Saved from the troubles of this life

I don't write here very much these days - mostly I blog on my "Valley Journal" blog.

This one is for more personal reflections.

Pax died 33 years ago.

Catherine died four and a half years ago.

Since Catherine died, I got peripheral neuropathy. My arthritic knee deteriorated rapidly. My mother and brother died suddenly. I had knee replacement surgery to fix my knee. And now I have a tumour in my kidney which may or may not be malignant and am awaiting surgery.

Catherine had a tender heart and kind nature, but mentally - due to her condition - she had a hard time dealing with things. An elderly aunt who she hardly knew died and she ended up back in hospital. So it is hard to imagine how she would have dealt with all of this.

"Good people pass away; the godly often die before their time. But no one seems to care or wonder why. No one seems to understand that God is protecting them from the evil to come." (Isaiah 57:1) 

I'm actually at a point that I am relieved that Catherine and Pax have been protected from the evil of this world. May they be at peace, and watching over me as I walk through this next valley. 

The passing of time: Bereavedhood

I haven't posted anything new here for a long time. I have another blog (www.avalleyjournal.co.uk) in which I write about more general bereavement subjects. I was trying to make that one "supportive" and this one "personal" but I almost forgot...

Catherine's 4th anniversary came and went, preceded a week earlier by my mother's anniversary and the death of my mother's sister. At 94-ish, that wasn't a surprise, and we weren't close, so it didn't have much impact on me except a sadness at the passing of generations. A month before that was my brother's anniversary.

So from early March to the middle of April, I was anniversaried, and now I'm coming closer to Pax's.

March-April-May are not happy months for me, which is a warning about that which follows.

Lots of other things are trying to drag me down at the moment. For the first time in my life, I don't have any required work to do, any projects that I must pursue, or anybody to take care of. (Hubby retired and we have enough to scrape by.) I do some health and social care related volunteering, I help with writing articles and leaflets on bereavement, I do the occasional other nice thing. I've been trying (not too hard) to promote my "A Valley Journal" book but it's not going far.  A major writing/editing project that threaded through my previous decades has now come to a complete end, and a book proposal with a new publisher has been rejected. It would have been me something else to put my teeth into.

I do have lots of other stuff in the pipeline that I'm working on, but none of it is essential.
I don't seem to be able to put my weight down on anything in particular. A bit of this, a bit of that. I can work on one of those projects for a few hours, or play the piano, or paint, or read a book, potter in the garden, or look at the sky. I bet some people would love to be in this state of liberty, but it's not helpful for me. To feel un-needed by life in general and rather directionless is not healthy in my bereaved state.

Bereaved state. That's not something that many people understand.  I don't know why, because we have words for states:

Motherhood, fatherhood, parenthood ...

And me: bereavedhood.

That's it for now.