New Year

I was dreading New Year’s Eve. I wanted to cocoon myself between my duvet and electric blanket and not come out until the middle of January - mainly because people have stopped talking about the Christmas break by then. Of course, my youngest was having none of that. She wanted to have fun on New Year’s Eve. She wanted to be around people. She didn’t want to be stuck in with a depressed mum. Naturally, she didn’t say any of this but it was patently obvious that she was dreading New Year’s Eve as much as I was – but for quite different reasons. I wanted to avoid people who saw partying as far more important than the loss of my son – she wanted to spend time with them. I’m under no illusion that she misses him desperately - it’s just that sometimes she needs a break from it.

I want – I need – people to remember him, and to share those memories with me. I need them to give me anecdotes of when he was alive. I need them to just bloody ask how I’m feeling. However, most can’t be bothered with all that at the best of times, let alone when they want to party, party, party. And Christmas and New Year is THE party season. Tis the season of goodwill after all.

Anyway, we got through Christmas. I know we went to my brother’s on Christmas Day. I think we watched TV on Boxing Day and went shopping the following day. I really can’t remember what we did after that. On the 30^th, I called an old friend. We had a lot of catching up to do and chatted for quite some time. Then she invited my youngest and me to her place for the following evening. There was to be no party, thank goodness – the last thing I needed was to be surrounded by drunks – just us, her hubby, our daughters, and her granddaughter, who would be tucked up in bed anyway. I accepted gratefully. It was a compromise for us. I needed a quiet evening and my daughter needed to be with other people.

We took a couple of pizzas – just in case – and arrived early enough to be entertained by her gorgeous granddaughter before she was whisked off to bed. After that, the girls, having only just met,  went off together to watch a DVD, and her hubby disappeared into another part of the house leaving the two of us to gas away to our heart’s content. We talked about everything and anything – we hadn’t seen each other in almost two years so we had a lot to catch up on.

We all watched the fireworks on TV, ate pizza and we left around 1.30am I think. I was tired but pleasantly so. I was relaxed and felt OK. It was a good evening.


This was in such sharp contrast to last year, when I drove home after a horrific evening and tried to figure out who I could trust to take care of my daughter when I was dead. I tried to plan my death that night. It wasn't like earlier on, when I’d wanted to be with him but was aware that wasn’t possible. It was that I just wanted it all to stop. All that agony of my loss never being acknowledged or recognised. I still don’t know what stopped me. Maybe my will to live was stronger than I thought. I know I was too scared to abandon my daughter to the family who clearly didn’t give a toss about me so how could I trust them to take proper care of her. Anyway, I went to bed and plodded on – for a year.

And here I am. It’s now 2011 and I still exist, but am now in my second year without my son – and I miss him. I want to be asleep and dreaming of him. I’d like to have just one dream when I can listen to, and talk with, him, and hold him, and kiss him, and ruffle his hair, and scold him, and tell him to ‘tidy that bloody mess you call a bedroom’, and just be a normal mum with her boy. Because then, just for a few short minutes, he’d be alive and it would feel real. But it’s been months, over a year actually, since I last dreamed about him. And that was no dream - it was another nightmare entirely. Yet, as unbearable as it was to see him lying, decomposing in his coffin, and telling me how cold he was, and even though I sobbed helplessly because I couldn’t even keep my little boy warm and safe, that was better than never dreaming of him at all.

I don’t know whether the next year will be easier. I really, really want to hope it will – but always there, is the feeling that it won’t.