A Week of Goodbyes

Posted on March 5, 2019 by Apparently Catherine

Time passes as the daylight finally gives up on trying to peek beyond the tightly pulled curtains and disappears below the horizon for another day.

Wind howls outside and it seems nothing is still but the shattered beat of our broken heart as we lay wet cheeked in the comforting swathes of our old blankets and unwashed sheets.

It’s been week of all too familiar goodbyes as one by one it seemed everything was being taken from us, but like it always seems to do, life goes on around us as though they were unimportant or as if they had never existed at all. It has always intrigued and saddened me just how quickly experiences and entire lives become nothing but a vague memory as they silently fade into that fluid mosaic of time.

It’s for our survival, perhaps.

Chaos had reigned supreme here for just a minute, a home that was bursting at the seams already but also bursting with love, was suddenly set to take another into the fold.

S was with us again, it was to be for a few weeks officially until they found her a place in residential care, but we knew we wouldn’t ever let that happen- she could stay with us, while questions of ‘how would we cope’ were to be put off until another day; we would make it work, somehow, but she absolutely wasn’t going there.

Then the other morning we woke up and discovered after nearly a decade of never having a problem a Fox (or several) had come under the cover of night, found a patch of rusted wire we didn’t know about and taken all of our ducks, our 9yr old Rooster (although he was rather unpleasant) my gorgeous powder puff silkie chickens and left us with just one very lonely, very traumatised hen.

It was devastating.

Later that day we returned from work to find our beautiful hand reared parrot Rosie had passed away too – for no apparent reason what so ever, she was only young, perfectly healthy and had been absolutely fine that morning.

And then just like that it was suddenly over for our time with S too.

The need to ‘fix it all’ was suddenly gone, they’d found her a real placement, a family, this tale had suddenly ended and with what should by all means be considered a perfect happily ever after.

Now normalcy would return for our home, hopefully a newfound sense of stability for S and yet instead of the joy we should have felt, only the emptiness found us.

We wanted to be the ones to fix it, my parts and I, we wanted to to help her, protect her, prevent any more bad things from ever happening to her and while we acknowledge that deep down it is perhaps in fact about saving a former self that nobody else was there for, we feel as though now we’ve lost something so very precious and irreplaceable to us.

We sheltered ourselves from the heartache of the week as best we could, as we always do.

We had only buried our dead a few days ago and now once again we were forced to swallow our tears as we waved goodbye again this morning, this time to S, a reflection of the self we couldn’t save and a wonderful child whom we have so much hope for, we prayed to the God we don’t believe in that perhaps this time, finally, someone will weather the storms born from her traumas and hold her hand through these treacherous years of life and onto a path of love and stability.

We said our farewells in our own ways as we always have, some as though grieving for a lost friend and some as if reading out the news, but always outwardly stoic, our tears may only be permitted to flow when silent and hidden. We told S she’s always welcome to visit with us and that we were so very proud of her.

Then the car drove away and the phone rang, the emails came in and the world kept on turning anyway. The minutes had turned to hours and time had begun to blend already, now I fear that the days weeks and months will once again evaporate before us as they always seem to and all of these precious moments and experiences will be lost like so many others have.

As the sun sets on this day, I hope so much that one day we will be able to remember more than we forget.

xx Suzi