Away from home.

This is only the second time I have come away from home for any time, since Don died in May. It is a bizarre feeling to come away from the house and land which seems to becoming more beautiful as winter ends. I have never seen so many birds about the place and they seem to be happy to be close to the house ( I have been feeding them a bit.)

I'm spending a week with each daughter and then have decided that when I get back home maybe its time to get some structure back into my life, rather than just drift like I have been...although there is nothing wrong with drifting either.

After Melissa and Alison's birthdays (soon) there is then Melissa's wedding in early November and I have to function a bit better than I am to help her to celebrate what will be for her a wonderful day but also a hard day as the girls were so close to their dad.

Melissa is a real Virgo and quite used to having to do things for herself as we could only ever help at a distance, so she and Chris have organised the wedding... with minimal input from me...which is probably less complicated anyway...but stupidly I feel a loss about this ...maybe this feeling is natural and part of just being her mother.

I was always going to give a small talk after the wedding, and leaving the father of the bride bit up to Don because it meant so very much to him to let people know what Melissa is really like, something she is good at hiding. Like Don she is one of few people I have come across in life who doesn't complain and in this day and age that is becoming a rarity. We live in a culture of complaint.

So I am now father and mother of the bride and just have to hope I can do it without tears on what is for her a very happy day, but what we all know will be bitter sweet to those of us close to him.

I am close to completing the information needed to bring some action against the hospital and Doctor (s) who are responsible for Don's dreadful suffering and death... I have been working on this pretty much a bit every day...and just a bit to go. I am not going to use lawyers as there are other avenues to try first and I can make better use of my own money than to hand it over to people who charge $200 to write a letter.

I did speak to one by way of a reference point, so she could investigate other avenues which she did do for me, and she said, "that because he was so disabled, that I would be classed by the courts as being financially and emotionally better off because he was dead".

There you have it kids...and thats exactly the thoughts of most ignorant people... some of whom have suggested as much to me, even on the day of the funeral...ain't human nature just something or what? She was being helpful and I appreciated it, because lawyers are only, like many professionals these days and always I suppose , interested in the money earned at the end of the day.

I am a big girl and can deal with this sort of shit better than most because Don and I faced this too often in the past. We spent about a 4 year period in an out of court when one ex fake nurse tried to strip us of all we owned..., and there as legal aid for her but nothing for us at all because we owned our house... We both realised that at some vague time in the late 1980's after a few years of attitudes softening and becoming more reasonable towards attitudes towards disabled, during the late '90's and up till now there has been an increasing hardening of these attitudes, which in some way reflects the hardening of society.

We are all going backwards at a rate of knots culturally this way. There seems to be a harder edge, more subtle cruelty towards those just below us or who find themselves in trouble...even the girls have noticed this...that there was a freer attitude and people have become much more conservative and not in a good way...

I so much miss Don's amazing mimicry of these sorts of people. Our old VW van would just rock from side to side as he would sit behind me as we drove home and mimic whole conversations had with these sorts of people, getting them to a tee and adding his own drops of sarcasm...

People had no idea that the quiet bearded man, they assumed was one thing was another thing entirely... because they assumed. Just as the courts would assume they knew the value of Don's life to me because that value had nothing financial about it.

It was priceless.