Do Not Hurry As You Walk With Grief

I should definitely be doing something more ‘important’ or ‘productive’ right now, than sitting here self-indulgently writing. But I’m being gentle with myself today, and following my instinct, as we emerge – are we emerging? - from a tunnel of sadness. Jill’s brother Andrew died unexpectedly and relatively suddenly three weeks ago, just a few days after first feeling unwell. We had a funeral and a Memorial service for him last week, and it still all feels just a little surreal.

There are all kinds of emotions flying around at a time like this, from guilt to anger and all stations in between. We know them all, and still they’re swirling. It’s painful, and there are no shortcuts. We just have to go through the wringer at times like this.

Andrew was probably the cleverest and most practical bloke I’ve ever met. He had a PhD, but that wasn’t what made him clever. He just had a way of solving problems. I moaned to him at Christmas about something I just couldn’t see how to fix, and he immediately grabbed a pencil and a sheet of paper, and said ‘I’d do it like this’ as he scrawled a diagram. It was easy – why couldn’t I have seen that?

We’ve laughed as we’ve remembered lots of his ‘solutions’ – torches lashed to goggles for seeing his music when we went carol-singing, or a home-made periscope so the kids could see if the ball had rolled off the garage roof. They were his zany solutions, but it genuinely seemed to me that there was nothing he wasn’t an expert in, no problem he couldn’t offer a really solid and practical solution to. So we’ll miss him for that - we’ve already had to call an electrician for something he would have fixed - but more, we’ll miss him for who he was – Jill’s dear brother and my friend.

So you see, my inbox and In tray seems to have taken on a new perspective just for the moment. There’ll be time, we’ll get to that, but for now we’re following some advice we've often offered: Do Not Hurry As You Walk With Grief.