One Day at a Time?

I've just come back from a work conference, where I caught up with a lot of colleagues who hadn't seem me since Jen died. So quite a few people obviously felt that they should say something to me. The most helpful one or two people were those who had their own experience of grief, and who talked about their life without offering a lesson. One colleague talked about how his father died when he was thirteen, and the difficulties with how his mother responded.

But a good few people would ask how I was coping (how can I give an answer in a couple of sentences?), and then say, "I guess you're taking it one day at a time". I now have a lot of practice in remembering that the person is trying to be helpful, even if they are not actually being helpful, and so I try to be gracious and nod politely.

The 'one day at a time' cliche reminds me so much of the brilliant satires of John Clarke, who delights in sending up the cliches of sport ('one game at a time'). Now there is an element of sense in the cliche, especially when you face a situation of extreme uncertainty (when you can end up torturing yourself about all manner of hypotheticals) or when you are so overwhelmed by the prospect of what has to happen. In that case, there is some wisdom in bringing one's focus back to the immediate events one can control, in setting oneself to the small and manageable tasks that may be steps towards a goal.

In other situations though, the cliche can amount to closing one's eyes to the inconvenient or painful realities. After Jen was diagnosed, quite a few friends suggested that I shouldn't think then about life after Jen's death, but just enjoy the time. I know they said that out of love, but I'm profoundly grateful that Jen and I had quite a few conversations about what I'd do when she was gone, from an idea for where to put her ashes, to the arrangements for looking after the boys. The prospects of long survival from such a metastatic cancer were so grim that we had to think not about a day, but about the years ahead for me and the boys.

In the present, I couldn't hope to look after the boys and keep up with ordinary living if I wasn't quite well organised, planning out the weeks and months ahead. I don't have another person at home who can be implicitly relied on to manage anything and everything as needed. A little while back I had to make a preliminary plan of my leave from now to the end of 2010, not in the previous vague way of 'perhaps we could go to the farm in July', but at the level of counting the exact days of accrued leave at each stage of the year. The problem of course is that I have four weeks of normal leave, another week or so of special leave, and long service leave, which then has to cover the 12 weeks of Rowan's school holidays, and the 15 weeks of Jamie's holidays. The brute mathematics indicates that I'm going to need a lot of help to make this work. Jen's family, who have already been so generous, are again going to be vital.

The balancing consideration to my 'one term at a time' or 'one year at a time', is that any manner of unexpected events could throw the whole plan out. Grief itself is not linear. We may find that our plan isn't working, and have to reshape our routines yet again, but again it won't be a plan just for one day.