Today

My youngest son’s home and he’s making me laugh – telling me how they don’t mind being kettled anymore because someone has a tea trolley for when it happens, and they all just sit down and have a cup of tea. It pisses off the police no end, and then he asks if I’m going, and I say I’m not sure – I have a lot to do, a lot to organise before I go away. Maybe.

Then he looks away – you know the way they do when they want you to think it isn’t very important – and he says,

“..By the way, that thing happened again – the thing with my heart - you know”

I make my voice sound calm

“What do you mean?”

“You know – that time it went really fast and wouldn’t stop”

“It happened again?”

He’s still looking down, stroking the little grey cat’s ear, pulling it gently between two fingers, the way he loves you to, and he tells me how it was worse this time– how it didn’t stop for a whole day, right through the night and into the next morning. I try not to lose my temper, I say “Why didn’t you go to the hospital – you know what they said.”

And he says “yes, but - you know – I thought it would stop”

We argue for a bit. He promises me that he’ll go and tell a doctor next time, definitely – if it happens again. I say how about just going anyway – like now, just telling them, and he raises his eyes to the ceiling and says there’s no point – they’ll just stick that stupid monitor thing on and it won’t happen. Like last time. And then we leave it there, because there’s nothing else to say.

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Marnie doesn’t know it’s today. She doesn’t want to know. She told me she’s deliberately forgotten when it happened – and if that’s true and I hope it is, if that’s what she wants… We all do it differently.

She wrote to me this morning – a jaunty email, saying how much she’s looking forward to seeing me – how she has all sorts of things planned for when I come.

There is one thing she talks about quite often, one thing she remembers. When she first knew she was going to have a baby – they hadn’t been married long – and they’d just got this house – a proper big house, with land, stables, a gatehouse – all of that . She says how she remembers standing at the open window of one of the upstairs rooms, just after they’d bought it, looking out, thinking “this is where my children will grow up, that’s where they’ll play tennis - that’s where they’ll learn to ride “.. and then she says that was the last time she ever planned ahead – the last time ever, because it was only a few months later that Joe’s father died. They never even moved in.

I know it’s today. I haven’t forgotten – not one single second of how it felt, how it still feels.

We haven’t talked about it, not directly. There’s quite a lot we don’t say. I told her once about how I couldn’t breathe that day, although I didn’t know what it was until quite a bit later. I just thought I couldn’t breathe .

I thought about going to the cottage, sitting in the little field– I could easily – it’s so close. No-one would know. But I don’t think I could bear to – not unless he came with me. That would make sense: the three of us – him, and me and Joel, and now the two of us, him and me, just sitting on the grass, not doing much, like we used to.

He’s still there though – Tucson – and I’m not sure if he’ll ever come back. Last year he said he always tried to think of the positive – the fact that Joe was around in the first place – that we should take our memories of him down through the years, use them to make something joyful, something good.

I don’t. I don’t even try. I just stick at hating everything – the whole pointless, stupidity of it all. The unfairness of it. I know it doesn’t make sense – I know it’s not the right way to look at it and I know if Joe were here he would tell me to shut the fuck up and get on with things. It doesn’t help though. I can’t help it. I still miss him so much.

Three days before, it’s my eldest son’s birthday. Three days after, my youngest son’s, and so it’s always busy, and happy and often, like today, the first really warm weather – tshirt , and sunglasses, and bare feet weather, and I can stretch out on the deck and let the sun hit my face.

Since very early this morning – really early, because I couldn’t sleep - I’ve been trying so hard to see the good – reasoning with myself – thinking about all the wonderful amazing things I have, all the people I love, how lucky I am to be able to do what I want. I am so fucking lucky. I’m the luckiest person in the world.