Good Grief 50

50 ... a half century of grief .... should be more correctly something like Caesium 50 .. a radioactive half life ... quietly corrosive and destroying.

Everything is an effort.
The insidiousness of grief, or whatever it mutates into, pervades everything. The mists roll in and swirl around, obscuring all forms.
And the forms are everything and anything, the relationships we had, the ones we try to have, the ones we try to create, with ourselves, with others, with the dead, with the living, with the things we do, don't do, the things we have and the things we don't have .... it goes on, and on.
The feeling of connection to anything and anyone has become hard work. I keep trying and then try not to try and to just be. But feel damned if I do and damned if I don't.
There seems to be no rest. I cannot find rest.
I often feel only death will bring rest which, of course, it will, but nothing else ... no more brief glimpses of beauty ... like this one - the grandeur of the world in spite of us.
I have slept badly and feel unwell generally, exhausted and worn out.
I took myself off to do things, walk etc. and on Saturday I camped. I didn't sleep much through the night ... my vigilant self wasn't able to switch off but as daylight emerged I drifted off to the sound of children playing. Somewhere, there is a world of play and I was reassured enough to sleep for a short while.
References to children abounded all day, as is so often the case for the childless.
I listened to Will Self talk about 'Losing Sleep', he says, ' ... as other parents will identify ... you still hold their beating hearts in your heart even when you are unconscious and so you remain ever alert in case they falter.'
Later in the day I heard a woman speak of trying to find ways to connect with her 12 year old daughter ... moving like a magnet to find 'the place of pull and connection'.

I can find much in what I have done and try to do, and do give it a positive spin to the outside world when I am in it. This, as has been suggested, is the unexpurgated version. And even my noticing is a connection of sorts ... as a consumer of absence, I notice presence, possibly/probably more acutely. The dreadful sadness and loss of not having those kinds of feelings, those difficulties ... and all that comes with it, along with all the other feelings of loss, all fuel to the sense of 'Caesium 50' and the feeling of never being able to rest, roaming the earth in a stateless loss ... a different kind of refugee.