“Nobody else will ever know the
strength of my love for you.
After all, you’re the only one
who knows what my heart
sounds like from the inside.

Acceptance of where I am on this insufferable journey has somewhat given me some breathing space to not expect any more from myself than where I am and what I’m thinking. It is normal to think and feel the way I do. The thoughts about not wanting to die but equally not wanting to go on without William to co-exist is a hard concept for anyone looking from the outside in to understand, but for me it is a personal battle that I enter into every morning that I wake up, again to the realisation that William is gone.

The only change since my last post is the noticeable difference of the symptomatic side effects of anxiety. I still sit here with heightened anxiety but the medication has lifted the lid on the intensity. Sometimes it’s not enough, I become more and more agitated and what ability I did have to string my thoughts together completely diminishes. This feeling is unsettling and leaves me in limbo. Whenever I come up against something difficult I’ve always taken a very logistical and pragmatic view on how to break it down and deal with it. However, I can’t make sense of this, how can you? How can you break something down and manage it when the foundations of your life have been destroyed.

All I am doing each day is tolerating life, tolerating each day. Not wanting to or having the desire to move forward without William. I kind of feel like moving forward with life or even each day is somehow leaving William behind, leaving behind what has happened. I can hear you all saying to me ‘but you carry him with you’, ‘he’s in your heart and in your mind’, ‘you’ll never leave William behind, he’ll be with you always’, and you are right but it’s not the same as William being here, to me it feels like a betrayal to move forwards, to get to the end of each day. I now know I am not going to be moving forward knowingly, not by choice but if I do it’ll be naturally without me knowing. It doesn’t help when people point out subtle changes in my mood or something that I might do, all this does is exaggerate that it’s a ‘marker’, a ‘sign’, but it creates more of an issue for me, pointing out that I have managed to cope better with something doesn’t allow me to move forward naturally without me knowing or noticing, but just highlights that it’s happening, and that is what I want to avoid completely. I don’t want to move forward.

To even begin to entertain the idea that there is a life without William, there is another element that my mind is fighting against. That is needing William’s permission, William’s permission that it is ‘ok’, ‘ok’ to function and exist without him here. This is something that William cannot possibly tell me himself but something that I need to ‘feel’ him say or ‘sense’ him telling me. At the moment I am not ready or willing to allow this to happen. So for now I will carry on tolerating life, tolerating each day.

One thing I am certain of now is that if I carry on with this life, the life I have been left without William, I will only ever manage to live with what has happened. I will not leave it behind me or move forward but learn how carry it with me through life. Like I carried William for 9 months, like I carried him in my arms for 382 days, and now like I am left to carry him, only in my heart.