Taking Care

At my parent's grave in Honiton this morning my sister and I remove the spiky dead brown rosemary bush in a pot, cut the straggly grass around the plinth, wash the bird droppings off the oak cross, brush the worms casts and dead grass cuttings off the little prayer book someone left there. We abandon the plastic sweet peas in the pin flower holder and my sister replaces them with sweet smelling garden roses, lavender spikes and buds of curled mauve flax. I arrange the bunch of buddleia in a cut off plastic water bottle which we know will fall over in the slighted gust of wind....but we also know these offerings will only last a day or two anyway....and that if our parents were alive they would laugh and say it all doesn't matter. Love doesn't die ....that's what matters.

We leave them up there, in the sunshine, find a cafe with a rickety table under a green shady canopy, share small squares of gluten-free chocolate brownie and sticky pecan pie and toast our parents in sparkling elderflower juice..... imagining our big sister in Beirut and our brother in Holland are sitting at the table with us.....and remember some things about this day 6 years ago.

This afternoon I sink into the deep womb of a squashy arm chair in the room of a lovely homeopath at the Exeter Natural Health Centre. My husband and I both consulted him soon after the semantic dementia diagnosis in November 2010. Then I was still in the dazzling headlights of shock and terror and grief.

Today I'm in the long shadow of the mountain of fear..... and loss of husband..... loss of myself.....and the relentlessness of unwanted responsibility. For an hour I answer his questions to get to the heart of it.  He prescribes one rolled up remedy for it all....Carcinosinum for how to be the one who cares for another - with love -  without losing yourself/ giving up yourself/ neglecting yourself in the process.

So I'll take the pill every Friday .....and start trusting.....start allowing myself to take care of me as well as my husband.