I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since I was here — ‘here’ being Birmingham, England. On the left is Selfridge’s, a department store that’s part of the Bullring shopping centre, and the church is in a nearby courtyard, newly restored.
I flew from Hamburg to London on March 26 last year to spend Mother’s Day dinner in Wolverhampton with Lucy and her family, and I laughed as I re-read this entry* about lapsing into a food coma afterwards and telling the UK Immigration officer that the purpose of my visit was a big dinner. I was absolutely knackered, as Vinny’s memorial was the day before and I was up late printing out photos for his classmates and burning CDs of the presentation. I’d pulled an all-nighter because Berit and I had to leave at 6 o’clock in the morning to get back to the same airport where we held the memorial so I could fly to London. That whole day was a blur.
The next day, however, was much more lucid and it was mostly like old times. I can only say ‘mostly’ because those weeks I was in Europe last year was not for a holiday, and sometimes it seemed I couldn’t enjoy myself because I couldn’t stop thinking about David and Vinny. Everywhere I looked, it reminded me of them and how the world seemed less colourful and much emptier without them in it.
David was fond of a saying — I don’t know the origin of it — that goes something like this:
You can’t help what you feel but you can help what you do.
Yesterday, for some reason, I felt like making some phone calls, so call I did. I was on the phone for hours, longer than all the phone calls I’ve made recently and added together, to people I had been incommunicado with for many months. In the last year and a half I carried on mostly an internal dialogue. I had plenty to say but lacked the emotional energy to make a simple phone call.
It was such a relief to be able to talk freely at last. It’s not that these friends were unapproachable in any way, it was because it took me a while to find my voice again, to feel any sort of excitement about the future; to feel up to the task of making plans. Strange though it may sound, it is an arduous, frustrating, patience-testing process to feel like a normal human being again, on a daily basis. Little by little, it is happening.
* Although I’m very sorry to report that Terry, Vinny’s 15-year old greyhound shown in that photo, passed away last December. Yes, December was a rather crap month, not just for me.