20th November

So I’m back home now and it doesn’t feel too bad. But really the whole of my life is worse than any bad dream I ever had, and I suppose you could say I’m surviving on some sort of auto-pilot… going through the motions without a great deal of enthusiasm. This can’t last, for sure, I won’t allow it! Life is for living, there are things to do and people to see. I will pick myself up, though I have confidence that if I can’t do it the Lord will. The journey home was a struggle, as along the M5 and then the M42 I had to fight off the tears that threatened to force me to park up somewhere. It’s quite a challenge forcing myself to stop thinking about the most emotionally challenging event of my life. How can I ‘forget’ that my wife has died? I know the answer to that question; the problem is that I keep ignoring it by living in the past rather than the present. Jane is not dead. Yes she died, of course, May 24^th around 10am… I was there, I watched her take her last breath, and I felt her heartbeat gradually fade as I held her hand. We held her funeral and in the summer I scattered her ashes in the sea. But the truth is that today she lives with Jesus Christ in a very special place called heaven. And I don’t. Despite an incredibly caring and close family I’m all alone. Heartbroken and completely bereft, I feel lost and don’t know what to do. I know I have to move on but that seems impossible at the moment, it’s just too hard. So I force myself to keep doing the ‘right things’ in the hope that tomorrow will be a better day again but with the knowledge that the day after probably won’t. They say, whoever they are, that for men the average time of recovery from the initial shock of bereavement is from 9 months to a couple of years. I can do that. But much longer and I think my heart would truly break, it really can’t be healthy living like this. I need somebody or something to brighten up my life again as the light is growing dim at the moment.

My very special eldest daughter came ringing the doorbell within ten minutes of my arriving home this afternoon. She came walking from the local school where my granddaughter had been playing football, they were absolutely frozen. So it was good to see them and nice to be able to turn the heating up to thaw them out. But we talked of Christmas and how sad it would be this year, and she shared her ideas for most of my family to be together on Christmas Day. I’ve always enjoyed Christmas, though I detest the commercialism and the unwarranted worldly excess that could easily overshadow this remembrance of one of the world’s greatest events… the miracle of Almighty God, the creator of the universe laying aside his majesty to become a baby boy. Born an outcast and seen as illegitimate, a refugee, in a country occupied by a most brutal invading army; then forced to flee to another nation when threatened by the extermination of every young child in the area. Quite a challenging start for the most influential person who ever lived. The child who became the man who split history into two - BC or Before Christ and AD, Anno Domini which is Latin for ‘The Year of Our Lord’. He inspired the permanently best-selling book of all time, The Bible; spanning millennia and really the whole of human history, past, present and future in it’s pages. And of course he is The Saviour of the World… Jesus Christ.

Now I’m beginning to see more clearly again… and I'm just a little brighter.

Luke 2:3-7 ‘All returned to their own ancestral towns to register for this census. And because Joseph was a descendant of King David, he had to go to Bethlehem in Judea, David’s ancient home. He travelled there from the village of Nazareth in Galilee. He took with him Mary, his fiancée, who was now obviously pregnant. And while they were there, the time came for her baby to be born. She gave birth to her first child, a son. She wrapped him snugly in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no lodging available for them.’ (NLT)