The Slow Road Back

Everything has changed.

If you read the previous post, you will be aware that life took an unexpected and terrible turn for me and my family this year... and that's why I've been silent.

I've been step-by-stepping it and just staying sane. It was only recently that I realised that I could even live through my daughter's death. It wasn't that I was suicidal, it was simply that profound grief and mourning hits you in a way where everything beyond a certain point becomes opaque and that point is very near. I had no vision for what happens next. Not even lunch.

It's weird. You (assuming you aren't suffering the same thing and I fervently hope you aren't) are right now, aware of what you have 'going on'. You have several plans in your mind, some things that need to get done. You also have longer range stuff that you need to think more specifically about and you make time to think about them because they are a forward narrative that gives your life shape and meaning. There was a T-shirt slogan that went something like “life is what happens while you're making plans.” Well, I don't believe that is true at all. A lot of life is driven by making those plans, even if it doesn't go the way it was designed, it is at least still going.

Grief robs you of that. In among the many horrid things it is, it is a profound state of motivationlessness. You get stuck in some very tight thinking that spirals in on itself, revolving around one certain fact and one certain event. Everything outside that gets obliterated. But, as the spiral starts to loosen, you become able to come back to some larger idea of yourself. That's when you can actually picture living again.

In May, I went back to my corporate gig, shortly after the funeral and found that not only was the effort of being motivated and energetic about driving the project utterly beyond me, the mental agility required was gone, as well. I was anxious and agoraphobic, sleep deprived and jittery and just plain sad beyond description. I couldn't even reliably count coins to make change at the shops, let alone lead people in a competitive, business environment. I'd been on parental leave with her before it happened and coming back to 3,000 emails is one thing, coming back to 3,000 emails when all your priorities have been blown out of the water is quite something else. You couldn't find the amount of care I had with a tunnelling electron microscope.

So, I quit. It wasn't even a decision. It was simply a matter of survival.

I took the period that would've been my long-service leave just to 'be'. To be with my broken little family and keep breathing.

That period has finished and the vision and idea of what I will now become, has to sharpen up. A mortgage in Sydney guarantees that I can't be a house-husband forever. I have taken the first, tentative steps back out into the world and that's why I'm firing up the blog again.

I think it's potentially amusing and that was the point of A Grey Area to start with. I'd never promised to always be light-hearted and my moral compass always tells me to at least acknowledge the complexity of life, but I do actually live for a giggle and my new gig is an amusing turn in life.

I'm delivering organic fruit and veg to people's houses, for a family run company, a few days a week. Never, in the field of human digestion, has one man been paid so little, for delivering so much.

In the 80s, I was at a Steiner school. Since then, in a varied work life, I've been a cabbie and a bus-driver, driven trucks and delivery vehicles.

I've gone back to my roots.

The road and god-damn hippies.