January 11th 2013 A year since the first time I sat and wrote about how hard it is to live in my world without Lettie. Am I better? I experience the searching that leaks from the eyes of others now time has passed: is she ok, she seems ok, she looks ok, and she acts ok so she must be ok –phew! Am I ok? Somewhere inside me wants to scream this is such a stupid question… …The pain that grabs my heart at any moment is still there, now it is triggered not so much by the experience of Lettie’s death but by the total absence of her life. Why is she not shopping at Angel as she did regularly, why is she not at work, why is she not watching Eastenders, why is she not on the bus going home from work, why is she not planning her next holiday? These thoughts and pictures (I see her doing these things) hit at random and hurl me deep into loss, a loss so deep that it squeezes every drop of breath from my body and makes me want to double up. There is almost nothing I do in my life I did not do with Lettie at some point, memories sit like traps everywhere. Do the memories not give me strength and comfort people ask? No because the loss is too profound and too close. Well it is close for me. It’s not so close for others whose lives go on simply without Lettie in it. My life is absolutely broken. I cannot find anything familiar to hold onto that doesn’t hurt. I am ‘supposed’ to be about the business of rebuilding my life – how do I do that when so many pieces are missing? I look inside myself to try and find something I recognise but I can’t because my sense of self has been completely shattered like a mirror. I am left with tiny fragments that no longer fit together, the reflection is distorted with bits in the wrong place and there is no ‘lid’ of the box to help me fit the pieces together again. Because there are pieces missing it is irrevocably altered in ways I don’t always know. I realise that I experience aspects of living (going on holiday, Christmas, family gatherings) with the sub- conscious hope that I will be able to feel enough to nourish me in ways that will help to make me better. I don’t actually think this; it is out of my awareness. Each time I suffer sadness and loss of hope when it’s over and it isn’t better. No matter how hard I try to be in the moment, to get positive things out of experiences they will never be anything but experiences without Lettie. Christmas was Christmas without Lettie, and will never ever not be that for me. In trying to ‘be positive’ I prepared for Christmas, and in so doing looked for things I need – baking trays (Lettie loved homemade mince pies), pudding basins (‘mum can you give me your recipe for Christmas pudding, what size basin do I need?’), Christmas tree (photo still on my phone she sent of her first tree) everything reminds me how much she loved Christmas and how for what turned out to be her last Christmas we did these things together. So, see what I mean it’s everywhere. She’s not here and will never be here again. Whilst looking for things I stumble on a bag which contains her Christmas decorations (from that first tree) and am thrown into the pain of how alive she was and how much hope and joy for life she held. This should give me comfort but it doesn’t because it stirs up my desire to protect her from the pain of her realisation of the loss of hope and joy, which I couldn’t do. It’s the same pain I felt when she was small and she fell over or couldn’t manage to do something and needed comfort. I want to sweep her up and hold her – every minute of every day. So what do others see when they check me out in the split moment of eye contact? They see what they need to, that I seem to be ok. Sadly, for me what they need to see is not the truth. I cannot give them the truth, it’s not fair, and their life needs to go on simply without Lettie in it, whilst mine is forever broken.