IT is January again.
Just when we think we deserve warm balmy days and evenings outside with a cold drink, that south easterly wind blows hard.
It jangles nerves and blows precious burgeoning fruit off trees.
In 2005, I helped clear out my sister’s house and my parents’ house.
Dad had died six years earlier, Mum was going into aged care and my sister had died.
Such tasks are emotionally gruelling.
There are so many items imbued with the essence of their owners which without their owners are simply things, but they are things so hard to throw away.
My own home became crammed with items that I simply couldn’t discard.
A vase that I had given my mother for a birthday present when I was a child, two mugs with cartoon cats on them that my sons had given their aunty.
It seems somewhat discourteous to throw away things which were so highly valued by someone.
And so it is January again and every year I am dragged back into the trauma of my sister dying.
I replay over and over the week prior to her death.
She telling me she loved me and I telling her I loved her too, the ambulance taking her away to the hospice, arriving there myself and the doctor being vague about how this would all pan out and a nurse saying, “Hello. It will be three days and would you like a stiff drink?”
After 16 years, you would think the loss would diminish. It doesn’t.
When you lose someone you love, you lose a part of yourself.
You learn ever so slowly to live without it but life is always sadder for the loss.
So, here I am at midnight, raking over the coals of the past and sleep eludes me.
