"This ain't no way to live.."

In Oxford on Sunday it was yellow, everywhere. The light was falling over everything it could in a drunken spilling. It leaked, and there was nothing other to do other than lie flat in it and let it pour over me. You, my lovely boy, with your ripe , open face told me excitedly that you had found the golden pathway, and we walked in red and yellow leaves over the flat evening lawn to find another child's bench, illuminated as if on a plinth. Evening sun blazed on our faces obliterating everything into blackness around it. Then it disappeared, no melting away. Heat then nothing. Silence but for the papery falling of a curled leaf.

I woke up last night suddenly, trying to pin down exactly what feels different- I thought that by now, four and a half years in (or out?) , I had it covered, had felt everything there was to feel. But I hadn't considered nothingness.

In the early months and years, it was all strong, it was perfectly possible to feel your presence and your absence in one seething cauldron, simultaneous and eviscerating. Then, other swings of the pendulum brought disconnectedness. Then , there were almost holy glimpses of you, us , it, all being alright, and much bigger, more expanded in love than I had ever felt possible. I could relax a bit in that afternoon light. I felt foolish, like it was only by my limitations that there had been the veil of death between us.

But, when I woke up last night, I thought- it's like being in a horrific accident, but you don't die. Everything feels like you're not going to make it, and the only limit on the horizon is your own death. But - you survive - and then you wake up blinking, with pins holding your body together, and you are still breathing.

So now what.

And the next horizon that yawns ahead is - forever.

"What Foever means after the Death of your Child" seemed like a clumsy and obvious title when I first saw it on the bereavement shelves in the bookshop but..this forever fills me with a flattening despair, and alongside it, the bleakest fury.

Cups that crack can go straight in the bin.

Doors with broken handles can be kicked open.

Towels with stains can be ripped into floorcloths.

Optimism seems exhausting. Even being in the present takes too much energy.

Hey, come little boy. Seeing your blue sky face and your wheaty skin is the absolute pleasure of my day at 3.30.. I'll see you later x