TO(E)DAY

Well it was actually Friday that the TOE got dealt too!!! I had an appointment for the 28th but really it wasn’t possible to go to work with the TOE as it was. So a call to my wonderful GP on Thursday last, resulted in an appointment that day with a specialist who kindly fitted me into his operating schedule for the next day! No time to think and it was really a relief.

I have since been – doing nothing much!! Photographic evidence supports this. Ha ha. I am honoured to have an intelligent Ted E Bear who likes reading and listening to his Ipod while keeping an eye on me. End result is I will have had two weeks off work by the time I am certified fit, (not mentally you understand) to return on Saturday. I have to say this has been the silver lining of the cloud of toe pain. I have read three books, got stuck into my writing and have just enjoyed not having to do anything. I have especially enjoyed not having to get up at in the middle of the night to go to work.

The weather is on the turn with slight but consistent drizzle. The house is snug and warm and I don’t worry about leaks in the roof as I did in the older home. It is great and it really does feel like home. The bush out the back is just as glorious in the wet and provides an ever-changing kaleidoscope of colour and movement along with birds of all sorts and the odd visiting neighbourhood cat.

The cat is gentle. It is orange and brown/black and white. It looks like Shelley’s cat, Sparkey. Shelley’s cat got killed by a rouge dog, as she lay sunning herself in the back garden at our old home. It was a shocking violent death to a lovely gentle cat. I had to phone Shelley in London and tell her. It was one of the worst things I had to do, until Shelley died.

I think this visiting look-a-like cat knows we love cats, but are too raw to take on any more pets, anymore anything really. It comes up to us as we sit outside, meows, accepts a pat and then sprawls around for a while. It is a gentle cat and gives us love by remote. We don’t have to worry about its’ day to day welfare. This morning it was sitting curled up at the bottom of the expansive lawn, at the base of one of the native trees. It might have been the pose for in front of a fire on a winter’s day, but it was drizzling and the cat just sat, curled up and looking peaceful. It is nice having her/him around.

June is nearing an end and for me that means the 7th of July is looming. I never know what to do on the day. The day Shelley was murdered. I get very stressed before the day, wondering what I am supposed to do. I always feel like I should scream and shout and yell at everyone in the world, this is the day my darling daughter was murdered. This is her death day. Thought out carefully by a cold-blooded killer who dared to step onto a tube train in London and connect the wires to his homemade bomb. He killed 26 people on Shelley’s tube. His friends killed another 26. They had made a practice run to make sure they got it right.

I am receiving daily updates from the London trial of associates of the murderers. There may be some chance that they will be found guilty and spend the rest of their lives in jail. I really don’t care. Whatever happens to them won’t change my life’s role of doing my best to live as best I can in my grief. It is too late to change what happened.

The murderers at least killed themselves in some misguided belief that their actions were their passport to heaven. I doubt it even exists and maybe that is the last laugh on them. Their being dead in some ways makes it easier; I don’t have to see their faces or wade through a trail involving them. I am not sure I could contain my anger if they were alive. It frightens me to think how I might cope with that, so for me, it is best that they are wherever they are. Hell I think, if that exists.

I won’t run around yelling. I still don’t know what I will do. In some ways it is no different to any other day, without Shelley. It is just that it is the day. The day my life changed forever.

I will think of all her fellow travellers who died; of the survivors who are piecing their lives back into some sort of order while they learn to live with the images and memories of that fateful tube trip.

That is what we do. We all have to learn somehow, how to keep going. I will see my sons and give them a hug. That is all I need with my HB’s love to keep going.

Arohanui,

KG
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