Everthing has changed. Nothing has changed.


Today it is two months since Mr Duncan died.  I'm still trying to process the enormity of his death.  And it's insignificance.



EVERYTHING has changed.



Mr Duncan is dead. 

The life we created together is gone, along with the future we planned for our little family.



How I see the world, how I feel, behave, think, and act has changed.  

I am not the me I’m used to being.



All of a sudden I have massive anxiety, and little things I would never have even noticed before trigger a sudden increase in heartbeat and difficulty breathing.   
The strangest little things can trigger a massive wave of hurt and bring on a jag of violent crying.  Every thing is a potential trigger.  From the halved laundry pile to the undone chores I’d been asking him to do for weeks.  And I do not know what will trigger me, until it is too late and I’m in a flood of tears.



I regularly forget things.  A planner by profession, I can barely think further than two days ahead and if I don’t put everything in my phone calendar, it’s as if I never even knew about it.  And at this time, I have more meetings than ever to remember - lawyers, banks, insurance companies, grief counsellors…



On top of all the essential form-filling, insurance claims, changes of name on accounts, you know, the  mass of bureaucratic paperwork a widowed person is required to deal with, because Mr Duncan was British, I also have British bureaucracy and UK inheritance tax to add to the mix.   Normally I’m a bureaucracy goddess, but my skills have deserted me.



I am no longer the person I was.

Everything has changed.



And yet...

NOTHING has changed.  

His clothes are still hanging in the wardrobe. 

The bills keep coming. 

I still have to drag myself out of bed every morning.  

Our daughter still needs me to do everything for her.  And it's harder.  She’s much more demanding and clingy now her dad is gone.



But for every single person I come into contact with, everything is the same. 

Their lives remain untouched, unaffected by Mr Duncan’s death.

I read recently that being widowed is like being in a car accident.  One minute you’re doing 100km along the highway like everyone else and the next you’re sitting, helpless, on the side of the road wondering what the %&£& just happened.

The other people slow down as they pass the accident site, to see what’s happened and check if you’re okay, but pretty soon they’re back up to highway speed on track for their destination.  

Weeks, months, later and you’re still on the side of the road hoping for an ambulance to help with the pain.  Or a tow truck to help you move forward.  Or…, on those really grim days, a hearse to take you away.



It feels surreal. 

And very isolating.



Everything has changed and nothing has changed.

Eulogy

I wrote this, and a close friend read it for me, at Mr Duncan's funeral.

I first met Mr Duncan when he shared his umbrella with me standing in line for the London Summer Proms.  That was Mr Duncan in a nutshell - thoughtful, kind, generous.  

We’d see each other socially at company events, but our friendship deepened when he was planning the trip of a lifetime - driving his Land Rover around the world, starting in Perth.

We stayed in touch as he travelled, messaging every few days as he related his exploits: escaping flash flooding in the Kimberleys, being best man at his friend’s wedding, learning to surf at Coolangatta and driving long distances to detour around bush-fires in Victoria.

One day Mr Duncan said ‘you’re more than welcome to join me at the ends of the earth if you want a break from London’. 

Famous last words.

So I found a cheap flight and joined Mr Duncan for what was intended to be a two week trip into the Australian Outback.  We ended up spending the next ten months travelling in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and Cambodia and driving home overland from South Africa.

What we each recognised in the other was a love of adventure, and a partner in crime who could be relied upon.  Mr Duncan learned to dive in Thailand, trekked to see the gorillas in Rwanda and scared the living daylights out of me, driving down the ridiculously steep and snowy Sani Pass out of Lesotho.

We woke to elephants eating leaves from the tree we were camping under, white water rafted down the Nile, slept under the stars in the crater of an extinct volcano in Namibia and splurged on a luxury safari trip to the Okovango Delta.  

Together we dealt with flat tyres and busted shock absorbers in the middle-of-nowhere Tanzania, being held up by tribe members with AK47s in the badlands between Kenya and Ethiopia, and multiple attempted shakedowns by local officials everywhere.  

Hakuna Matata.

When we reached Khartoum, I flew back to the UK for Christmas.  It took Mr Duncan another six weeks to drive back to London.  By the time he was home we realised how much we missed each other and agreed to start “dating”.  

A little over a year later we’d moved in together and were trying for a baby.  Mr Duncan was confident he would be the father of a little girl.  This led to a conversation about where we’d want to raise our family and Australia offered the open spaces and outdoor lifestyle we wanted, along with satisfying work opportunities for us both.

Two weeks after Mr Duncan’s visa was granted and our flights were booked, I discovered I was pregnant with Pickle.  And thus started our most important and unpredictable adventure yet - parenthood.

Mr Duncan was an amazing Dad.  

He was hands-on from the start and it was his desire to be more present for his daughter that led to his working from home.

With Pickle, Mr Duncan's sense of adventure took a different path.  He always found the time to help her to explore the world around her and explain the little mysteries she uncovered.

He delighted in his daughter, as she did in him and they shared a very close relationship full of all sorts of Daddy-and-Pickle-only games and secrets.  

I miss Mr Duncan more than I can comprehend,

-his gentle strength,

-his depth of knowledge,

-his thoughtful opinion,

-his technical acumen,

-his sparkling wit

... and his unwavering faith in me.

I am heartbroken for Pickle, that she will grow up without him by her side. 

But I will remember Mr Duncan as someone who embraced life to it’s fullest and can only hope I raise Pickle to feel the same sense of optimism and adventure in life as her Dad.