Bluebells

Guilt. “Survivors guilt” – felt by those left behind. I first found myself drowning in this about 18 months ago. In just few days, my neighbour R was diagnosed with a cancer in her jaw, our good friend K was told that her breast cancer was in her bones and not going to get better, and the lovely Lisa Lynch, who many of you will know is a big hero of mine, was hit with the same news. It was a pretty awful month all round, and one of the most shocking things I found was my own reaction to my own reaction.

The sequence goes something like this:

Thought 1: NO! That’s awful, that can’t be, surely that’s wrong, nononono.......

Thought 2: That could be me! No, please don’t let it happen to me. I don’t want that to happen to me.

Thought 3: You bitch. You complete cow. Someone has just heard the most awful thing and all you can do is think about yourself. You horrible person.

It’s a pretty potent emotion, guilt, and when it’s mixed with fear – as it usually is – it’s poison. I span round in a horrible spiral, didn’t quite crash and burn but it took a lot of help for me to get through.

So yesterday, I came in from work, with a screaming headache, after a long day. I took some painkillers and told M I was going to bed...but before I went I just checked Twitter. And there it was. The nastiest, crappiest news, the news I’d been dreading. The wonderful, inimitable, inspirational Lisa Lynch has gone. Yet another woman has left her family behind, another husband is facing the world without his best friend, another set of parents have lost their daughter. A young, vibrant and talented lass who’s not even had a proper crack at life.

Twitter was filled with the news; messages from the reluctant members of this not particularly exclusive club, the ad-hoc support network that’s grown up through social networking; from those who had read her words and found them inspiring, or just plain entertaining (and her words have always been entertaining, even when they were bringing bad news). We knew how ill she’d been, that time was short, nobody was surprised but all so very sad.
Then someone said “that’s left a big hole in the support network”; that’s when the wave of guilt knocked me over. Because it has. We all talk, and we all share, and one of us has gone and that might just leave the network a bit weaker.

The thing is, that’s normal. It’s part of feeling human, part of grieving. We cry when someone dies – but we’re not crying for them, we’re crying for ourselves. Because we have lost them, they won’t be making us laugh again. They are out of pain now, and in some ways we console ourselves with that, but we’re going to miss them; every time we see their picture, hear their name or meet any number of other triggers, we are reminded of the hole in our life. And yes, there is an element sometimes of relief that it’s not us, that we’re still here, because life is precious and we must treasure what we still have.

In the intervening eighteen months since the guilt first knocked me down, all three of those strong brave women have left us. K quietly and privately fought as long and as hard as she could, but eventually was beaten. R looked at the treatment offered, gauged the effect on her life and her family’s, and quietly declined the interventions which would have left her unable to eat or speak, for the sake of an extra few months. L continued to update her blog, dealing with the Bullshit and what it was doing to her in her own inimitable style, and worrying that her last sentence might contain a typo!

But this week the inevitable arrived, as it will for all of us one day.

So what about us? The guilty survivors, the grieving families? What do we do?

We weep, we lie awake, we rant about the unfairness of it all. We face the fear that never goes away, the knowledge that one day it will be our turn.
Then we move forward. We remember. We celebrate. Because no matter how guilty we might feel about it, we are still here. Because one day, I will be gone, and spring will still come and there will still be bluebells, and those left behind had damned well better look at the little blue buggers and remember how much I loved them, and smile. 

I don’t know how Lisa, or K or R, felt about bluebells... but I love them. And I know that they will be here soon, drifting like smoke through the woodland, and I will be glad that I am alive to see them. I will look around me, and see the world, and be glad that I am still able to. I will think of the people I have loved who I can’t hug any more, and I will smile and remember with joy that I was privileged to have them in my life. I will do the things we used to do together, and they will still be with me, because they are part of me now. As someone wiser than me said, there is a light, and it never goes out.

Rest in Peace, Lisa Lynch, 1979-2013.