Each day a challenge

Hi Gilly,

Music, walking and gardening. ....a pond and birds.. 

He will always be with you and your family..

Take care x

Gordon 

Just so sorry to hear your sad news. It only seems a few days ago that you took him to his seaside place and made special memories. Take care of yourself Gilly and I hope in time that you can enjoy and live your best life with the rest of your family. As others have said G will always be with you .

Ann

Gilly, I'm so sorry to hear your sad news.

I hope the love from family & friends and also friends here in this community will help you through this sad time. 

He will always be with you, in your heart and in the memories of the wonderful times you spent together.

Steve x

I am so sorry for your loss Gillyflower. I know I will follow the same journey one day X

Children accept things in a different way don't they? My little granddaughter will miss him and she will only remember his kindness and patience, as he never let her see the pain.

I have kept busy but there is that overwhelming loneliness that creeps in sometimes and the knowledge that nothing is ever going to be the same again. I just wish I could rewind and fall in love with him all over again. 

I will continue to support the charity in the hope that one day there will be something that can treat the cancer without the heartbreaking side effects that afflict some.

Keep fighting all you guys on here and never stop telling your loved ones how much they mean to you.  You are all special  and it is love that gets us through the dark times. That never dies.

You are a very special lady Gilly. I know it's a cliché that time heals. You will always miss your darling G of course but your pain will lessen as time goes by until you can meet again.

Ann x

Thank you so much everyone. I am taking time out and watching a film this afternoon but imagining my dear husband is just in the next room.

So much to do but my children are fabulous and a dear friend who went through the same loss has warned me I might crash, must eat and must look after myself in case I burn out - Hence the lazy afternoon!

I feel so much for all of you who are battling with this awful disease. I will do all I can to keep supporting the pc charity and if anyone wants support I will pop on here now and then because it really helped to share the moments I found difficult.

Thank you all.

Dear Gillyflower, 

Lyn is so right in that you will never get things back as they were but you will find a new normal eventually. It's so different, but in a way the same, for us all if that makes sense? A new normal, finding purpose in your life, however you see it, in time it happens and I hated people saying time would help, but eventually it did.

It's more than ten years for me now and I still pop in here most days. I've not a great deal to say here, but I do like to keep up with people here. I do volunteer with Prostate Cancer UK and I feel that using the knowledge I wish I hadn't had to gain makes a little bit of sense of losing Mike. For some it is better to move away, but I found such support and lovely people, not to mention good friends, on this forum that it has become part of who I am now, and that's a good feeling. 

Getting through each day is good, and all you can expect at this stage. I think I tried too hard to get through them and coped much better when I just decided to let it be. Suddenly one day I found I smiled when the sun shone instead of forcing smiles to make other people feel better. Other people seemed to want me to cope when really I felt I wasn't coping. I forced a smile one day to a neighbour and she patted me on the shoulder and said she was glad I was better, as though I'd had a bad cold! That's when I realised that some of the newer people in my life, and people on this forum, did understand more than people I had maybe known much longer. 

Star crossed talks about reinventing yourself and I get that totally. In time I almost completely reinvented myself to suit the life I could live, rather than the life I had previously lived. Mostly it's okay, even good, but I would never want to forget my past life, it's just somehow the two can run side by side. Memories become easier and kinder. Learning to cope becomes less of a challenge. Asking for help was always difficult for me, and probably still is, but people do want to help and if they can make life easier for you, please let them.

I understand your thoughts on feeling robbed of your time with your dear G at the end. Anger is the stage of grief I found most difficult to accept. I understood the other stages and expected them, but I felt I should have been able to deal with the anger. Images of the last few days take their toll on you. And in similar circumstances to G's Mike's journey came to a quicker end than we had expected. In time I was grateful he hadn't suffered more for a longer time, but at the time it was a shock and I felt he was cheated.

You are so right, now it is enough to get through each day. Try to be as kind to yourself as you would be to others. And do keep popping in here, especially if it helps you, but do know that you have helped, and will continue to help, so many others with your posts.

Take care, love Janet, x

Yesterday I was out with my son and grand-daughter and found myself marvelling at the clouds in the sky and the wild flowers underfoot as well as moorhens diving on a sun splashed lake. I felt alive and strangely happy for a few hours. I missed G so much but I felt as if it was ok to still enjoy nature and the pleasure of company.

The house still feels empty but I don't feel alone all of the time. I think my gorgeous G is telling me to get on with life and enjoy it again while I can. I am sure he is with me at every step and if I falter he will try to rescue me again.

The longing to hug him is always there but I am taking baby steps to learn to do things on my own.

The weird thing is that I have never had to be completely on my own. I lived with other students a s a teenager and married straight from university so this is a very strange experience for me. Thank goodness for a garden and things to do. Have a good day everyone and remember to always tell people how much they mean to you.

Thank you all for being so kind. It seems such a long time since that Christmas Eve when we were first told that the cancer was there. It was such a shock at the time but I think we dealt with the cancer journey as well as we could. Today has been especially tough, for no real reason, other than I woke up suddenly from a snooze and was shocked to find G wasn't in the seat beside me . The tears have been plentiful today and the aching longing is hard to deal with but I am calmer now and know that this is how it is going to be. I had niggling doubts about some of the treatments and called my own gp who spent a long time talking me through things and we came to the realisation that although things could have been a little less intrusive, there was nothing anybody could have done to prevent the outcome as there were so many things going wrong at once  that he couldn't fight it any longer.

