Hello 2023, please by kinder

It’s the first of January. It’s the day for looking forward, making plans and being inspired. Right now I’m just glad to put last year behind me, be in the day and reflect on what has been.

The first of January last year felt like a firework had exploded in my face.

In fairness the firework probably went off on Christmas Eve when my mum was taken into hospital with suspected sepsis. A load of questions started firing off in my mind. But mainly the thought clanging around in there, was: “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

With my head still trying to wrap itself around the thought that my steady, healthy mum, had been quite close to death and was now unsteady and a bit frail looking, I did what I like to do best - read.

Reading to Stay Sane!

The first half of the year was about waiting.

Once mum was stable the tests had begun. She’d not had a stroke, which is what I thought was happening at first. But she did need a minor op, oh, and there was a lump, a big one, near her kidney. But they didn’t know what it was yet, or where the initial infection had come from.

At first I was sitting outside hospitals in my car while my mum had more tests and appointments. Covid restrictions were still floating around and so I sat in the chilly outside with a book, hoping it would take my mind off the cold.

I tried to get a routine going - drop mum off, go find coffee, come back and wait. But things changed too quick for that to take hold.

By the end of March I’d read 19 books. Not that many - and in fairness most were not read whilst I was waiting for mum, but when I was alone and work was done for the day. No need to be on the loopy what-are-we-going-to-hear-next thought merry go round when I could be roaming around Narnia (I read nothing but Narnia in January, transporting children’s books were a great help.)

Too Stunned to Read

The answer did arrive though and we could put a name to what the problem was. Marginal Zone Lymphoma. The slowest of the slow when it comes to blood cancers. And that is the extent of my knowledge. Other than that chemo wouldn’t do anything except maybe slow it down, and it might not even do that. So that’s a road mum opted not to go down.

I should also point out that this answer rocked up on the Jubilee weekend. Which in a way was good because I had a couple of bank holidays to get my head back together. I can recommend cake and a good friend who doesn’t mind hearing you say “I don’t understand” on repeat. But later in the year when someone asked me what I’d done for the Jubilee I nearly answered with “cried alot” before I caught myself and gave a more standard answer, “I ate cake and watched telly.”

June was also the month where I read only one book - Dark Tides by Philippa Gregory, sort of a book version of pathetic fallacy, maybe. Tears kept getting in the way of the words, so I gave up.

I Broke My Reading Record

For now life is about adjusting to what the past year has thrown at us. But there’s a couple of things that I’ve been able to draw from my experience so far.

It’s never fun to see someone you love suffer. I suppose that goes without saying, but reading through this post so far, it doesn’t do justice to the feelings I felt each time we sat with mum waiting for an ambulance to come, or as I raced to be with her when she had those episodes. Is there a word for when you feel so anxious you could be sick, so full of adrenaline you feel you could fly but also utterly consumed by sadness? Sometimes when it was all over, I was sick and somehow that made me feel a little better.

One of the surprises of this last year was the many positive things I found to think about. The whole time I have felt split in two. If I could put everything to do with my mum in a box and put it away life would be ace right now. I’ve got a lot of good things going on. But always at the edge of memory is this grief waiting for me to remember.

So what are the positive things? Well one is that I’ve got a new appreciation for those who are carers of family members full time. I’ve had a tiny taste of what that must be like, and I can’t imagine the emotional drain that looking after someone all the time must have. And children that have to do that for their parents have my full respect.

I’m glad it’s nothing worse. We still don’t know what the future will look like for my mum, but right now she’s doing good, all things considered. She has good days and bad days, but she has a positive attitude and isn’t willing to go down without a fight. Although I sometimes wish she would sit down and rest a bit more than she does.

So, this one is superficial, but also the reason for this post and maybe future ones. I read 100 books in a year for the first time. I’m not sure how much my mum is responsible for that, but my theory is that I used books as an escape from my reality.

The thing is, there is only so much consuming I can do before I need to look for a new hit. Which is where I got to in late November. Now I want to read the book and then look for things that it has inspired me to do. Let me give you an example. I read
Shadowlands by Matthew Green, and now I’ve drawn up a bucket list to visit the places he mentions in the book, and maybe a few other lost villages along the way.

It might not work for every read - not sure how many wardrobes I would need to knock on the back of before I found Narnia, but I thought the future of this blog might be me sharing a few adventures in real life, inspired by what I read in the pages of a book. And maybe I’ll throw in some stuff on how it’s helping me process what’s going on with me and my anticipatory grief.