I've been asked a few times since yesterday... was there anything the medium knew, that wasn't on your blog...?
A few bits and pieces, that meant more to me than most people who read this would realise... the older woman who gave him a kick up the bum, the message he passed on (cheeky) about getting to heaven... and those fingers through my hair.
I don't think I've ever written about it, correct if I'm wrong, please... That maddening feeling, right from the start... worse, or better, whichever way you look at it, on the nights I sobbed myself to sleep. Tony's fingers, running through my hair, the way I'd felt a hundred times before. And the positivity that this was it, that tomorrow, or sometime during the night, I'd wake up with my mind completely missing in action, cracked under the pressure... praying that I wasn't going insane, half laughing that I was finally losing my mind.
***
It takes me days to recover from seeing the medium.
I cry for 24 hours. Sometimes I sob noisily, but mostly it's just fat salty tears that travel down my cheeks and plop onto things, puddles of salt on my keyboard, the plates for dinner, mixing in soundlessly with my children's bathwater.
I try not to cry in front of my children. It breaks my heart that my son is so used to me crying he barely bats an eyelid- a concerned hug and he's on his way. After watching me cry for hours, despite my best attempts to hide it, he turns to me and say "Mum, are you still crying? You can't be sad all the time!"
Which makes me cry all the harder.
I'm not sure what I'm crying for. Shock, at first. Then pain, because that was so exactly what I needed to hear, and came so quickly and forcefully, it was as if he were waiting for me, just waiting for the chance to make himself heard.
He plays with your hair at night... I can't describe the shock, the comfort.... I am not, it seems, as psychotic as I feared. When I feel his presence there, warm and strong and comforting, standing behind me, holding me up... maybe that's not as much of my imagination as I thought.
At the same time, I am pissed. How dare he. Stupidly, the knowledge that he is having the tattoo on his back finished makes me angry... nice for him, of course, to be able to go and get a tattoo whenever he pleases, without the military operation of finding a babysitter for two small children. Nice for him, too, to be happy and at peace, when that's the furthest island from me right now, and I either float aimlessly or splash frenetically toward it, all the time going nowhere.
But deeper than the angry, deeper than the unjustness, is the simple, desolate pain of grief. Sorrow. Somehow, the knowledge that he isn't angry at me, that he loves me, that he's sorry... it makes things worse. I have permission now to miss him as much as I choose, as much as any widow would miss her husband.
The grief is all consuming, and I spend almost two days wanting nothing more than to die, to leave, to stop this pain and be with Tony again.
Because if he's there, he's still around... what am I doing here?
And then, of course, I'm pissed at him again. Because by dieing, he went and left me without that option.
It passes, of course, as it always does. I contemplate running away from my children, starting a new life where I can pretend I haven't lived my old one, pleasing my self destructive as it wishes. And I do none of those things.
I emerge from that dark cloud around the day I turn thirty. And I feel... better. There are so many tiny things cleared up now.
He's sorry, and he loved me, all the while, as much I as loved him. He's OK with me moving on. He's happy, and I'm not... but I can be, if I happen find to come across it, and he won't hold it against me.
And my children are just mine, Any lingering grief about having to raise them as Tony would have wished is gone... he'll always be their dad, and they'll always know all about him. But with that one sentence- he doesn't feel he has the right to call himself Dad anymore- he removed all that guilt and worry. I know that might make people In Real Life angry, but I took it in the spirit I'm sure it came... he left them so young, his influence will be so diluted... he'll never be a real, flesh and blood person to them, and while that breaks my heart, I know it's true.
It's a relief, and a balm for my pain, and brings me closure. I feel loved again, I feel a right to grieve for my husband. Questions are answered, and this experience tells me what I've wanted to hear, what I've needed to hear for months now.
That he loved me, desperately, as much as I loved him.
That this wasn't my fault.
Skeptics, shush now, if you can help yourselves. I believe that this was real, that this was truth.
And considering what it's given me, if it wasn't.... does it matter?