one year later

Today marks the one year day since M unexpectedly passed away.

A year that in a strange way has been the shortest as well as the longest in my life so far. A year not only filled with deep sorrow but also resilience and an incredible amount of growth. Acceptance, gratitude and glimpses of happiness.

After the devastating fact so much and yet so little has happened since. Be as that may, I'm so darn proud of myself. Wherever I am today it's okay, we all manage sorrow and life differently and looking back I've achieved lots even if it doesn't feel like it some days. I'm not quite there yet, financial stability and serenity is not, as far as I know, within my reach just yet.

However these past few weeks have been a whirlwind of emotions, filled with very personal meetings as well as professional. I'm still quite dumbstruck as to what I've achieved and experienced in March alone. This March.

One of my features is pride, accepting defeat and asking for help does not come easy. I want to cope with things, solve my problems on my own. With the end of my company's financial year coming up very soon I realised things did not look well. Thought a lot about different plausible solutions. One of them being to contact M's parents asking for help. Given everything that happened between us during this year I'm sure you can understand how utterly deeply uncomfortable that was, I thought I'd close the door to that part of my life since writing that letter in September.

But realising I needed to solve a pressing issue and coming to terms with the fact that noone will thank me for my pride in this case and the only one with something to lose would be me. Also - what would the future me thank respectively reproach me for? So I bit the bullet. The very uncomfortable bullet. And to my surprise it turned out to be an easier bullet to swallow than I would have ever thought.

Without going into any details - but actually those details would be fit for a long blogpost about human behaviour, the far from uncommon notion 'if we don't talk about it it hasn't really happened' and communication gone awry - I got the help I very much needed. Without any discussions. A rather substantial weight has been lifted from my shoulders. Not every weight is gone, but still a big one. 

And even though I obviously remember how rubbish their behaviour over the year have made me feel, I understand now that a large part of that has been due to a strange lack of clear communication. And I do believe I've come to the forgive stage, even if it can't be forgotten or changed, forgiving is moving on. 

The next step, a new year. One year later.