Great Christian Diaries

2003-12-10 - 1.55am  previous entry  next entry

Hello. As you can see I have a new poll question after many months! It's about as thrilling as I am feeling at the moment, so please accept my apologies! Hopefully I'll find my brain soon so I can change it again. It was definitely time for a new question, but I just couldn't think of a good one. The last one got 55 votes!!!!! Okay so that's probably 5 people being sooo bored that they voted 11 times over the many years that the question was up there (!!), but never mind. Most people seem to want wintery weather, closely followed by a preference for autumnal weather. But that's kind of irrelevant now because it's winter. Oh well. But thanks for voting!! Feel free to ignore the current poll though, really.

Let's see, what can I talk about tonight? It's late - 12.30am already and my head aches, but I don't care. I feel like I need to offload, though I'm not sure what about exactly.

When did I last write? Maybe Sunday? Well, we didn't go to church on Sunday. Hmmm, what else? Monday I didn't do anything. Tuesday is today, and I have done a bit more today. Still feeling a bit worse for wear from that period, but glad to be feeling better! Today Neil was on study leave. He was going to be tomorrow too, but he has a whole afternoon of skating and then a meal for a team Christmas outing thingy at work, so it didn't make sense to use up one of his study days for that. Tonight he was at the very last Alpha course meeting, and tomorrow evening he will be out at the work meal. Thursday we have both been invited to a meal at someone's house with a few other couples from church, but I reeeeally don't want to go. And Friday we have Granny and Grandoug round for dinner. They are coming over late afternoon though, to avoid the rush hour traffic and so that Granny has plenty of time to give my hair a trim (yaaay! Long overdue!!). I am also meant to be going to Judith's tomorrow to type something up for her, but I also really don't want to go. I already put her off from last week because of Cameron's school presentation, so I can't put her off much more. Urgh.

So today Neil has finally put the front door up!!!! Yay!! He did that in the morning, and I took him to Uni in the afternoon so he could study. We have a nice new front door which looks gorgeous (if I do say so myself!), and without broken glass in it, hoorah! It's much more secure than the last one too, because we fitted double locks to it. But we still have to fix the weather bar on the bottom yet. I am still applying woodstain. *sigh* I feel like I've been painting wood with woodstain for all eternity or something. All year I've been varnishing or staining some door or other! But we finally have six new doors in our house, having replaced the whole lot of them except for the kitchen back door, which is fine.

I also made a start on my Christmas cards yesterday, after panicking mildly whilst watching the 6 o'clock news that evening, where they said yesterday was the deadline for sending cards worldwide in time for Christmas!!! What?!! Where is the time going?!! I hadn't even opened my packs of Christmas cards yet, I still felt like I had ages before Christmas! So yesterday I started writing them, which has taken me hours so far and I'm not even halfway through them, because the ones to old school friends always have to have the whole year's news in them. Ooh my aching wrist! This year's news seems somewhat depressing when I read the little summary back, what with Cameron's death, and Grandmummy's death, and my parents moving out of the country, and the whole "we're having a baby this year!" plan having completely belly-flopped. But oh well. It hasn't all been bad by any means. I just am not in the right mood to think of what the good things might have been at the moment. Yucky of me, I know.

I did the washing up today and some laundry and things. The place is such a mess and I need to sort it out. I went to the supermarket too.

This afternoon after I took Neil to Uni I went to the cemetery to visit Cameron's grave. I always do now, as it's so near to the university. It was sooo cold today, although not quite as cold as yesterday apparantly, but I wasn't out in it yesterday. All the leaves are off the trees now in the cemetery, and the trees look very bleak and stark against the sky.

When Cameron died, the next day I think, or I can't remember exactly when, but it was when it was still shouting in my head and I was completely numb. Anyway, I was driving somewhere in my car and I put the radio on to blot out my head shouting, and sat in this traffic jam, and that song I mentioned that I loved quite a while ago by Daniel Beddingfield (sp?) - "If you're not the one" started playing. If you've heard it you probably know it slices through you like a knife, or maybe it doesn't for you? Well for me it's so beautiful, it gives me goose-bumps. It makes me feel sad and soaring all in one go, and I forget all that's around me. Well I heard it twice over a couple of days right after Cameron died, and now that song is a reminder of the way I felt then, the sense of shocking loss. But still with the beauty and the sweetness, if that makes any sense. It aches to hear it, but I love to hear it all the same.

I didn't hear it for a while after that, but it played in my head when I saw Cameron at night in my mind a lot. Last Thursday I was driving home from Cameron's house after the visit to his school, and I sat in a traffic jam just past the turning to the cemetery. It was dark and I felt sad and empty because of how the day had reminded me of Cameron being gone, and because I hate driving past the cemetery and not being able to visit him, because it was closed after dark. So I switched the radio on, and that song was playing. It's just the words that ache so. I don't know them exactly, just from what I've heard as I listen to it, but here is the part that breaks me, apart from the chorus which I also love:

"Cause I miss you. Body and soul so strong that it takes my breath away, and I breathe you... into my heart and pray for the strength to stand today. And I love you. Whether it's wrong or right, and though I can't be with you tonight, you know my heart is by your side."

