mum and I
went off to the hospital for my weekly gold injection (a treatment that helped my
arthritis enormously but to which I developed an allergic reaction – otherwise by
now I would be shimmering!) However,instead of going straight back to school, we
visited some friends and I was allowed to stay THE WHOLE DAY ON MY OWN! Mum
left and I was taken home that evening.
I remember clearly sitting on the arm
of the settee, while the friends’ baby plonked on the piano, and quietly asking
Mum how Grandma was. I'm ashamed to say but it was the first time during Grandma's illness that I had asked. Mum told me she had
died in the early hours of the morning.
I didn’t know what to do.
Everyone else
was socialising as if it were a normal day. We weren’t an emotional, demonstrative
family and I wasn’t a child given to crying in public. I swallowed the
confusing swirl of emotions deep inside and that is where they stayed.
I never
did cry for Grandma. I didn’t go to the funeral and her death was never talked
about, but every year during that time from Christmas into New Year, I would be
haunted by the same unsettled feelings and fear of loss.
This sense of
isolation wasn't helped by Dad and Big Sis going back to work, while
Hobble Boy and Mrs McTeach headed off to Scotland for Hogmanay. With my friends
still immersed in family stuff, it was just mum, me and an eerie, silent
stillness.
It took a long time to shake
those negative associations (if I ever have completely) but now it is exactly
that sense of peace and space that enables me to reset; it acts as an airlock
between careening chaotically into Christmas and stepping sedately into
January.
For a few months I feel as if I am maintaining some kind of control over life, that I am steering a course, Captain of my own destiny. Inevitably, however, at some point in the summer, time seems to pick up speed and, by autumn, my ship has become a car on a roller coaster and I am no longer steering but clinging on desperately until I am finally flung - exhausted and usually full of cold - to the end of the year.
I
came to the conclusion in my teens that humans are, in fact, meant to
hibernate. I have not changed this opinion.
In October, just as the roller coaster is reaching full momentum, I have an overwhelming desire to wrap myself in a
duvet and curl up under a table or in the cupboard under the stairs.
My teenage self would have limited hibernation to January and February (not wanting to miss my birthday and Christmas.) Nowadays I think sleeping from mid-October to mid-March would be just fine and by January the need to hibernate is very strong.
So, on the one hand I am focused,
in control and determined that this year I will achieve the things I want to
and on the other I want the world to go away and just let me sleep.
I suspect I may be a secret SAD sufferer. What do you th…ZZzzz
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