Dark Days
This one is hard to write. So it may seem factual and not in my usual verbose manner. It needs telling but not dwelling on. This is part of the story but is a much bigger story in itself and one I am not ready to write in detail about.
I can't remember if it was just over a week or a matter days since our last training course day and the upsetting news about our extended wait- it was either 3 days later or 9 days. I don't want to look up dates.
I received a phone call at work from the police. Very long story short, leaving out the emotion and trauma and intricate details how how slow and fast time can pass and how surreal life can be- it turned out that on that day my dad was knocked down by a car cutting a corner on a junction. He was walking to an appointment in town. Dad never regained consciousness and we were told there was no hope of recovery and had to agree for life support to be turned off.
I learned that day what it is like to be alone and not be the child protected by her parents anymore as mum and I swapped roles and she became the one in need. The relationship has never gone back to parent and child. It is the day I had to grow up and no longer be the child. There is nothing quite like this feeling, realising you are the 'grown up' in the parent-child relationship.
Karl was my rock. So calm and understanding with us both. I spent so much time worrying about mum that I didn't care for myself. Karl and I held the funeral together (dad was not religious and years ago I had promised- of my own volition- that I would hold them and not let someone else say platitudes who didn't know them). I do not know how we did it- but we did and I hope we did him proud- I even sang, 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' and got the congregation to sing 'Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines" to honour his past in the RAF.
What followed was months of crowd anxiety for me- a real shaking fear of being in public and then rounds of court cases at both magistrate and crown court; which stirred everything up again. By May we were able to finally move on. After the court cases we were all shell shocked and numb.
So, it turned out, we would have had to pause anyway in the process. There is no way we could have carried on at this point- no way were we in an emotional state to have contemplated taking a child into our lives and the adoption agency would have enforced a break anyway and rightly so- we needed time to grieve.
We volunteered at event days with the adoption agency to keep in touch and met our social worker a couple of times to get stage one paperwork finished.
This is why I wish, in hindsight, we had waited to tell my parents- dad was looking forward to being a granddad, he had spoken excitedly to mum about teaching them to grow things on his allotment and had put a little patch aside for it. If I hadn't told them, he would never have had that disappointment. We made sure the perpetrator of this crime knew how much he had hurt our family and had robbed future grandchildren of a loving grandad. They needed to know their careless actions had cost not just a life by changed the lives of others forever.
I can't remember if it was just over a week or a matter days since our last training course day and the upsetting news about our extended wait- it was either 3 days later or 9 days. I don't want to look up dates.
I received a phone call at work from the police. Very long story short, leaving out the emotion and trauma and intricate details how how slow and fast time can pass and how surreal life can be- it turned out that on that day my dad was knocked down by a car cutting a corner on a junction. He was walking to an appointment in town. Dad never regained consciousness and we were told there was no hope of recovery and had to agree for life support to be turned off.
I learned that day what it is like to be alone and not be the child protected by her parents anymore as mum and I swapped roles and she became the one in need. The relationship has never gone back to parent and child. It is the day I had to grow up and no longer be the child. There is nothing quite like this feeling, realising you are the 'grown up' in the parent-child relationship.
Karl was my rock. So calm and understanding with us both. I spent so much time worrying about mum that I didn't care for myself. Karl and I held the funeral together (dad was not religious and years ago I had promised- of my own volition- that I would hold them and not let someone else say platitudes who didn't know them). I do not know how we did it- but we did and I hope we did him proud- I even sang, 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' and got the congregation to sing 'Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines" to honour his past in the RAF.
What followed was months of crowd anxiety for me- a real shaking fear of being in public and then rounds of court cases at both magistrate and crown court; which stirred everything up again. By May we were able to finally move on. After the court cases we were all shell shocked and numb.
So, it turned out, we would have had to pause anyway in the process. There is no way we could have carried on at this point- no way were we in an emotional state to have contemplated taking a child into our lives and the adoption agency would have enforced a break anyway and rightly so- we needed time to grieve.
We volunteered at event days with the adoption agency to keep in touch and met our social worker a couple of times to get stage one paperwork finished.
This is why I wish, in hindsight, we had waited to tell my parents- dad was looking forward to being a granddad, he had spoken excitedly to mum about teaching them to grow things on his allotment and had put a little patch aside for it. If I hadn't told them, he would never have had that disappointment. We made sure the perpetrator of this crime knew how much he had hurt our family and had robbed future grandchildren of a loving grandad. They needed to know their careless actions had cost not just a life by changed the lives of others forever.
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