Day 26 of Grief: A Stream of Random Thoughts

Just going through my notes and scribbles, this is from Friday, the 19th of June.

Note: When I recorded this, I did not yet have Darren’s post-mortem report. I was searching backwards through every cough, every twitch, any health issues (he had none), trying to work out whether I had missed something.

Daniel’s on his final day of work experience at the minute at St Joseph’s, so that’s really nice that he’s done that and has been able to do it. They have been so lovely to him and he needed to get out of this house.

I am so incredibly tired, but I’m waiting on a Tesco delivery.

Jesus, I feel like I’m always going to feel like this, but there’s so many things that… like now that I go to record myself, saying these things out loud, and the speed with which my head can think about 30 things at the same time and be fighting these invisible fights…

And actually, there’s so much anger at things.

You know, I was just looking at something there on Instagram and someone announcing that they’ve become grandparents, and I just started thinking; fuck, Darren never became a grandparent. He never even had that bit where he saw his son grow up fully.

But he has seen Daniel to 17, and Daniel’s wise beyond most teenagers’ years, so he saw him as a young adult. But he never got to see Daniel, say when he was maybe in his 30s, had a family, a career, and then had grandchildren and things like that.

And I feel that’s all been taken away from both of them.

I can’t… I can’t process it.

I can’t process whether there was more at play and I’m hiding it from myself. Like, was he going downhill in front of me and I didn’t know? I didn’t notice that he was…

He seemed outwardly happy. There was nothing.

He had that cough, the kind of thing that went on for a couple of months, and I worried about it. And any time I’d say to him, “That cough, you’ve still got it,” he’d go, “No, I’m just clearing my throat,” or, “No, I had a dry mouth, so that’s why I was doing it.”

But I would hear it, or things like that, and I wondered, you know, is there something there?

It’s just like… I could have had him up in the health place being checked out sooner if he had went.

Of course, he wouldn’t have went.

He always loved the thing of, “I can’t make a medical appointment during the day because I’m working.”

And I’d go, “Yeah, but I’m sure your work will let you out. Let you leave your computer aside for an hour, go up the road to the doctor, and come home.”

And he would him and ha, and then I would leave it so I wasn’t bugging him.

I suppose now I’m glad that we’ve got the summer because to have to go and get Daniel to school every day in this period…

Like, if this had happened at any other period of time, say September, I would have had a child who’d barely be going into school, so I’d have been really fucked.

Because not only would I have had that fight every day, but I would be exhausted because I’d be getting up every day at ten to eight, getting him up, getting him fed, telling him to get out to be on time.

And every day would be like that.

So every shite situation could be just worse.

And I should get a dictaphone.

I should get a dictaphone so I don’t have to worry about…

A dictaphone that types things up automatically would be awesome, I guess.

Well that’s my Alan Partridge idea for the day.