Porridge

"Trust you to notice," said someone at the funeral I was at yesterday, "You're going to blog about this, aren't you?"
I smiled in that way you do, with a fixed top lip and blank eyes, when you can't quite get your head round what someone is saying. I couldn't quite see how I could write a blog about porridge but after a heavy night's sleep and a long walk, porridge is all I can think about.

I'm like porridge at the moment. I feel bland, boring,grey and  full of lumps.  Sometimes I'm too hot; sometimes too cold; rarely just right. Existing feels like moving through porridge.

"That's perfectly normal," people have told me this week.  "It's what happens after the death of a parent." This is slightly weird for me. Being perfectly fine is usual but to be 'perfectly normal' is not something I'm used to and I've decided that if this is normal, you can keep it.

I don't feel normal.  In fact, I feel very different.  I don't really feel like me.

I've been to work and not cared. I have no interest in doing things properly. I spend my days wishing I could get home to do nothing. I'd like to sit on the sofa and watch rubbish TV, knit or read my book. I'm not interested in whether there are weeds at the allotment. I don't want to eat or cook complicated meals and am more than happy with an avocado. I don't care if children I teach have practised.The swimming pool seems too far away to bother. There are piles of ironing and last night's dishes are unwashed.  I'm not planning lessons or thinking about writing reports. I'm letting other people worry about getting the music ready for a concert the choir have agreed to.  I haven't been blogging because no body really wants to read porridge.

People tell me that this is a normal part of grief.

My Mum says that her emotions flit between anger and guilt.
"They are two of the seven stages of grief," I told her. "It's shock then guilt followed by anger."
"Seven?" she shouted down the phone. "You mean there's more to come? Great!"
Even by screwing my face up and beating my temples lightly I couldn't drag the other four stages up from the depths of my memory.
"I think the last one is acceptance," I said, eventually.

After I put the phone down, I decided to look it up.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who did the initial work with terminally ill patients and wrote about it in a book called Death and Dying only had 5 stages. (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance) but this was later expanded to be appropriate to those suffering the loss of a loved one, or indeed any kind of loss (including divorce, redundancy or even the loss of a sports game).  They added  upward turn and reconstruction categories between depression and acceptance to make the number up to seven.

The only real stage I failed to remember was the depression one. Gradually getting better to get to acceptance are probably not stages we need to worry about.

I was wondering why I hadn't read much about the depression stage but I think I know now.  People don't write about it because they can't be bothered. It's boring to you, let alone anyone else.  It's the period when other people think you should be getting over it and moving on with your life. You don't want to think about anything. Sitting alone to reflect on your own, tedious private thoughts seems preferable.

The Long Suffering Husband hoped that after yesterday's funeral (of a friend) I'd be able to start to get back to normal. I wonder how he'll react when he discovers that this is 'perfectly normal' and that this porridge phase could last some time.