Tagged: family

1/n

Where am I right now?
I’m thinking, or is that drinking?
Oh I am absolutely drinking (I would say deinitely but I forgot how to pronounce it).
my sister was kind.
But where am I?
Somewhere in the land of the lost. Slightly dramatic. But that is where I am. Having to deal. Things are real. My sister died.
People die.
They do. There is no escaping it. Though saying it that way is like saying ‘all lives matter’, as in context M’FO.
Why am I writing this?
She died suddenly. Quickly. Heart-wrenchingly…
There has to be a coroner’s thing…
We can’t even register her dead and do the paperwork fully thing…
We can do some of that thing…
I am also the one doing that thing. I am not alone, I am just… taking the stance that my family are too heartbroken to take…
She was the oldest of my mother’s children. I am the youngest. I am also the one who does this sort of organising paperwork thing. I am the one who thinks in the straight line objective ways. I am critical. I am objective. Basically I can be a logical/rational/unemotional cunt (please excuse the gender-specific abuse and fuck the fucking-fuck-fuck out of any wankery about cussing).
I don’t have typical (neuro or social) habits, friends, family, close relations. In fact if you took a survey I wouldn’t hit average for pretty much everyone in my life. Except me, and I am not sure about me. Unless the survey had the question ‘does anyone in your life exhibit x non-typical feature’ as a standard base of inclusion…
I have also seen dead people before. Several. I have dealt in this area. I have a way of martialling what needs to be done. I can COMPARTMENTALISE.
I am also the one who would be angry if I wasn’t the one doing this as it is fucking stupid to make anyone else do it. On that note, my family would do anything they had to, they never made me do this. I pretty much manipulated the circumstances where I am doing this. And thank fuck I did. My heart is breaking at the loss of my sister. I would be fucking manic if that also meant my brother and sister were tortured by doing things that I can do.
I can do this and the act of doing with confidence counts against the pain.
My sister died suddenly, it was medical emergency so it was brutal. It was 4 days ago. And because of bank holidays (I am not judging here, I am not blaming, it is just circumstance), today was the first day I could go and identify her.
My other sister came along. She was initially asked to identify as she was listed as next contact due to living closer. My sister couldn’t do it.
I went alone.
I am glad I did. I am better knowing that my decision to do so was best. I don’t want them to remember her this way.
I knew something of what it was to be.
It wasn’t my first dead person.
But I am still in the land of the lost.
I did that. It was the best choice. There are so many other reasons and understandings I could tell you to explain how and why it is better this way.
I just hate myself for knowing it was the best choice. I hate myself for being so strong in all of this. I hate myself for not having anything more than those as the only reasons I need (I have more but this is about me and not others).
Where is this going?
Oh yes.
My sister died and today I had to identify her body after she had been dead for 3 days (4 calendar days).
Today I started the process of going through all her paperwork and a life that was spent giving love to others (I am not being kind, she was generally a person who gave a lot of love to others as she had experienced a fuck ton of abuse in her own life and turned it to kindness.). Today I started to accept her death and be rational about how we deal with her loss.
Where am I right now?
I am lost. But not really. I have things to do. I have things to arrange. A funeral, financial matters. Family matters.
Not really lost…
Feeling loss.
“Always try, to be nice and never fail to be kind.”

Woodland Walk 6th December

Sunday was a much more relaxed walking experience. Family drive, minus the eldest child, to Eaves Wood near Silverdale.

We had a happy couple of hours traipsing around to the tip of the hill and the Pepper pot monument with amazing views across Morecambe Bay and the sands.

What a difference 2 years makes

In the last two years I have addressed what I thought was an issue for me (your experience and feelings will likely vary) and that was my weight. I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t healthy (or I didn’t feel healthy) and I wasn’t fit, in fact exercise was tiresome and often painful.

So I went to the gym, and I started to run, and I learned to love it. The following pictures are 2 years apart. The first two from the Tree Top Nets in Cumbria on the 22nd October 2016 and the next two from this morning in a hotel room near to the Theme parks and the M4/M25. I am with my two oldest boys, and I feel better about how I look, how I feel and how much exercise I get with my boys.

Why are you in Edinburgh Markie?

or: My God that was a Long Road

or: My Wife is Smarter than I am

or: Filled with Awe

I know it is bad grammatical form to put three sub headings in a line with no text in-betweenst them but i felt it was a title thing, like the start of a silly movie or a book, and I like the notion…

Anyway…

My God that was a Long Road

It has been a long seven years for Leigh, in fact it is eight but that’s a complex story to tell and I want this to be the first snapshot.

