Sunday 29 March 2020

Surfacing under personal sad times

It's been difficult to generate the drive to blog over the last ten days. On the 16th March I was at hospital having a MRI scan which was an interesting experience. Maybe more about that later (not a great time to be having such investigations but small detail in the greater suffering of many at thus time) On the same day we lost Rachels mum Christine who had fought a ten year long battle. Rachel and family had done a fantastic job of keeping Christine in her own home where she died in peace with Rachel and myself as well as one of Rachel's sister and Christine's brother with her.

In light of the following weeks escalation of the measures to control the spread of the virus her passing was a blessing not only to Christine but the family. Organising a funeral in these times has been a challenge but Rachel has done an unbelievable amount of work to give her mum a send off within the new restrictions she wanted. This week will be hard but cathartic all the same.

I'm a self isolator in the main by desire so the measures have not had a great impact on me but I can understand the pressures it has/will put on families and individuals who are the opposite of me. What took me by surprise was the anxiety levels that I experienced in the first few days of the change of life we are all now practicing. I'm normally a level controlled person but my mind went into overdrive and I had a few unpleasant days. This flared up other health issues that further compounded my state of physical and mental health. I type this to share with others it's ok to experience change. I found controlled breathing a great help as well as compartmentalising the negative thoughts as they came into my mind. I used a shoe box approach.... anything that I start to think about that is overtly negative and something I cannot influence I open a shoe box in my mind and drop the thought into it - it works very well for me.

One other thing that works for me is keeping my mind and body busy. We had a discussion over should we go to the boat to isolate ( we needed to ensure we kept well prior to the funeral for obvious reasons) as it turned out we were asked by C&RT to not go to the boat as we were leisure boater, so we were happy to follow this advice. Indeed we had already decided the cottage was far the better location as we had all the services on tap as well as many many jobs to crack on with . It's a shame we are missing Percy and there is work to do there but nothing like that needs doing here and I have a lovely garage and workshop to spend endless hours on jobs for the house.

The walking around here is also very isolated so that makes our daily hour of exercise easy and enjoyable. We are running our food down as we are trying to stay away from people until the funeral, then I'll join the queues and be happy to do so.

There is a lot I could type but in the main we are doing what the country needs people to do, social distancing, keeping calm and carrying on. It'll pass and things will resume to not quite normal and nor should they. I'll blog again about my thoughts on this ....

For now I'm thinking and sending positive thoughts to all those in hospital and those who have lost loved ones, the brave and committed essential workers across all aspects of this phase of life. Bless them all  - too many trades and professions to list but we all know who they are.

Stay safe, stay positive and keep healthy.

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