The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

The QMC is a hospital near where I lived in Nottingham.

It was once the biggest hospital in Europe, but its real significance is it is the hospital that saved my eyesight, saved my Mum’s life, saved my Dad’s … until they couldn’t.

It’s a place that ignites an insane amount of emotions in me.

I obviously haven’t been in it for a long time, but the last occasion I was there – when I went with Mum to see her specialist to try and delay her op as it was going to coincide when Otis was going to be born – so much came flooding back.

It smelt the same.
It had the same bustle and noise.
It had the same cafes and newsagents.
It had the same corridors, doors and places of eery silence.

I have spent too much of my life in that place.

It may be a place that saved me and the most important members of my family … but it also subjected me to feelings that I never want to experience again.

Fear. Worry. Pain. Confusion.

So it was strange to receive this email from a medical student [QMC is also a medical training and research hospital] saying they had found this blog and discovered the posts I had written about my Mum and Dad dying.

They told me they were doing a project where they were reaching out to people who had suffered great loss to see if they would be willing to write about their experience and how they came back from their darkest points – so that it could help others going through a similar thing.

I was both flattered and terrified.

Flattered to be asked. Terrified what it may reignite.

Because despite Dad having been gone 23 years and Mum 7, I can still be affected by their loss with the most random of triggers.

And it was then I realised why I had to do it.

Because while Anthony Hopkins eyes can make me think of my Dad … or random elderly women in Thai Restaurants in Manhattan Beach can make me feel compelled to give them a hug … the rush of emotion they ignite has gone from drowning to reconnecting.

I know that might sound strange.

And I can assure you that isn’t how it feels when you’re in the moment of it.

But after – when the moment has been allowed to overwhelm – it is exactly how I feel.

Which is why I sent them this. I hope it does someone good, somewhere.

I hope it lets Mum and Dad know even though their loss can stab me with pain.

I’m OK.

And so is the pain.

Shadows

And then there was no one.
He was on his own.
An adult who still felt like a child but had no other choice than to grow up.