Emotionally dilute

A close friend of my mum's died today. I can't really tell if the reality of what's happened has hit me yet, but I felt like writing something on it. Everything happened so quickly-she was fine one minute, went to the doctor and had some tests, and it turned out she had cancer. I knew she was going to die, but it didn't prepare me any more for today. Thoughts have slowly been creeping up on me about her children. I can't imagine what it would be like to lose one of my parents.

It's impossible to compare one death to another, and say that you "know what it's like". The simple answer is, you don't. I don't think anyone knew how I felt when my sister died-it was my personal experience, and there was a different one for my mum, dad, brother, and anyone else who knew her. It was such a great shock for me, I wasn't even able to cry at the funeral, and the whole time, I was standing there thinking about how everyone else probably thought I was inhuman. I would lie in bed for night, awake for hours on end, trying to reprimand myself, because sometimes I had forgotten that anything had changed. The sense of guilt I felt around that time was overwhelming, and no matter how many times I told myself that I had done nothing wrong, I couldn't shake it off.

It will be the second year I've spend without her on the 4th of April. Actually, this is the first time I've ever wrote any of this down, excluding my old diary, where I did an update in bullet point form about a year or so after her death. That sounds like an awfully horrible way to approach the subject, but that's just the way I am.

Things are still going on now which drag this up from the past, over and over again. And I don't mean "precious memories", I mean painful, nasty things, that are really upsetting for my mum. Perhaps I'll write more on this subject later on, but I don't really feel like continuing now. I'm glad none of my friends read this.