MOUNTAINS

Wedding Dress For Sale
Pure White - Size 12
Veil &; Train
Any Reasonable Offer Considered

It has taken me over a month to write that advert, and I haven't put it
in the paper yet. Perhaps that is another month away, perhaps longer.
Time doesn't really mean anything to me anymore. When every waking
minute fills you with despair you don't tend to add them together to
remind yourself that you have hours of this - days and weeks! Only
people with a future ever look to it.

Leaving the house and placing the advert isn't much of anything I know,
but for me it will be like scaling a mountain. A mountain that I am not
yet even in sight of, let alone in a position to begin waging an
assault upon. At this moment in time, I am miles away, in another world
wandering around this suddenly expansive house in a permanent daze. The
problem is that it is warm here and safe and familiar. I fear that I
may stay here forever.

I know what I am doing is not healthy and will not change what has
happened, but the way forward seems so unbearable. Being able to see
the mountain that awaits you way off in the distance is perhaps worse
than seeing it from its base. At its base, vast overhanging rock some
way up may prevent you from being able to see to the summit and so it
can appear conquerable. When you have overcome the outcrop then perhaps
a skirt of low lying clouds will hide still the formidable challenge
that is left to surmount and your spirits might remain high. Until
finally, by the completion of these series of lesser challenges, you
will have done it. But from here, I can see all my personal mountain
and it is one huge unpalatable chunk. Its vastness and its sheer sided
faces scare me to death.

Lucy was laid to rest six weeks ago now. Only a week before we were due
to be married. I was at the barracks when the call came through, early
evening just after I had taken dinner. My Father told me that she had
been involved in a car crash, in that little Jeep of hers that she
loved so much. I listened without really taking any of it in - went
stumbling blindly for the sergeant immediately after to ask if he might
grant me leave to go home and attend to it. It was the sergeant who
found me, collapsed only yards from the phone.

I wanted to see her on my return. I needed to hold her hand, to kiss
her cheek, to whisper goodbye to her face to face before she was lost
to me forever, but my Father tried to stop me. The impact was horrific
son, he said falteringly. You do not want to see her the way I had to
when I identified her body. But my strength of will, the very thing
that makes me a good soldier was my undoing.

My Father was right about my not seeing her. The crash had been
nightmarish; she had ploughed headlong into a tree at a dreadful speed.
My darling Lucy was not what I saw in that ice cold room. My Father
suffers from nightmares; I do not sleep that often to have
nightmares.

The phone rings intermittently throughout the days, shattering the
silence of this vacuous place, this house that should have rung with
our laughter. Not my family, they are respecting my wishes and allowing
me to deal with this on my own terms. It will be friends - anxious,
appalled, keen to offer their sincere condolences, desperate to help me
through this difficult time and quick to offer such meaningless advice
as 'life must go on".

Why must life go on? If I have learnt one thing over the years, it is
that life means nothing if you don't share it. What's an experience of
a unique time or a splendid place or any sweet moment if you aren't
with somebody at the time? Who is truly interested in the ramblings of
a person who takes their holidays alone? Who cares for the highlights
of a New Years Eve celebration when they are detailed by someone who
watched them alone upon a television screen? No one. But with your
family or your friends or your fianc?e by your side you become whole.
You are privileged to have had someone with you who saw, heard, felt
and was affected by the very things that so moved you. Lucy was all of
these people to me.

You know we discussed the possibility of one of us dying so many times
- when you are on a tour of duty with the army based in Northern
Ireland, the subject is scarcely but a moment from your mind. But it
was always me who did the dying. Yet I now see the fundamental flaw in
our plan. What we never discussed was how the remaining partner should
go about the business of living.

A funny thing happened when the Sergeant found me blacked out, upon the
floor. When he had established what had happened, he authorised my
immediate return to England. But I had to wait several hours for the
first available flight. He came nervously into my room as I brooded in
the corner in the gloom and asked that I surrender my firearm to him.
It struck me as an odd request at the time, because it is never
normally made of a soldier in Northern Ireland! You carry your rifle
with you like you do your fear, forever by your side, all of the time.
I realise now though what it was he was fearful of.

A new day, early morning and I awoke from a fitful sleep sprawled upon
the floor in time to witness a spectacular sight. The sun leaned
heavily upon the horizon and seemed to set the entire land ablaze
before climbing steadfastly into the air. The sky was as clear and as
blue as Lucy's eyes gleaming brightly beneath me from a hundred tear
dampened photographs. It was inspiring!

I have resolved to venture outside on this day. It will be the first
time I have since the funeral. I shall set off walking towards my
mountain with the advert for Lucy's dress acting as my guide. Perhaps I
shall arrive at the base of it and see that it is in fact surmountable,
albeit in small stages. And maybe then life will go on. Or perhaps I
shall never draw close to it, like it is with a rainbow and it will
remain forever as something I am unable to take on. If so then I do not
fear the thing that has visited my thoughts so often now. One way or
the other, I guess I've got to try something.