Are we Going Backwards?

The body armour is on again. At the moment, life is in a seriously weird place. The additional isolation brought about by coronavirus is impacting a lot of different areas. After Evie died, we developed a series of coping strategies, honed over time, to help us deal with the emptiness that each day brought. In some ways they were just a distraction, but in others, an important way to give our brains a rest from the pain. Most of those strategies have now gone because in the main they involved contact with other people in some form.

Throwing myself into work, both for the Rainy Day Trust and for Evie’s Gift is all well and good, but even that has now lost its efficacy. It has become routine, and because my attention is focused almost wholly on fundraising, I’m not getting the variety of input to keep it interesting. The lack of contact with others and the overall isolation are reminiscent of the time a few months after Evie died, where people just drifted away. It feels like someone has hit a “Reset” button. The difference this time is that I know what works and what doesn’t. The problem is that I can’t enact the stuff that does work, so that is almost worse.

Have we gone backwards? It absolutely feels like it. Back to the spring and summer of 2018. That’s probably not the best analogy though. But it certainly does feel as if we have jumped back in time, and that all the work to learn how to cope has been wasted. How we overcome that change, I’m not really sure. Being patient and just waiting for it to blow through isn’t an option. The mental toll is mounting. Frustration is rising at minor things once again. The metaphorical fuse has most definitely shortened again too.

Losing your child makes you feel as if you are stuck in a time warp anyway, so what is happening now serves only to heighten the awareness of that problem. I’m back to feeling lost again, unable to find a solution as I was when I was desperately trying to solve the puzzle that was Evie’s death. A whirl of brain activity going nowhere, achieving nothing. I seem unable to detach my brain from the problem, to allow it to just ‘be’. I know that given time, we will come through the crisis and that things will get back to normal. The trouble is that for us bereaved parents, ‘normal’ is pretty sh*t anyway, so it isn’t much of an improvement.

I don’t have any answers or solutions to this one. The ‘reset’ button has been pressed and somehow, I have to figure out a way to work with that. For the moment though, I am back in the dark room without a map.