I'm feeling ....
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More to follow....
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2003-10-05 - 12.45am (6th) previous entry next entry Thank you so much Meg for your lovely guestbook entries, and Nicola for the encouraging email. *hugs* to you both! Thank you to everyone who has been praying for Cameron’s mum with the timing of her baby around the funeral. God has been wonderfully faithful yet AGAIN!!! She gave birth to a baby boy last night at 3.20am. He is called Nathan, and he weighed in at 5lb 8oz. Michael (her 3-year-old) weighed similar, so although he’s light, it seems to be normal for her babies! Mother and baby are both fine, and the birth was normal and without any complications. She didn’t need stitches or anything, praise God. She was up and about within the hour, and they were both home when I phoned this evening. So this is wonderful news. But it’s sort of odd when it’s happened only 11 days after her own little boy died. I congratulated them and was joyful and happy about it, because I really felt that way, but then how does that feel to them? I don’t know. I don’t know how I’d feel if it were me. Joy and grief all at the same time. And not even the same type as when you have twins and lose one, because this was her grown up boy who she’d known and loved for 11 years. However, her husband said she is doing well. I think she must be a superwoman. The genuine article! He agreed with me :) I hope things go okay for them with the new baby. She is coming to the funeral as planned tomorrow – it boggles my brain that she will be attending such a draining and difficult event less than 36 hours after giving birth. Boggle. But they have a carer for the baby for while the funeral is on, and I don’t know how that will work with a newborn, but I know it’s definitely necessary for her to be able to have nothing else to focus on but Cameron at the funeral. So the funeral is tomorrow at 1.15, and I am feeling okay about it. Sad. But okay. It’s a necessary thing, in respect and love for Cameron, and to allow everyone who knew him to grieve and say goodbye. I need to be there to do that too. But I feel I have largely dealt with that side of things, when I went to visit Cam’s body on Friday. I’m so so so glad I did still. The only thing is that sometimes I get a strong image in my mind of that visit, and I can’t believe – absolutely cannot believe – that I was there and that he was there, like that, not alive I mean, and that he’s gone. The image seems to add to the shock of what is true. But the rest of the time I am struggling to remember what he looked like in his coffin. Today when I tried to remember and couldn’t, I panicked, thinking that my memories were all going to disappear. But I do not need to worry about losing that memory. I have it written down, and it is not one of the specially important memories – of how he looked I mean. The memory of the EVENT is what’s important to me, not so much every detail of how he looked. But somehow it makes me feel upset when I can’t quite picture how he looked the very last time I saw him for the rest of my life. I do remember how he looked the last time I saw him alive though, much more clearly. And that’s weird, since I wasn’t trying to commit him to memory that day since I didn’t know it was the last time I would see him alive. But I’ve been trying to remember him on Friday, and yet the memory is like sand through a sieve, like I’m clutching at it but it’s something I can’t hold onto. That scares me a bit, because I don’t want anything of Cameron to fade, not ever. But I am trying to keep cool about such things. I can’t do anything about anything. I can only keep loving him. And that I will do. My grandparents get home from a longish holiday this weekend, and they don’t know about Cameron, so I have to phone them and tell them soon. That will be hard I think. My mum told me on the phone this evening that she has told my brother. I need to phone him too. My family had all met Cam – my parents and brother quite a lot of times - and thought he was just precious. Mummy cried more than I did when I told her. Well I didn’t cry at all so that wasn’t hard. Emotion isn’t there when I talk to people about Cam, I just shake instead which is almost more embarrassing. My voice shakes, my limbs shake, my ribs and tummy shake. I can feel fine about it all, and then read my own diary back about visiting Cam on Friday – and even find it comforting to read in some ways – and yet by halfway through I am shaking so much I have to stop and breathe nice and slow. It’s not distress because I still feel okay, I just seem to shake a lot about Cameron since I found out he died. Well, since before actually, when I had that feeling after his mum’s message. I have that saved on my answer machine still. It’ll be automatically wiped in 9 more days, but I wish it wouldn’t be. I listen to it sometimes. It just says, “Alice this is Cameron’s mum. Could you call me back as soon as possible please?” and that’s it. But in hindsight it’s so much more. I don’t know why I still listen to it. I suppose it freezes that moment between Cameron being alive to me and being blissfully ignorant of the truth, and how I’ve felt ever since. The other message that is saved right after it is another one from his mum, saying “Just to let you know Cameron’s funeral will be at 1.15pm on Monday the 6th of October” and some other stuff. I tell you, when you listen to the two, one after the other like machines play them, it’s too weird for words. One when I had no idea. The next like a lead weight of truth. Urgh, I could drive myself crazy dwelling so much on all this. I don’t know how much I dwell on Cameron and these last 11 days is normal and how much is too much. Oh well, one thing I know is that I am going to go out there tomorrow and give that boy of mine my whole heart and my whole attention in everything I do. I’m going to honour him and love him, and cry if I need to, and laugh if he makes me laugh as well, in anything funny that is recalled about him. If he was alive I would do no less, so why should it be different just because he couldn’t stay? I am expecting the hardest parts to be singing his favourite hymns, seeing his family broken to pieces in their hearts, watching his coffin into the ground and covered up, and almost more than all of those – going back to his house afterwards, without him. That part I do not know how to bear. But I’m sure I will, since I have an amazing God pouring strength and peace and comfort and love into me moment by moment, and also because loving Cameron means bearing stuff you never thought you could until doing so stretched you and you realised you could. That’s how it has been from the first few weeks of loving him, all the way till now. So yay for my super stretchy heart, courtesy of my precious Cameron, and my faithful God! I’m gonna go and give it a good old stretch tomorrow methinks. But it’s all good in the end I think. It has to be, because that’s what God promised, and anyway, I will see Cam again yet. It ain’t over till the fat lady sings. Or something! But you know what I mean. Life will go on, and Cameron will never really be gone. |
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