My ability to completely psych myself out with anticipation, over how I will do or cope with things, is one of the worst things I have to deal with when widowing.
I can see hard things coming at me like a freight train.
And, as I appear to have both control freak and anxious tendencies, it sends me into a complete tailspin trying to prepare for the hard thing to hit me.
There are things that side swipe me out of left field, put me completely off kilter and flatten me, for sure.
But I’ve decided anticipating being flattened is sometimes worse.
Round Three of The Hard Things begins on Friday with a third wedding anniversary alone.
But, having survived two of them already – the first one quite unsuccessfully, the second with a breakfast gin – I feel that while it is going to be a shit day, and I will feel equally sad and happy at the photos that will come up, and I will still think it was a great party, and I will still have been glad to have been married for 16 years … 13 and ¾ of those with a living spouse … I will be able to get through the day.
The really tough test comes next week:
A family holiday.
The kids and my parents.
Melbourne Airport.
The exact same scenario I had at about 11.30am on January 20, 2019.
5 hours later Pete was dead.
I haven’t been back to Melbourne airport since.
I have actually only been back to Melbourne 3 or 4 times since.
We haven’t actually been on a family holiday since Christmas 2017.
2018 was such a bloody write off with things going wrong that we didn’t have one other than going to my parents farm and having Christmas in Melbourne.
So, in January 2019 when my parents and brother decided we needed at holiday at the beach so everyone could have time out and start 2020 off on the right foot – it was a great idea.
Except we never got there. The kids did. For less than 24 hours. I rang Dad to tell him he needed to get the kids home within 1/2 an hour of them arriving at the holiday destination Pete and I were to join them at three days later.
And so, next week, the kids and my parents return to the scene where they last saw Pete alive.
Where he hugged the kids and kissed them and told them he loved them as the last things he would ever say to them.
I genuinely feel that even though we are catching a 6.50am flight I might have to have a drink of alcohol before arriving at the airport.
Because: See above.
But also, because its not just the fact its Melbourne airport.
It will be the same airline.
The flight will boarding and departing from the same lounge area.
It's going to be us walking the exact.same.path we did that day.
The kids know it.
I know it.
The kids know I know they know it.
I know the kids know I know they know it.
Someone suggested we should go alone. Not take my parents. Go and have a holiday and fun with just us. Really enjoy us as a unit.
I talked to the kids about that prospect.
The eldest responded: But don’t they realise how hard it is going to be? And if you lose it, who’s going to look after us?
When I said that even if I did lose it, I was vaguely confident I’d still be able to get us all on the plane – Mummy is, afterall, becoming a master of completely losing it while still performing basic functional activities.
She replied: But how is that fair on you? It’s just easier on you if they are there to help.
And she is right.
Also – if it takes 3 drinks to get me to calm down and also not panic about the idea of giving myself DVT on a 4 hour flight, who’s going to drive the hire care when we get there?
Because the other thing is, we are going somewhere Pete loved. That we loved together. Somewhere we always told to children we would take them.
As luck would have it, my parents have been with us the three times we have visited this place.
They know we loved it.
And they want the kids to love it and enjoy it as much as Pete and I did.
So we will have a ‘yes holiday’ in the same theme of the new Netfilx movie – Yes Day.
There won’t be much we wont do or try and do in the few days we are there.
Because our first family holiday without Pete, having got ourselves over the physical, emotional, mental and actual barrier that will be walking over the same place we last saw him alive and were together as a family, deserves to be everything it’s meant to be.
Plus if the crocodiles are out of this place, I want to recreate these photos.
Pete always wanted to recreate it with Isobel when we took them back.
I'm a pretty poor replacement for a proper recreation (but with photoshop ... who knows what can be done?) and while I really want to, I'm not entirely sure if getting through what we have to, to get there, this might be the actual tipping point.
And because I have another 8 days to completely mentally wind up that not coping spring that took Mum over a week to unwind good and proper, I'm actually quite sure I will need all the help I can get.
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