Last Thursday

It’s been a four days since I’ve written anything. I’ve been good at journalling daily for the most part. It’s the first time in 2016 I’ve gone more than a day without writing. It’s too late now to do this. I should be in bed. Now it’s too late to stop. I need to get this out of my head.

Last Thursday sucked.

But before Thursday. The lead up. The week or so before. Kids about to go back to school. Didn’t get much sleep, a quick holiday in Sydney and then trying to get them organised for school.

Dropping the kids for their first day back at school. I didn’t feel it last year. But somehow the adrenaline; the determination to do this has been evaporating. A mum saw through me in the car park, asked if I was OK. Said yes. She knew I wasn’t. Fuck I’m transparent. I was short. I turned to get out of the place. Felt like an imposter. Where’s Mary? I’m so sorry kids, I’m all there is today.

So to Thursday. I was struggling with the kids, struggling with Cara. Just struggling. Cara still complaining about her hair cut from 2 days ago. A performance of stomping and stamping. Malcontent. With life. With me. Apparently.

I got cross. Told her she couldn’t go to Jocelyn’s on the weekend. Classic parenting mistake. In the moment, grasping for the only consequence I could think of that would resonate with her. But all the while knowing it was a consequence I would struggle to follow through on.

And then her words; upset at me being cross: “I don’t feel like I’m part of this family”. I can still hear her. I felt gutted. The first time since Mary died that one of the kids has completely floored me.

The rest of the day is a blur. I got nothing done of any use. I read, responded and wrote work stuff on automatic pilot. At lunch I went for a walk and cried as water seeped out of the stiflingly thick hot Brisbane air. As I walked back to the office from the botanic gardens I wrote the following words in my iPhone…

I feel Mary’s hands malformed, large and grotesque
clasped around my heart, around my chest
Is this what you become in death?
A purpose denying the living breath.
A whisper hard and strong,
“What are you doing to my daughter,”
“Why are you screwing up my son,”
“Can you not just finish what I’d begun.”
Her hands dig and squeeze,
they wring tears, gasping, remember to breathe.
There’s no arguing with ghosts,
the rebuttal is uttered before the reasons spoke.
Naked, raw, unmasked, I thought I could cope.
No escape.

Now it’s Monday. I’m writing after having visited a psychologist, one from the company I’d messaged walking back to the office saying I was struggling. Spoke to someone new. She didn’t know my story.

Telling people my story can feel comical.

“So my wife died. Drowned. I’m looking after our two kids. They’re 10 and 7. I guess the drowning was probably caused indirectly after she was in a coma following a bike accident two years ago. Yeah that was hard, she was in a coma for a couple of days. Remember running to a toilet in the intensive care unit and spending 5 minutes howling. But she made it through. The next two years were hard. She wasn’t herself – was still getting back to work. When I miss Mary now I sometimes have to think about which Mary I miss. Before or after the accident. Both. Yeah it was hard. But I knew I would be OK we’d been through shit like that before. Didn’t I mention? That was her second coma. She used to joke that the second one wasn’t as bad as the first. I’m not sure I remember telling her that she was wrong. Yeah she suffered from a postpartum eclamptic seizure back in 2003. Four days hooked up to 5 pumps. You know in intensive care they have a saying ‘seven pumps going to heaven’ or something like that. Close thing though, thought I’d lose her. Remember holding up a domestic flight on the tarmac at the Isa, wouldn’t board the plane until I’d seen them pack her onto the RFDS flight where they had no room for me. Thought I’d lose her. Still remember being a weeping mess walking down the aisle of that mac air flight. That all took a lot of recovering from. Yeah you’re right ‘eclampsia’ it’s associated with high blood pressure in pregnancy. No that wasn’t with Harry. That was with Ellen. She died after a day. Died of Neonatal Hemochromatosis. That was hard too. Bit over a year later, straight after Mary got pregnant with Harry, we found out there was a 90% chance the same thing would happen to him. Yes, would have been nice if the doctors had told us that before we decided to try again. Spent months researching and found a doctor in the US who helped us. Amazing really, Mary was one of the first women in Australia to get the immunoglobulin treatment for that disease that helped keep Harry from dying like Ellen. Mary went through the treatment all again three years later with Cara. One day in hospital on a drip each week from 16 weeks. Yup both of them went straight into the neonatal intensive care units after they were born. Have you ever been inside the NICU ward in a hospital? Soul destroying…

You can’t make this shit up. You wouldn’t make this shit up. Neither tragedy or comedy. Just a bad sorry story.

I’ve got a long way to go don’t I. The road doesn’t end, does it?

I used to think what I was afraid of was something happening to me and the kids being without a dad as well as without a mum. Wrote on the internet about it. In the random things that happen in life they’re already one down and they’re no less likely than the next kids to lose another parent.

At some point today I realised that I’d somehow turned that fear on it’s head. I’m actually scared of losing one of them. I’m petrified of it. I know that’s true, because I can’t write that last sentence without feeling every word. The paragraph before flows easily, a story I tell.

I hate the thought of people reading this and saying “you’re doing a great job Trent”. It’s the downside part of sharing on the internet. I had this discussion with a friend in the last week. I think it’s why I haven’t posted as much lately. Something a bit too weird about eliciting Facebook thumbs up.

The upside I think is that writing here publicly has become a vehicle that’s helping me shape and understand my story. Somewhere in the telling it becomes that little bit less scary, a little less tragic. And somewhere in the future maybe it helps Harry and Cara understand their dad that little bit better.

I don’t want positive reinforcement. I know I’m doing the best I can and whether or not it’s good enough, it’s all I can do. I want a different story. No, that’s not quite it, I know I can’t have that. I want to own my story again and tell it with pride, tell it without all the hurt.

I’ll get there. I just hope there are less Thursdays like that one along the way.