We are in Edinburgh with the kids, the other kids, and the responsible person who is probably a kid, for Leigh’s graduation this weekend. She could have chosen almost anywhere in the UK, but she came home. Leigh was born in Edinburgh and spent her early years in Scotland. Like her mother she is Scottish in her heart and in her birthright, it is here she came home to for an accolade justly deserved. We are here so Leigh can go to the graduation ceremony for her Psychology degree.

My Wife is Smarter than I am

I am not trying to win easy praise, or give it either. I am not being an atypical male ‘oh she’s quite smart, possibly smarter than I in some respects, what, what, what…’. I am talking book smart. Dedication to theory smart. Follow the evidence/facts, deduce and infer smart. She is logical, precise and well structured academically. She is smart.

I am clever. But, like a monkey clever. Kinda like, oh dear it is too late and I threw it already so you can’t duck the poo, clever.

Filled with Awe

So why am I filled with awe?

  • 8 years;
  • A full time job;
  • A wedding;
  • Five pregnancies;
  • Two successful pregnancies;
  • A two.eight year old, a one year old and a going on 2nd-childhood-year-old husband;
  • A full time job (yes, it is there twice, think about it);
  • A science degree taken, completed, passed.

Do I really need to explain why I am in awe of my wife?

Credit…(?)

I guess I can claim some credit. I did a lot of housework, most of the cooking, a lot of the day-to-day life organising….well, shit, of course I damned well did, did you not read the above list? Were there hours in the day where she could have done that, well, yes. But you know we had to make the kids some way, and apparently she needed to sleep and occasionally we went on holiday…wait she took college work with her then…

There were very few hours in the day.

I did what I could, I could have done more, she is grateful I didn’t do less.

I wanted to mention me, because I partly share, I helped, but I helped because it is who I am.

She did it all.

I am in incredible awe of Leigh’s achievement.

(I hope this weekend there will be more words and pictures to share).

Scheduling Life

So it has come to this, we finally have such a busy life now that Leigh and I regularly sit down and have to write down the proceeding weeks times and events to see where we can negotiate who is doing what, when, where and how we can fit a social life into a now hectic family and work regime, and most important how we make the time for each other.

We were always busy, we are people who fill our lives, when we are not working, with interesting hobbies and pursuits and if we can a fair number of social events, games, and holidays.

But in the past year this has taken an extra dimension or two.

The first of these was the birth of our first son, Ben, who we both want to spend as much time with as humanly possible. The next was Leigh returning to full time work after Maternity Leave, add in her return to university (part time) and my undertaking of projects and responsibilities as part of a growing responsibility in the Perl community as an organiser and helper, and you have administatioclasm.

There is also the diverse group of people who are our friends who unfortunately bear the brunt of our disappearing time as we juggle their exposure to us on a weird rotation basis with no rules, but plenty of traps, pitfalls and the occasional Gremlin.

Then of course you have to consider family, who we are almost pathologically meran to as we shuttle engagements and apportion them meagre moments of our now precious time.

It has become a juggling act. If we sit down to watch a programme (television) or film it is a rare event, almost to be treasured, and if it is one that doesn’t fully sap our attention we also read, discuss or use a computer at the same time.

This now sounds sad. I am missing all the fun times we take Ben out for walks, or to the park and generally when we sit on the floor playing with toys and reading books.

I have not mentioned the holidays we get with Grandmas in the motorhome and visiting far flung relatives and friends and loving how they put all their attention on our son and let us rest while they entertain him.

Or the fact that we feel so much like a family, that we do all that we can to further ourselves both morally and intellectually, that the efforts we make are to strengthen and support the varying groups we belong to (not to blow our own trumpet too much but we are super).

And, we still find time to write in Nanowrimo, scriptfrenzy, run and play roleplaying games, read books and fight the occasional horde of pixelated monsters.

We just don’t watch a lot of contemporary television, and we miss a lot of theatre, concerts and films, those are the elements of our lives we had to remove to do all of the other things we want.

These days we catch up on contemporary film/theatre/music life months later, and sometimes I catch up on films when traveling. I miss seeing them first, or at the cinema, but I wouldn’t swap what I have even if you offered me a lifetime free pass to see all the music, films and theatre first.

Pictures of some friends and places

This is Matt and Dyana and the 'bunnies who put their love into the pot' on Matt's 24th Brithday in 2007

Leigh in the foreground and Nathan in the background, taken on Skerton Bridge, Easter in 2007

Linda and Leigh on Morecambe beach on Palm Sunday 2007

'The Lesser-Spotted Sims' Steph sans camera on the Beach in Morecambe on Palm Sunday 2007

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