Good and bad

The reality for all of us is that we encounter good and bad things every day. How good and how bad may differ from day to day, and within each day, but they’re common for all of us. Ramp that up several levels and that’s what I experience at the moment.

It’s important to know that in order to understand the things I say about the journey I’m currently on. The only thing I know to do is to be honest and open about it all, and that will include both good and bad days, and parts of days.

Yesterday, I apparently concerned some people when I talked about how the nights are awful. But that’s just a simple a fact—they are awful because night is when I miss Nigel the most. Some nights are worse than other nights, and that, too, is a fact. None of that is going to change any time soon, and I’m not expecting it to—neither will my talking about it go away when I have something to say about it, like last night.

As I’ve said, part of my motivation is that I’m aware that something I say may help someone else who someday finds themselves in something like my situation. But my biggest motivation is simpler: I have absolutely no idea what the future will be like, and in such situations I’d talk with Nigel about it. Since he’s not here, I’m talking about it openly in order to work it out for myself. The fact that I’m doing this in real time means that the swings and roundabouts may be a bit more obvious than it would be if I held back and commented more as reflection after the fact. That was never going to be my way.

So, last night was a bad night. Tonight isn’t. Some are good, others aren’t. It’s just my reality.

Today was a similarly mixed bag.

The company that Nigel leased his car from was coming to pick it up today. I decided to give it a bit of a tidy up, because Nigel would have, and I accidentally made myself extra work in the process. That was very close to upsetting me a lot, but it didn’t because I breathed deeply and worked through it.

When they later came to collect the car, I was sad—it had been a part of our lives for the past few years, but—as Nigel would say—it’s just a bloody car, nothing important. And, sending it back means that it will be settled sooner and will be one less thing on my list of things to take care of, all of which is good.

But I also remembered something yesterday, knowing the collection of the car was imminent. Every morning, when Nigel drove off to work, I’d stand at the side of the window in our dining area, pull back the curtain just enough, and watch Nigel drive off to the road, and keep watching until he turned left heading away. I did that every day, and was even a little grumpy if something made me miss seeing that. I don’t know that Nigel ever knew I did that; it didn’t seem important to tell him, and he never mentioned it. But because that had been my daily routine for the entire 2 and a half years we’ve lived in this house, I dreaded seeing Nigel’s car being driven away. In the end, I didn’t see that, exactly, because I was down at ground level (so I could close the gate before I opened the front door). So, what could have been an awful experience for me turned out to be neutral, and I count that as a win.

In the afternoon, I discovered that our usual email server, which we’ve been using for years, suddenly stopped working. Their website wasn’t a lot better. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and I still haven’t. This again brought me close to losing it, but I figured out temporary workarounds until I can understand what happened so I can then fix it. That’s not a perfect resolution, but at least I didn’t get upset about it, which could easily have happened.

Today I also got the results of my latest blood tests, and everything appeared to be in the normal ranges. That’s an unequivocally good thing. After the things that went wrong today it was kind of hard to feel happy about that, but it’s still good news.

Then this evening I went to our next-door neighbours for dinner again. It was a really nice evening, and a nice distraction.

So, today I had a mixed bag of good and bad, as most of us do most days. All of mine are directly related to the one big thing I’ve been going through, which makes it a little different from what most people experience in a day.

For the foreseeable future, there will be good and bad days and/or nights. And I’ll talk about them both. Today was a kind of typical day for me at the moment, one that could have been bad, but had good moments mixed in with some not so good moments. I’m okay with that, and I hope other people will be, too.

The reality of this whole thing for people following me on this new journey is simple: You don’t need to worry about me (or someone else) talking about the bad stuff, but you might need to worry if we don’t.

Not much danger that I’ll stop talking about all this. You have been warned.

Originally published on my personal Facebook Page on October 3.