Sometimes it’s really nice to have a distraction from all the crying; there really is an awful lot of crying. I have cried for 149 days, not non-stop, but crying all the same. Sometimes wailing like a wounded animal of the floor, writhing in pain, sometimes a single tear but always daily tears. Sometimes I could really do with a distraction and they come, like when you are crying but then step on your daughter’s minion toy and it shouts “ Banana.” Or you go to the loo for some quiet and find a Lego guy in the loo attached to some weird blue tack and string apparatus. Here is today’s distraction:

I was picking up Flynn from school at about 3.30. I was wearing the silk dress I had bought for James’ funeral. I pulled up, parked, got out, opened Celeste’s door, undid her straps and began to walk toward his school. There was a woman I didn’t recognise in front of me with a few children on some of those ubiquitous scooters. I walked behind her ‘til she stopped dead in front of me and turned to face me. She looked at me for a few seconds, very seriously, as if she might have some very bad news to deliver and then said- “can I say something to you?” “Okay” I said.

She paused and with an Anne Robinson squeezing of her eye before perhaps offering…’ You are the weakest link’…..she delivered “ Just now, when you were getting your daughter out of your car, we all got a view of your entire bottom!”

I want to report that I thought of something hugely witty and funny to say but I was far too concerned with the realisation that my legs are so much browner than my bottom and then I had this genuine thought: Should I, in future, be putting fake tan on my bottom for the school run?

For Jan.

There is a HBO T.V. series called the Leftovers, which James and I looked forward to every week. We would bolt in for the night, get the kids into bed, light a good log fire, get a nice meal going and open a bottle of wine and sit and watch hours of this.

The premise is that in one single second 2% of the world’s population just vanish simultaneously. They call this -The Great departure. Nobody has any idea as to their whereabouts or what happened. Those left, owe their name to the title.

It’s bizarrely quite real and accurate and insightful, with regards to the grief rather than the plot. I am now a leftover.

In the first episode Paterson Joseph tells his co-star -“for whoever is joined with all the living, there is hope.” Anyone in trauma is so far from who they once were, so changed, so without hope. The absence of hope will destroy you. It must be sought out actively and restored at any cost.

I’m a leftover but I’m still alive: I still love deeply and I’m trying to stay connected to who I once was. I’m dancing alone but I’m dancing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLT3YUALJno

For fellow Leftovers Ross and Paul.

When I was sitting holding James’ hand in his hospital bed, a million thoughts of terror were running through my brain and I’d try to focus on one and it would dart off as quickly as it had arrived to be followed by the next. There were just so many that they needed to make room for each other. It was a bit like that scene in trading places when Eddie Murphy goes to the cash machine and the notes just keep on coming.

Then the oddest one stuck: How will I get suntan lotion on my back when I go on holiday? And speaking of which, who will take photos of the kids and I when we go on this holiday? The photos were usually done by James and I would do the same for him, but now all the photos are just of the kids as if they have no parents at all. I then thought, I must polish up on my selfie taking. I don’t think I have ever taken a selfie so I was nervous…. Until I saw this little beauty.

For Algy

There are worse things than losing your 36-year-old husband, but not many. In fact there’s really only one.

One of the things I’m failing to come to terms with the most is the new imagine of me. I think of myself as a young girl in her thirties, living in London and raising a small family but this is definitely not how others see me.

I am most people’s worst nightmare. I got really unlucky whereas most people don’t. It is very unusual for your husband to die at this age, for anyone to die at this age, statistically speaking. Many people on some subconscious level are thinking- Thank God it’s not me. And who on earth would blame them?

I have effectively taken one for the team.

I’ve loved and I’ve lost.

Today was Celeste’s birthday and it was all shades of wrong for all the obvious reasons. Celeste was so very happy and seemed pretty unaffected by all the tears and drawing in of breath. Her Granny had made her a cake and there was even a present from James that he had bought for her in January, which I made him stash until it was her birthday.

It was this John Derian picture plate. He thought it might be funny as she has such a penchant for bunnies. Of course she wasn’t remotely interested. When we all sang happy birthday we told her to make a wish. I thought she would wish for Daddy to come back or a new Daddy and I’d watch as everyone became really uncomfortable but what she said was as unpredictable as ever and for the first time I thought: I think this Celestial one is going to be okay.

For Rowan Coleman, for believing in me.

When someone you love dies it’s so easy to over eulogise, even canonise, but I think, I can fairly say that James (along with his father) was the kindest man I have ever met. The difficulty with this comes when people take advantage of this or, are less deserving of it. I felt like a lioness constantly ready to pounce on anyone who even looked at him the wrong way.

Like Bronte’s Cathy, all my great miseries in this world have been James’ miseries and I have watched and felt each from the beginning.

A funeral is a complicated affair. I was completely taken aback when I was introduced to someone I had never met but who I knew had been unkind to James and I wanted to kill him. Hot tears bubbled like lava behind my eyes and I wanted to shoot fire out of my mouth.

I was so shocked upon hearing this person’s name and so unprepared that I ended up shaking his hand. But I dare say my face told him everything. What could I have said anyway? There’s just no point, and poor James would have been mortified. James was not only kind, he was bright and savvy and usually managed to filter out those less worthwhile. I often wonder if this level of pistols at dawn is felt by anyone else grieving?

I feel the same way about the tumor which killed him. V is definitely for vendetta. If cancer were a person I would not stop until I had smashed every bone in its body. There is no stone I would leave unturned in seeking him out. I would demand his head on a platter, like Salome.