Urgh, it's just so exactly how I feel about Cameron.

Anyway, that song played on the radio. I thought what a bitter coincidence it was, after the day I'd had at Cam's school and sitting past the turning to the closed cemetery. And then the song finished and a boring advert came on, so I switched to another radio station, and guess which song was just starting? So I listened to it again, and sang with it this time.

No reason for me writing all that, I just felt like it. I have no wise stuff or conclusions from it this time.

On the way to the cemetery today, I avoided turning the radio on because meaningful songs felt like they would ache too much just as I was on my way somewhere achy anyway. But just as I pulled into the cemetery, in fact, out of nowhere as I was rounding a bend in the road, this song popped in my head from yeeeeears ago. My dad bought me a tape of this singer back in ohhhh.... 1989 probably. Because he knew I loved beautiful voices, and I was interested in all sorts of music, even though I was 13 (!!). This singer is called Dianne Reeves, and the tape was her album "Never Too Far", which is absolutely excellent if you like listening to one of the most amazing singing voices around and vaguely jazzy-ish music. There's this one song practically hidden away near the end of the second side of the tape. I haven't thought about it for a long long time. But it's called "Company", and if I write the words and try to describe the emotional effect of the song, it will be like me saying "this is red" and posting a grainy, poor quality, black-and-white scratched up photo of the colour red. Because the voice and the melody and the way the notes linger.... I can't show it to you and I wish I could. But anyway, you'll just have to take my word for it!

There's this part - well all of it really, but there's this part where the words match my feelings at the moment. I sang it sooooo many hundreds of times since I was 13, but I never related to the words till today. But the words only make up about 1% of the emotion because the melody and the voice and the instruments is just so beautiful and moving. Anyway the words to this little bit go:

"I'll see you in another life now baby, I'll free you in my dreams. But when I reach across the galaxy, I will miss your company."

Of course that takes all of about 5 minutes to actually listen to, with all the lingering notes, etc! But it's so beautiful. That's just a tiny part of the whole song.

It popped in my head like I had switched the tape on in the car, and when I got out of the car I was still singing it. At the time it just felt like a beautiful song in my head, all nostalgic and stuff, so I was singing it as I walked along the rows of graves to Cameron's. I stopped singing long enough to say, "Hi lovely" and carried on while I picked leaves off his grave and the usual stuff. And then there were no more leaves to clear up and there was nothing else for me to do. There were no other people in the cemetery, not a single one, and so I just squatted there by the side of Cameron's grave and let my eye fall on nothing in particular while I finished singing the song. I sing as loud or quiet as I feel like singing at the cemetery if there's nobody else there. Then when I finished singing it was so quiet, and so I started over again, and I looked up as I was crouching there and saw the sun setting behind the wintery trees on the far side of the cemetery. The sky was peach and pink and mauve and completely clear, except for a few brilliant white streaks where planes had passed over recently. The whole sky towards the setting sun was filled with hundreds and hundreds of birds, flying so high in V formations that they seemed tiny specks. But hundreds of them against that beautiful colour.

And I was thinking, "Wow Cam, look at that!" and right at that moment I got to singing the part about reaching across the galaxy and missing your company, and I realised I was singing about Cameron, and the world suddenly felt the most beautiful and the most lonely and empty all in one go, that it has in a long time. Well it's probably felt this empty a lot since Cam died, but it was strangely painful to see it so beautiful at the same time as missing Cameron so much. For some reason that hurts way more than just missing him without the beauty of the song and the sunset and the colours and the birds. The air was so clear and crisp. It felt like there were no barriers between me and God, physically, at all. The air was not clogged with stuff, with daylight, pollution, humidity, heat, dust, anything at all. I felt like I was breathing the very air that surrounded those tiny dots of birds, so far away, so high up. Like the air was so thin and clear. I don't know. I'm talking rubbish or something.

Anyway I finished the song and then it was silent as well as beautiful and empty and lonely, so I stood at his grave and cried and wished him alive again and told him, told God, anyone, that I missed him. Whenever I feel like that and stand there crying at his grave, it feels like absolutely nothing has changed since the first time I sat there, still early on in my grief after he died. I feel like nothing has changed and I haven't come anywhere since then. Like that feeling is a state of permenance and I just regressed all the steps I've taken since his death, right back to square one where I just sit and cry and miss him and hurt. I know it can change because I've had weeks now where I can function fine(ish) and not cry at all and feel like it's okay and life goes on. But perhaps that's just the false bit, and really it will always come back to crying and aching and missing him and not believing it.

