May is a funny old month for us all - at 1:23am on 15th May 2014 my precious baby boy arrived, hands down the best day of my life! Sorry David loved the wedding but becoming parents tops it! There are also a couple of other close family birthdays but unfortunately its also the month that holds the anniversaries of both my mums and my big sisters deaths.
Mum died on 'May Day' (May 6th that year) 1996, I was 13 and my little brother was 10. I won't pretend it was anything other than horrific. We hadn't known she was as sick as she and that the cancer had come back with vengeance, so yep a whole heap of shit. In my grief I tried to run away and slit my thumb on the rusty back gate (not exactly helpful at the time) and the 3 of us just didn't know what to do. Hours passed on that Monday, people came and left the house and dad was on the phone a lot but mostly it was a blur. Two things I remember - trying to force down some fish and chips while watching a film called 'Batteries Not Included'. A seemingly harmless film but it's a Disney type film so of course one of the robot parents dies. I now can't watch that film. The day ended and we needed to go to bed because the most horrible thing about someone dying is that you have to carry on.
Now this post isn't really about my mum it's about my sister. See we had been aware in the background for some time that my dad had another family or to be more accurate we were his other family and he actually had 3 grown up daughters that came before us. My dad is very very unlikely to read this but he would not deny that he had been a grade A nob. Clearly he was hoping for a story line to be written about him on Eastenders and to be fair that's exactly what it was like for a while. I will not go into the gory detail about this time, but needless to say grief stricken and thrown into a new family was hard for us all. However out of this came my sisters and the eldest being Angie.
Angie was dads first born, only 20 years younger than him so nearly 18 years older than me. It was hard for her finding out about us as it was all of my sisters but she did an amazing thing and instead of being angry all she did was look out for me and my brother. She worked crazy hours as a nurse in a nursing home and was always doing kind things for people. We saw her every week for as long as I can remember. She was an amazing auntie to my niece and nephew the children of my middle sister Ann and was one of those people who was a natural mum, but fate is cruel and she could not have children. She was also there for my dad - they were two peas in a pod, his first born. Losing my mum crushed my dad but he still had all his babies and his babies babies and with time our 'new family' found a way to cope.
Then came 20th May 2004, I was back from uni and sitting in my bedroom and my brother in his. We were always all in separate rooms unless there was food on the table, that's just the way we were! Then dad comes bursting into my room saying Angie has died. For a moment I don't process, I don't believe but that doesn't last long. 8 years after we lost mum we lost our big sister and dad lost his eldest child. She wasn't sick, there was no warning. She went to sleep for a nap after a night shift at work and never woke up. Things would never be the same again, dad would never be the same again. The funeral was a testament to the type of person Angie was, the aisles were full to the brim, people queued outside to pay their respects, I have never seen so many people at a funeral before it was overwhelming.
Grief is overwhelming and losing people changes you. I started having panic attacks after this, especially at work. If I tried to get hold of someone and they didn't answer I immediately thought they were dead. I didn't go back and finish uni and was a complete mess for a while. It was during this time I met David, he suffered the worst of my anxiety. The problem is you are expected to carry on as normal and in some ways you have to. We all have responsibilities and life has to go on. We never had help when mum died and we never had help when Angie died. Mental health services in this country are getting better because the awareness of mental health is rising and therefore helping to remove the stigma, but it's hard to ask for help.
May will always be a month of extreme highs and extreme lows for us but we will never forget those we have lost and will never take for granted how lucky we are to have each other.
xxx #Itsokaynototbeokay #Headstogether