Just for today

                                

                                                   NICK

Just for today I don't give a flying f... about anything.

I don't care if I pay my income tax, or if the carpet needs cleaning, the garden needs tending, the food needs buying, the bills need paying.

I don't care about my health, my addictions, my past, my abuses, my advocacy, my activism, my writing, my work. 

I don't care if I eat or not.
I don't care what I look like.Or even get dressed.
I don't care if it is raining, cold, miserable. 

I don't care if the pope still exists or the narcissistic church is still abusive, 
I don't even care that I was one of their victims.

I don't care what day it is or even if it is.

Because today is the day thirty years ago that my wonderful son Nick was killed, and there is NOTHING in comparison to the pain of losing a child, and living a life without them.

It has been thirty years of grief.

When you first lose someone, your grief is obvious to everyone, you cannot hide it. Thereafter it continues , just as painfully but more invisibly.It is still there, but you have to navigate around it in order to function.

And it unfolds over time, the initial devastation is replaced every day with new senses of loss. Stuff I couldn't have envisaged, the fact that he didn't get to his siblings graduations, weddings, he never met their partners, his niece or nephews, I didn't get to see him settled and happily married with his own children around him.

Every milestone in all of our lives,  no matter how joyous reminds us that there is one of us missing.

And grief changes you, I am a different person to the one I was before Nick died. His death made me into  somebody, something else.
Someone he probably wouldn't even recognise.

He was only 19 , and this year we would have been celebrating his 50th birthday.
So forgive me if today I just can't care about anything else. Tomorrow I no doubt will put my facade back on and best foot forward, but today I just don't f....ing care.