Outside, the bubble is a world of noise, inside is silence and muted sounds. When grief hits, the bubble bursts and a cacophony of sadness invades my head until the bubble grows again with me back in it. I don't mind the world inside the bubble, though I fear my constant retreat to it will prevent me from living in real time. Four days after my mother died, I lay in my bathtub soaking in tepid water and rang her mobile phone. She didn't answer, but you knew that already. A man's voice took the call and I hung up. Her phone had not been used for over a year, and her number had already been transferred and her name replaced. I live my life, I have fun, I laugh and all seems fine and then bam. There it is again. It may last a minute, 10 minutes, an hour, a few days and then it's gone. Grief is crazy-making with an element of surprise and the constant knowledge that no matter what you do that person is gone, never to return, never. Losing a mother is like being on a ship that has lost it's ballast and is now at the mercy of the deepest ocean and all it holds within. I bob around without a foundation to bring me back to the same balanced spot each time, a spot I just can't get right. Instead, I spend my time sideways, upside down, rightside up, sinking to the ocean floor and floating back up, taken on the current to places I have never been. By dusk, I was driving around the streets, dialing friends who went through to voicemail. When I found a live voice at the end of the phone I broke down, pulled into a car park of a gourmet supermarket and sobbed for half an hour into a t-shirt I found on the floor of my car. My friend stayed on the line and taught me how to breathe again. It also reminded me that I had put the grieving of a significant romantic relationship to the side when the end of life's ultimate relationship took precedence and now there was no escaping either. I wanted one to comfort me for the loss of the other and vice-versa, yet both had legitimate reasons why they couldn't. Grief is like that; it intensifies every loss no matter the size and takes residence inside your head. Fourteen months ago, when I was told mum had cancer, I was determined to identify an exact prognosis, a figure I could put in my diary as if controlling time was a within my power and b the key to keeping my grief at bay. If I could manage the time I did have, then I could easily move forward and get on with my life after that date, right? When I rang half an hour after her and Dad returned home from the specialists for the biopsy results, I found out three things. My father was angry, my mother had walked in the door and gone straight for an alcoholic beverage and the bladder cancer tumor had invaded her vagina and pushed itself around her urethra, shut down one of her kidneys, infested her lymph nodes and settled in her lungs. The cancer was, in the words of the specialist, inoperable and in the handwriting of my father on the piece of paper he had printed out with the questions I so wanted the answers to, incurable. There would be no chemotherapy and only a short course of palliative radiotherapy to buy her an extra month or two.
