28 years ago today I lost my best friend, and my first love.
My life as I knew it changed the instant we got that phone call, and it would never be the same again.
No warning, no illness, no goodbyes. Nobody to be angry with, nobody to blame. An aortic aneurysm had gone undetected, and then unexpectedly ruptured.
Then there was the shock, and sadness and the overwhelming type of grief that makes day to day functioning almost impossible. To this day my memory of events and life for months after his death remain pretty foggy.
28 years later there's still some sadness, but it's more balanced with the happy memories.
“Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons.”
~ Blaise Pascal
Does time heal all wounds? I'm not sure. I'd like to think so. Maybe time just allows us the space to accept, move on, remember the good stuff. It certainly doesn't mean forgetting. I guess I don't think about him every day now... but he's still in my thoughts quite often. And of course I am a different person now to the one I was at 17. There's no way of knowing how long we would have stayed together. There's no way to go back and change the course of events before or after his death. My journey has been shaped in part because of this tragedy. “Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break.”
~Shakespeare
I can talk about that time now with people if they ask, but I tend not to go back there unless I need to. The story is there to be told, but the ending is always the same. Revisiting and re-telling it wont change it, but the re-telling HAS become easier with time.So how did I move on? Very slowly with the loving support of family and friends. Huge support that got me through a VERY dark time.
...and with the belief that he would have wanted me to get on with my life.