I do pray that each and every one of you who are going through your own journeys, can embrace the lives you have and do everything you want to do. Don't wait, or put things off till the time is right.

This world we live in now, with the coronavirus is very different from the one we all knew before and there are some things we cannot do, but we have to make the most of every day. One day there will be a way to stop this cancer in its tracks and stop it from spreading.  We have to have hope for all your futures.

I read the new threads and am constantly amazed at the different treatments and progress. My G was doing so well on the chemo - no side affects to speak of and reduction in mets. How devasting that he had to stop due to Covid and subsequently the cancer spread alarmingly. There are no certainties extra chemo would have given him more time, but my heart is broken to think that we were denied that chance because of the virus. 

Each day, it gets harder, some days I can't speak to people without crying and I know it is normal but it is a tough time. G would want me to carry on and I am trying but even having a flu jab on my own today reminded me we will never share anything again.

Good luck all you guys out there - keep fighting - one day there will be a cure.

Today has been a bit better. A friend came for coffee and she is having her own tribulations so it made me think outside my own feelings for a while.

Feeling more energised, I then launched into tidying up one small section of the garden and planted my rose for G- a present from a neighbour. Once again I can see the path instead of the overgrown patch it was before and that made me feel better. Then a surprise visit from my daughter made me happy for a while.

It is a continuing roller coaster ride and I feel as if my doing the garden is also doing it for G because he loved it too.

I am coping and will do but it is early days and I know there will be rough and smooth days. Thank you for caring.

I hope all of you have a good day tomorrow.

Apologies for my late response, Gillyflower.

I do think it is only time that helps you recognise the hole that is grief and skirt around it rather than falling in. I, too, lost my mum, dad and brother before Mike and as you say all in different ways for me too. I still torture myself as to whether it was better to lose my dad quickly to a heart attack, although he was only 53, or at an older age, and expected, like my mother from cancer. Not that there is anything I can do about either. But I do think our minds have ways of helping us cope in times of deep grief and seem to drip-feed only as much as we can cope with on a daily basis. And don't underestimate tiredness - it took me a long time to realise how I always felt worse when I was tired.

There's really no answers to the 'what might have been' questions we torture ourselves with. I believe we do whatever we do for the best and then wonder how differently we could have done it. In time these thoughts got less for me although I still find I need to occasionally tell myself I did the best I could with the knowledge I had.

I can completely understand your thoughts on what might have been without Covid. I obviously didn't have that to contend with, but several new drugs came out shortly after Mike died and I was forever trying to work out whether I thought if they had been out a year or two earlier they would have made a difference. 

And I agree some days it can be so hard to carry on. Fortunately as time goes by I found that these days came a little less frequently until they became rare.

But it's all the things that make you realise how everything has changed for you, yet life goes on for those around you isn't it? Even for the rest of the family I found they could go back to their own homes and life went on whereas I struggled to go home alone as it brought all the memories back. I have found a very different, and busy life, and it is all so much easier now, but it was a struggle to get there.

We all find our own ways, but I found if I did different things and went to different places then I coped better than doing the same things with the same people as then Mike was always missing. Although doing new things made me wonder what he would have thought, whether he would approve of what I was doing and where I was going. 

I hope you are still finding it makes you feel better to get on with your garden. I have always found to get out in the garden and make improvements, however small, is helpful. And how nice you got a surprise visit from your daughter - always a treat to get a surprise visit, and can totally lift you.

You're right in that listening to a friend's tribulations can take your mind off of your own sadness for a while, but please be careful - it is so easy to feel overwhelmed. Remember to take care of you.

Hoping you have a nice sunny weekend and can get outside - it's always so nice at this time of year to get warmer, sunnier days when we don't expect them.

Take care, Janet, x

Special thoughts on your 49th Wedding Anniversary ♥️

The sun is shining and it is a beautiful day. There is a zoom service to watch from our Church if I wish and I am determined to make the most of today before we move into those dreary wet days in winter. I have been amazed at how many huge lorry loads of potatoes the local farmer has taken to a depot somewhere. He has had a bumper crop and it reminds me that life is a series of cycles , with good years and bad ones. I am so thankful for the wonderful life I have had so far, with all the good and bad times, that all passed and are in my memories. 

Still the lorries are trundling past, busy people going about their work while the sun shines. 

So folks, enjoy today, hug your loved ones and have a happy time within the Covid restrictions. We have all been so affected by this,  but we have to remember that many people are affected more on a daily basis by cancer, strokes and other afflictions and I think we have to not forget those people as we try to stay covid free.

By the way - I have decorated a small bedroom and the paintwork looks OK so one small achievement so far. Next is the decluttering I need to do now that charity shops are taking things in again.

I am sure that you will ge pleased to know that donations to prostate cancer uk in memory of G reached over £1800 so I am so grateful to all those people who gave to such an important cause. One day even better treatments will be found. 

Have a good day everyone. 

Wishing you many years if happiness together. Cherish the little moments, they are as important as the big ones  xx