It's 2019 and I am supposed to be full of hopes and dreams, to leave behind the past and start afresh. But I don't feel like that at all. Yesterday was Monday and today is Tuesday. That's it.
The end of 2017 and 2018 were without question the worst times in my life. To lose my mother so suddenly and to have no time with her before she died was already very hard, particularly as she died the day I was supposed to move hundreds of miles south, but to witness what I saw when Pete died and to deal with the aftermath, just decimated my life. I don't think those who haven't gone through a similar experience can ever understand what it is like to be escorted off a hillside and taken, in the very midst of your hurt and anguish, to speak to the police. Hours of procedure and questions, your belongings separated out from their's when in life, it didn't matter whose carabiner was who's. Everything they owned being taken away and you finding yourself without transport, with a dog, in a climbing hut sometime around 1am. I drank the beer he had left behind and then I cried myself to sleep.
This December, I finally started to grieve for my mother again. I remembered her making a trifle and me whipping the cream and doing the decoration on the top. I would try to get her to put less custard on and then when we ate it, I would eat round it and give it to her to finish. She found Christmas stressful and as someone plagued by low self-esteem and anxiety, she lacked motivation to cook and bake. She thought everything she made was rubbish but her baking was fine. Every year she would make a Christmas cake, although often it became a New Year Cake. It was like some kind of science experiment as hats went on and paper came off throughout the six hours it took to cook.
Recently, there are things I think of and I know my mother would know the answer. I thought of her looking at a map the other day and looking up where I had been. I have been many, many places in the British Isles, but my mother had this amazing ability to have already have been there before. Even when Pete and I went to Kilarney, she had a somewhat comedic story ready about the time she went up a mountain there sometime in the 1960s.
So as a new year begins, I feel no further forward than I was before. I still miss Pete everyday and I can't describe how I feel as anything less than crushed and broken hearted. I wish I didn't feel this way, but I will never forget seeing him fall backwards from that ledge. But as that grief persists, it also lessons and slowly I have the chance to deal with losing my mother, something that was also very sudden, although I remember knowing inside that she wasn't going to survive. Slowly, I have found myself thinking of her again, the strangest things reminding me of her.
I start this new year grieving for two people but also grieving in advance for the loss of my father. I have not said a great deal about it publicly but he is dying and soon there will only be me left. I don't know how long he has left, but his cancer is not being treated and it is when things seem to be ticking along that he suddenly ends up in hospital needing blood transfusions again. Given his underlying serious chest condition, I doubt the prognosis is good, although it is hard to know anything when I am stuck in Bicester and he is in Inverness.
Through all of this, my means of escape has been to go to the Lakes, North Wales or the Peak, to ride my bike, to run or climb. It is all escapism. I made the wrong decision when I moved here and although the people are all lovely, it is not where I want to be. I want to buy a house up north, but I feel stuck in limbo as I wait to see what happens with my dad.
None of this is very cheery or positive, but it is the reality of my life. I keep going and I keep doing all the things that I want to do, or that I wished I had had the chance to do with Pete, but away from the sunny pictures and the upbeat facebook posts, reality is very different. Sometimes, I don't know how I'm still standing. If you had told me in the moment, that Pete was dead, I think I probably would have jumped after him. I'm glad I didn't and I feel more resilient that I have in years, but life is still hard.
For 2019, I want to do more of what I want to do, to run my ultra without injury or incident, to climb without the awful things I have seen impacting me on every route, to ride my bike from Cornwall to home. I want to achieve things with my work and carve out a niche for myself, I want to find a way of living, at least part-time, in Kendal or Lancaster and I want to meet someone who will love me for me, battle scars and all. I think more than anything, by the end of 2019, I hope my life is no longer defined purely by my grief.
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