Loss is always difficult

 This isn’t about Blue Van Woman’s adventures, you may have guessed by the title, it’s about loss.

I have recently lost someone that I loved.  I don’t mean ‘lost’ in that awful way that we use ‘dead’ these days nor do I mean that I have mis- placed him.

I mean that he is lost to me.  Gone, absent, no longer with me.

He was one of the main reasons that I bought my van.  He and I had spent hours and hours in his vans.  He showed me how to wild camp, how to live in a tiny space.  Until he couldn’t any more.  When we first fell apart I missed him and I missed the freedom of packing a van and heading off.

So I cried for him and I cried for waking up to perfect views.

I’d never driven his vans, far too scared and far too stereotyped to think I could possibly manage such monsters.  But you all know that I can drive a van as well as anyone else.  And I can camp.  I can find places in the wilds of Scotland and set up camp.  So I don’t miss camping at all.  In fact, I love camping even more because its not stressful.

That’s when I first started to realise that all was not well.  There really are only so many times that I can check the water levels or the battery charge remaining.  There are only so many times I can say, before we set off ‘have you got your tablets, clean clothes, toilet bag?’  And not be surprised when there were many things left in the van between trips that really shouldn’t have been.  But you let it go don’t you?  Not wanting to see what years of nursing shows you.

He had always been independent – he made it very clear that he didn’t want to live with me – ever – but saw no problem in us having a long distance relationship with all the benefits that intimacy brought.  He began to forget important things when he came to see me.  So I kept clothes for him and a week’s worth of his tablets in drawers that I had assigned him.  (I had a plastic box that had once held fat balls for birds at his place.)

In the past he had abandoned me several times – often for years.

We would spend time together, text, speak on the phone and then he would stop.

Completely.

This was nothing to do with what happened in later years – this was just how I let him treat me.  The fear of his disappearing never left me – but now he had gone from me forever.   He did lots of work at my house for me.  But it was like my mother’s embroidery.  She stitched endless, beautiful pictures – you know the ones – iron on transfers and then multicoloured threads.  And as her mind unraveled, so did the skeins of silk.  Until all she could embroider were single lines.  And his work unravelled – from neat works of carpentry to haphazard constructions of random pieces of wood.

I didn’t say anything – I was afraid he would stop coming.

He was going to move house and this was when I saw how bad his dementia had become.  No matter how I tried, I could not explain his own finances to him.  He could not grasp the basics of money in and money out.  I knew that his family had to deal with this.  There were other things but I can’t bear to share those with you.

And so I lost him.

I finished our relationship before it finished me.  He didn’t want me to live with him so I couldn’t do the hands on care he clearly needed.

I said goodbye.

Nowadays I miss the man he was but I know he’s gone.  But I don’t miss the constant fear that he will stop texting.  I don’t miss the anxiety of long days with no contact and the evenings when he didn’t pick up my phone calls.  And now I don’t miss the camping.

Dementia has taken the man I loved but he was never really mine anyway.

 

Written by Marion, hosted by Carrie