Reactions

We all muddled our way through and the drowsiness certainly helped. 

In a way I am glad that my memories of that day are so sparse and cloudy.   I honestly don’t think that I could have dealt with it all, whilst trying to get myself back on my feet.  There were still so many terrifying things in my life and a person can only handle so much.

My mindset was not exactly positive.  To add to all my other feelings – low self-esteem, low confidence, guilt, anger – now was added feeling like a failure.  I couldn’t even kill myself!  And now I had to sit in a ward with other people who were genuinely ill, hoping and praying that they did not find out why I was there.  How would that have made them feel?  There they were fighting for their lives, next to me who wanted to give up mine more than anything else.

And still everyone was so nice to me.  Why couldn’t they have been disapproving and angry?  That would have been so much easier to deal with.  And there was still more to come.  Hilda had spoken to my middle son and told him that to her, what I had done was totally selfish and she did not want to see or speak to me as she didn’t think she could be civil.  This was probably the reaction that I expected from everyone, but when I heard that this had been said to my son!!  How could she be so inconsiderate?  For that matter, selfish?  And she called me selfish?

There was my son trying to deal with what I had done, or at least tried to do, and she was using him to vent?  The sister of the man who had set off the chain of events and experiences that had led me here?  Unbelievable!

And my brother, who had always seemed to need someone else to take control, had stepped up to the mark and was providing my boys with the love and support that they needed.  I have always had a less than perfect relationship with him and my feelings towards him and his family have been pretty ambivalent.  But at the end of the day, when we really needed him, he was there for us and more importantly, there for my boys.  For that I will be forever grateful.

Quite a few people showed their true colours during the next couple of weeks.  And funnily enough, with the exception of Hilda, they were all beautiful colours indeed.