When the unthinkable happens...

I said in a previous blog entry that my aunt was ill and that I wouldn't be able to cope if anything happened to her. Unfortunately that time has come, completely unexpectedly and utterly prematurely. She'd had cancer for 8 years but those who didn't know could never tell and she easily had several years left yet (we'd been planning a big holiday together to Florida next summer). I won't go into details but within the space of an hour she went from getting ready to go to a friends for a BBQ to not being with us any more. It didn't help that the ambulance took 50 minutes to come, but I'm not going into details with that easier as it makes me too angry.

Everyone's just completely shell-shocked, it just doesn't seem real. My uncle is in a bad way - my aunt did everything for him, he doesn't have a clue how to cook, clean, anything. My mum (sister-in-law to my aunt) is lost without her, they used to go shopping and out for lunch several times a week, now she has no one. My cousins seem to be dealing with it remarkably well but I can't help thinking that's partly because their house is constantly full of people and partly because they just don't understand that she's gone forever. Me, I just keep thinking of all the happy memories we have but can't get my head around the fact that there'll never be any more with her. One of my earliest memories is with her when she looked after me when my nan died, talking about heaven as she tried to explain to a 7-year-old what happens when people die. She took me to my very first music concert, she's interwoven into every Christmas and holiday our families have shared, and that's it, there'll be no new memories. I have this constant fear now of who's going to be next...I struggle to sleep when I'm at home as I'm listening out for my family's breathing, every time my phone goes off I'm scared it's my dad telling me someone else has gone. I guess I, and everyone else, just needs time to come to terms with it; time is a healer, as they say.

The funeral is going to be on Friday and I've been asked to read out a poem. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do it; I'm hoping that if I focus on the page and what I'm doing rather than the 100-or-so sobbing people in front of me I'll be ok. This will be my 3rd funeral in 7 months and I really hope it's my last for a while. After that I'll have Saturday - Tuesday to cram for my last in-course assessment which is on Wednesday. It's unfortunate that everything has happened when it has, as this easily would have been my best module but I guess I'll just have to see how I do. Then it's a mock OSCE on Thursday (which I'm massively screwed for due to complete lack of preparation), a final day of Interprofessional Education on Friday (I won't be sad in the slightest that that's ending) and then 2 weeks of study leave begins...

Re-reading this I can't tell if I've over-shared. May come back tomorrow and edit some of it out...

Faye
xxx