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so on the way home from fake london christmas yesterday i was thinking about how it was my worst and best fake christmas ever. i laughed more than i have before, the dinner was the best one we've ever managed and i felt honestly christmassy which was quite a feat given the earliness of it all....but i missed my boy, who at last year's faux noel was a newcomer, and who loved every minute of it...

and then while on the bus heading out through west london i was enjoying a song and grinning and tapping my toes and wishing i was driving myself in my own car so i could sing out loud to whatever it was....minutes later it was -covered in rain- on the ear-phones and i was doing the quiet-stream-crying that i have perfected during the hours of train-rides i have survived between here and the briz over the last few months.....and i realised that this is a fairly neat summary of the bizarre, other-worldly experience that grief starts you on and carries you through and semi-ruins you with...

there is simply no telling what may occur from one moment to the next. its like a very natural, hugely understandable form of something bi-polar, and i think that for me the balance weighing against the sheer devastation of it all, is the memory of his nose, his eyes, his skin, his shoulders, his children, his care for me, his speedy walking, his disehevilled appearance, his endless supply of trivial facts and his determination from day one that i was the one for him.

devastating, somehow equally....

i think that i have overcome my fear of it; i no longer panic at the ups and downs of it all. i no longer find myself gripped by the idea that it might never end. i know that it is not only unavoidable but that this mourning, this missing and this weeping is ultimately what will produce (and i think i may say tentatively, has already begun to produce..) the morning, the new skin over wound, the new scope for plans-yet-made...the new love for jesus who, it turns out, really does save....


i am still having the odd bill bryson night here and there (i read bill bryson and his tiresome, humourless anecdotes when i am unable to sleep...) but you know, advent is upon us, and you know how i adore advent...a time for expecting to hope again.....and again....and again...