Always when I cry at Cameron's grave, somebody arrives in a car to visit a grave right near Cameron's, even though there's nobody else in the whole place and there are thousands of graves to visit. I don't know why, but this always happens. So it happened this time - the first lady I met way back in October arrived. I was crying and she went straight to her loved one's grave, so we didn't look up or say hi for 20 minutes or so, but I lose my tears when people turn up. Which is frustrating since I need to spill them really, if it feels that way. But oh well. I get self-conscious. But then after ages we chatted, and she said the last time she came to the cemetery was that time we met. She's so bitter and her voice is full of resentment when I talk to her. She hates God. She doesn't even believe in him. But since she says both statements I'm guessing she believes but hates him so much that she wants the satisfaction of declaring she doesn't believe in him. I'm guessing anyway. I am praying for her. I don't know what she's been through but she must have so much hurt buried inside. She is angry that Cameron died, like she's angry that the man whose grave she visits died in his mid-thirties. She says, "Such a waste of life!" with great venom in her tone. I know what she means in a way, but I feel defensive because Cameron could never have been called a waste of life. I mean, his life was never wasted. And that feels like what she's saying, though I know she means it slightly differently.

I am so sensitive to things people say lately, especially about Cameron. People say, "Oh I miss Cameron!" and they don't know him. They have a right to express missing him, of course they do, but I feel so.... tight inside, not at them exactly, but.... I just feel hot and I think, "No you don't! You don't have any idea what it's like to miss Cameron!" I hate when people make statements or act like their feelings are more important than other people's, or worse, or more difficult, or whatever. Everybody's feelings are valid, and not to be judged in comparison to another person's. Which is why I hate that I'm doing it by feeling this way. Yuck. Particularly since I myself don't know what it's like to miss Cameron, from his family's point of view. Bleurgh. I don't want to talk about this anymore.

A programme on TV this evening called "Hand of God" annoyed me greatly, but I don't really want to talk about that either. It would entice opinions from other people which = debate, and I hate debate. I hate conflict, even of opinions, even though that's life and perfectly normal. I'd rather avoid it. And while I'm on the subject of avoiding things, gosh I do NOT want to go to Judith's or this meal on Thursday evening. I can reschedule with Judith, but I know I have to go round sooner or later. I just don't want to socialise, or see anyone right now. I don't want to be held accountable, like Judith will do, asking me if I'm getting out/doing things/looking at courses/doing exercise, etc. I know this is good for me and I probably need it, and Judith is being a good friend by doing so, but I don't want it at all at the moment. I feel pressed into a corner by this kind of thing at the moment, even though that's not how it is. Also I don't want to go out to a meal (first there's the food/fear thing, for a start) with 2 other bubbly chatty young couples who are all fresh from leading the Alpha course with Neil and this guy who has invited us all. It will be a total "mask at the ready" evening, and I can't bear dredging up the emotional energy to wear a mask all evening while chatty bubbly people make happy conversation with each other. Either I don't join in and feel like I want to go home the whole time, as well as seeming horribly antisocial, or I force myself to join in and I don't want to do that. Maybe I need to. But I really really don't want to.

I feel bad because it's something Neil is going to go to whether I attend or not, and he would be the only "half" of a couple without their partner if I don't go. He says he doesn't mind at all if I want to stay, but it would be much nicer for him wouldn't it, if I was there? Couple-wise, that is. I think they want to play games after the meal. I don't want to go. I just feel unhappy. I don't want to say, "Helloooo! How are yoooou?! Yes, I'm fine! (insert wide grin) I've been doing this and that, not much, just stuff round the house! (insert "but I'm happy!" smile) How about you?!" But I don't want to say, "Hello... Not so great actually.... Well, I just feel unhappy lately. I'm not finding it easy to deal with Cameron's death..... Oh, sorry, who's Cameron? - he's the little boy I used to look after at the hospital (blether on about a bland and removed relationship that doesn't resemble me and Cam at all) - he died recently.... Yes, terrible I know.... (insert encouraging look to ease the listener's concern).... I know, that's what they say, I'm sure things will feel better in time (awkward silence while someone frantically thinks of something cheerful to say)" You see? Maybe I'm just being all cynical/pessimistic about it, but that's how I feel at the moment. I'd rather avoid people to be honest.

Sorry, this is such a naff entry. And it's 2am. And I nearly forgot to thank Nicola, Meg and Alison for their guestbook entries. Thanks girls :)

Recent entries.....

Cameron's first anniversary - 2004-09-24
Update - 5th Anniversary and other stuff! - 2004-08-16
Church picnic and being happy and things :) - 2004-06-27
Barbeque at Cameron's house... - 2004-05-18
To Tara... - 2004-04-19