Tag Archives: grief

the clock is ticking

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If your life is a day, what time do you think it is?

I guess this question only springs to mind as the ‘day’ begins to run away with you. However, the clock is always ticking and none of us have a clue how long we’ve got on this earth.

February tends to be a gloomy month for many of us and this year it seems particularly so – thanks to COVID, we don’t even have holiday plans to look forward to. For me it’s also heading towards the time in February when I lost both my parents. They actually died more than 25 years apart, but at exactly the same time of year. 

Even more gloomily, next year I will be the same age my mother was when she died, so I guess the ticking clock thoughts are somewhat inevitable. I’m sure my elder sisters had similar experiences approaching the same milestone.

It’s one o’clock in the morning, I’m not asleep and I can hear the wind howling round the house and whistling through the trees. Thankfully there is no sound of a ticking clock!

Still, I am wondering what time is it for me?

When I was very young time often dragged. I seemed to have to wait ages for everything whether it was Christmas, birthdays, the summer holidays, or even just the return of my siblings from a bicycle ride… 

Then I stopped marking time so much, I was too busy living and loving it, racing from one exciting event and experience to another.

Somewhere along the way life began to speed up. I can remember my children learning to walk, their first days at school and now suddenly, one of them is settling their own child into nursery and watching for their first steps.

Life seems to have moved suddenly from lunchtime to late afternoon – well I’m hoping it’s afternoon and not evening, but who knows?

The thing is I haven’t a clue what time it is and I’m glad. Not knowing means I need to make the most of each day, savour each moment, just in case it’s getting later than I’d realised and the sun is about to set.

Some years ago, a very good family friend lost his daughter in a car accident. It was a terrible shock – a beautiful young life cut short. His words to many of us, as he battled on through the pain and grief each day, were “carpe diem” – seize the day. He was right – we shouldn’t be watching the clock afraid of when it’s going to strike midnight. 

I want to try and seize each day, making the most of all that I have, even in lockdown!

Who’d marry a soldier?

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Guess who?
… Makes friends easily, adaptable, well travelled, independent, decorator, gardener, mechanic (when necessary), single mum (frequently), tough, fiercely loyal, wry sense of humour, expert gin & tonic maker, resilient, always hopeful – a lover of life.

My dictionary definition of an army wife, in case you hadn’t guessed.
I’m proud to be one of this diminishing breed, whose other characteristic is being a ‘pack animal’. Army wives are there for one another. When the going gets tough they stand alongside each other’s families supporting one another, sometimes emotionally but also practically.

Some of my best friends are either army wives or ex-army wives. The experiences we went through together as we waited anxiously for news from war zones or coped with being a lone parent far from our families, drew us close. Those bonds aren’t easily broken. That’s why writing a book with one particular army wife was the natural thing to do.

I first met Brenda Hale when she was a Sergeant’s wife while we were posted in Germany and our husbands were on an operational tour in Northern Ireland. Our children were born within a few months of each other. Brenda put me to shame in exercising back to fitness after giving birth and supported me in trying to run chaotic Sunday school sessions at the church on the barracks. In those years, although we worried for our husbands on operations in Belfast and Bosnia, I could never imagine what lay ahead.

One sunny August morning in 2009 I found my husband hunched at the foot of the stairs, shocked by the sudden death of a great man and a good friend. Neither of us could believe that this giant of a man had been taken away and his family left devastated. The harrowing news stories on the death of more soldiers in Afghanistan had become more personal than ever.

Some days later sitting at a table in an airport I still couldn’t take in the fact that the woman beside me had lost the love of her life, the father of her children and her best friend. How could this have happened?

It’s been a privilege to retrace the journey which the Hale girls have been on, through writing I married a soldier with Brenda. As she says, we’ve shared both tears and laughter as she has recalled wonderful moments, along with the most painful times.

If you’re looking for an inspirational read that gives you a real picture of life for army families, you’ll enjoy I married a soldier published by Lion Hudson. It tells the true story of how one very special army wife found a way through an event that threatened to crush her. This is a story of hope and faith beyond grief.

You can’t turn the clock back

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I’ve watched a lot of films over the past 48 hours – five to be exact. All of them had their appeal, but only one of them has been haunting me. Now lying in a strange hotel room in Brisbane, when I should be catching up on sleep after flying half way around the world, flashbacks and snippets from the story keep flooding back… I suppose that means it was a ‘good’ film.

Crunched into an aeroplane seat for more than 24 hours, I found myself watching a string of movies. Faced with so much choice I picked:

  • a cartoon, because I like the music
  • a thriller because the story is clever
  • a comedy because I wanted to smile
  • a family film because I love sailing and the Lake District
  • and finally a film that I thought might be a sort of romantic drama… it wasn’t.

But it was this particular film that has kept me awake since I landed.

‘Manchester by the sea’ caught my eye a few weeks ago when I mused over the poster promoting the film on the station platform. There was a man standing by the water, with boats in the background looking at a girl. That’s a strange title, I’d thought, at the same time saying to myself, but Manchester’s not by the sea! This particular Manchester is a fishing town in America where the story is set. I won’t give away the tale, although it’s nothing complex or particularly mysterious. In fact I almost decided to stop it more than once because it felt quite slow and I wasn’t particularly enjoying it… it’s hard to enjoy watching someone suffer and becoming almost robotic with the pain that’s buried so deeply no one sees it.

When bad things happen and something or someone hurts us, it’s a natural defence to shut up tight like a shell and block out all the painful emotions so that we can’t be hurt anymore. Grief can do that to us and so can loss or rejection. Guilt can also tie us up in internal knots. But grief and guilt together seem to be a cocktail of emotions that have the potential to destroy someone.

I suppose no one would want to watch ‘Manchester by the sea’ if you told them it was all about guilt and grief – it wouldn’t sell cinema tickets. If you do watch it, you may not feel ‘good’, but you will be made to think. The very ordinariness of the story, the day-to-day plain boringness of life from fixing blocked toilets to shopping for food and fishing, is part of what gives this film its power. It’s an honest, down to earth, depiction of what happens to someone after a terrible tragedy…no more than that, after a devastating accident.

We never really know what’s going on behind someone’s expression – their real thoughts and feelings can be completely hidden. And the film shows that the way someone reacts, whether it’s blanking out emotion or picking a fight, can mask internal battles raging just below the surface. It’s what the director has left out that is most effective. The dialogue is sometimes sparse and there are those very real moments when people speak over one another and stumble in trying to say what they mean. There are awkward silences and clumsy hugs for the moments when there simply are no words.

If you do go and watch it – be prepared to be haunted by the face of a man who wishes every day he could turn back the clock and do one thing differently.

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