For Henry Marsh CBE- For cutting that Almighty piece of shit out of my husband’s brain.

I’m worried about snow.

What if the snow comes and J’s not here to experience it with me?

This is the same feeling I have when I change something in the house. I’ve given Celeste the spare room so an Au pair can take her room and I’m so worried that when James comes back he will get confused and wonder why everything has been changed.

He might not be happy about how much money I have spent on the redecoration or that I threw out his golf travel bag.

I’ve gone a bit crazy fixing everything in the house and I’m almost there. It is almost perfect and there’s such an urgency to this that I can’t quite explain. But if you were to press me I would say- I’m doing all this and I’m getting everything ready for when James comes back. Everything must be done. No one, except a leftover will possibly understand this.

For Gautom

Top 5 comedy one-liners.

One of the things that have made my situation bearable, apart from the wonderful family and friends are the classic one-liners I have heard from, and it must be said, well meaning people. Here are my top five. These genuinely made me laugh and in some weird way added comedy to a situation so in need of it.

Number 5

A follow-up call to the babysitting agency Sitters

Me:   “I called yesterday to tell your colleague that my husband’s card didn’t work, on account of  him being dead and all, and your colleague said – well we need a new card-  I think it is shocking that she at no point said I’m sorry for your loss.”

Weird Sitters lady: “Yeah I heard about that, I think she was just really embarrassed.”

Me: “It’s tragic my husband died, it’s brutal…. but it’s really not embarrassing.”

Weird Sitters lady: “It’s just a bit embarrassing.”

Number 4

“I think my life is bad and then I just look at you.”

Number 3

“You are so skinny……………………..silver lining?”

Number 2

Window cleaner on hearing that my husband has just died: “Wow that’s pants.”

And the winner is…

Upon seeing my old Pilates teacher for the first time in a year.

Pilates teacher: “Alright Orna, you well?”

Me: “I’ve been better.”

Pilates teacher: “Ok brilliant. I’ haven’t seen you in ages, where have you been?”

Me: “Well, I haven’t really been coming because my husband died.”

Pilates teacher: “Okay then, a nice bit of Pilates ought to sort that out then.”

For Adam Hedelin

Flynn has been asking me when I’m going to take him to school; I know I must and I know everyone thinks I should but the thought of it so far has been unpalatable. Today I suck it up and head out into the trenches, wearing a face I keep in a jar by the door. I nip in and out of his school without so much as a pitiful stare or head tilt, back to my car, to blissful safety. I nudge out into the busy cul-de-sac and am faced with a very large man in a very tiny car who looks like he has swallowed anger whole for breakfast; By the look of him he, is the incarnation of Joseph Fritzl, as I live and breathe.

He refuses to place his huge body and tiny car in a massive parking space; instead he prefers to plough on until I am reversing backwards into a mosh-pit of school mums.

My car transforms into a large glass box where the head tilts are closing in as are the stares, mainly because Joseph Fritzl is launching a tirade of abuse at me (probably in German), I can’t make it out.

So I freeze. Unfortunately this means so does my car and doesn’t move. I am in the middle of I’d say twenty cars and I’m sobbing, wondering why I thought this was a good idea and because my car is a glass box everyone can see.

Frizzle retreats and looks vaguely moved at my sobbing. I smile at him but later think better of it, as he most likely has a young girl tied up in the boot of his tiny, weird car.

Now time to take Celeste to her school. I get her out and notice a group of mums I semi know and so I busy my brain for ways to look busy and focused: intellectual whistling. Like: How many streets can bin trucks do before they have to empty their load? And whoever came up with a Spork? And why did littlefinger suddenly develop a thick Irish accent in season three of Game Of Thrones when it was entirely absent in the other two and why did nobody comment on this? And was Lauren Hill really a racist?

I realise that this pair have stopped talking as I approach and only resume their chatting when I have passed. Then it hits me: I’m THAT person. I drop my head and quicken my steps to make this situation better for all involved and wonder is it possible that what I am feeling is ……shame? If it’s not then it’s pretty close. It’s the scarlet letter. Except instead of a giant A pinned to my chest, it’s a W, so much worse by all accounts. I realise that people are uncomfortable in some way by my very presence, as if it’s contagious. To my knowledge it is not.

There is one woman who crosses the street every time she sees me. It’s bizarre. And I can’t say I blame them really. I have grief dripping off me and I make puddles of it when I enter any room and nobody wants soggy carpets. Especially in Chiswick.

For Josie who really has True Grit

Albert Einstein once said that insanity was “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” So I try to make every day different but the result is a resounding sameness by the end except for a few bits in the middle.

When James died I went into some sort of cryogenically frozen coma when I awoke some months later I learned there had been a general election, an earthquake in Nepal and an insane pilot had purposefully flown a plane into a mountain killing everyone on board. I didn’t really give any of these things a second thought. I was numb and had been absent for so long. I felt like a bad mother, I’d left my ship. I was like an absentee landlord, needed but so wholly unavailable. I was just going through the motions, one Groundhog day at a time.

If I could offer any advice to anyone in the same position as me it is this:

Do something each day that doesn’t make you wretch with longing. Sometimes it’s reading the newspaper, sometimes it might even be a shower or a cup of coffee. Do these things but a word of warning, in the words of that great Oracle of Knowledge Kendric Lemar- Band-aids don’t fix bullet holes.

For Kelly