This is the first time I have felt able to record my thoughts and feelings. It's been a very difficult even traumatic few weeks for me and my family as we have had to cope with the ordeal of a member of the family becoming very ill a long way from home. My wife bore the brunt of it and has stayed close by him throughout. It has been an emotional rollercoaster and we have had to cope with the situation and deal with the worst imaginable scenarios. Thankfully he is getting better although progress is very slow. The experience has taught me once again that good health and mental, physical and emotional ability are just the most important things in life and how much we take them for granted day to day until they are removed. Its revealed an aspect of my wife's character and strength I knew would be there but which can only ever going to reveal itself in such situations. It's revealed the love and concern of our family and close friends. I think the ordeal has made our family stronger. It's given me experience and insights into life in intensive care something I have never experienced before and the enormous dedication, professionalism and kindness of clinical staff. But also seeing life on the wards and experiencing the frustrations as a parent of not being able to get the care and attention you need when you need it for your child and seeing just how much you have to fight sometimes to get the attention you need. Coping with the uncertainty of not knowing what was causing my son's illness was one of the hardest of things until you realise that it's almost academic and the most important thing is to treat the illness by every means until there is a positive response. Google also played its role in provided much needed but not wanted information on the possible conditions and outcomes we were dealing with.

I know the experience has had a significant impact on my feelings - at times totally drained of energy and numb while at other times overjoyed and everything in between. At the moment I am just thankful that we are where we are now and not where we were three weeks ago and I appreciate all that so many people have done to help him and us through the ordeal.

Putting the first mark on the paper is a scary thing but I know once I get going it's not so bad. The psychological barrier we have to confront when we make a start can be very hard to overcome. I recently spent 6 or 7 weeks prevaricating over a
chapter I had to write that I knew was going to be hard. Sadly, when I eventually started it was hard and I find it very easy to put it to one side  and start (and finish)something else. Not a good habit I know but I have managed to convince myself its part of my creative process and that because it's at the back of my mind (actually playing on my mind!) I'm still working on the ideas. So my question is do other people suffer from this problem and if they do have they learnt any strategies for
dealing with it. Generally once I get going my attitude changes and I become more positive so something obviously happens in the mind once a start has been made. 


Saturday 15/09 - my mums birthday- 86 today

Today I have a good example of making a start. One of my goals in my current development plan is to create a memorial garden for my first wife Jill. Immediately after she died in 1999 I spent 3 or 4 months building a water garden. It gave me a lot of comfort and the physical toiling under a hot sun helped me work through my grief.. Since I moved house I have felt guilty that I have not created a physical space for her. But it's one thing saying you are going to do something and another to do it. Anyway its a lovely sunny day and I have been in the garden chopping down trees. I decided to move one of our
benches into the woods.. We have 3 acres of woodland and apart from the paths it just runs wild.. As I was carrying it down to the woods I decided I'd like to put it in the middle somewhere and as I started looking the idea of the memorial garden came into my head again.. There is a sort of drainage channel through the middle with lots of reeds and in spring there is a swathe of forgetmenots.. which flowers in early May - the time Jill died... I know my daughters also share my delight in the forgetmenots so I decided that the naturalistic 'garden' just had to be there.. so rather than prevaricate any more I worked out a route
from the existing path, cleared the bigger logs and drove the tractor in to make a start on the pathway.. Standing back from the particularities of the situation I think my goal is to create something that I, and my children will value. I had a vision of what it will be like- pretty and natural like she was and surrounded by wild woodland but in the more open spaces where the light comes shining through and the wild flowers grow in spring. While my vision and enthusiasm was still in my head (and ignoring the other jobs I was in the middle of) I began creating a pathway towards achieving the vision.. I know its just a start, and
there will be a lot of hard work ahead, but it feels already as if I am a significant way towards my goal. I took some photos before I started so I can see the changes I make. I feel quite positive about it having made a start.
Sunday 16/09

Knowing I had a busy day ahead of me I got up at 7am and went down to the woods and spent several hours laying out the pathway. It was laborious work cutting through fallen logs, lugging fallen trees to line the pathway and trying to dig through the chalky rubble to fill in some of the hollows. I fell over several times as my foot caught in the brambles and got stung by nettles. Altogether it was a sweaty exhausting process but I could see the progress I was making so that spurred me on. I could see that although I had a rough idea for the direction of the pathway and the detail was designed as I went in order to miss trees and stumps that I hadn't at first appreciated were there because they were overgrown. It made me feel bad when I realised that the 4' wide pathway was going to destroy a lot of plants in the middle part of the new pathway. After thinking about if for a while I decided that I would only use the lawn mower in the middle part and have a narrow pathway through the reeds and bracken. I recognised that this was a better solution.

Monday 17/09

I should have been doing other things but I spent a couple of hours in the woods. It was hard work filling in valleys and fissures in the path and there is a lot of this to do before I have anything like a proper footpath. When I'm walking in some out of the way place I often think of the people who must have made the path originally. Making paths for future generations of people to follow seems to me to be a special task in life and it can be used as a metaphor for leading others. Today my woodland work was inspected by my mother and father in law who are visiting us. They love walking and they could see what I was trying to do and they recognised it as a good thing. We talked about how gardeners don't just make things for themselves they are creating something that other people can enjoy in the future. My insight today was to do with design - now that I have done what I have done I can see much more the potential in what I'm doing. Its only after you have got someway into a project that this potential can be appreciated.
Tuesday 18/09

Well I think I have found a solution to my bumpy path problem. I went for a walk around the garden and behind some fir trees I found a pile of builders rubble which I had put there 4 years ago when we had a garage conversion done. The only snag is it's a long way to hump it down to the woods. So I have to convince myself the exercise will do me good. I spent a couple of hours humping the rubble down - altogether I made 4 trips with a full barrow.. fortunately its downhill and the last one I got a puncture and ended up having to pull the barrow. This is the slogging part of the process with little joy. It took me two hours to grade 2 meters so I can estimate that there is a couple of weeks work if I try to stick to my two hours a day. It was sunny though and paused to imagine several times what I could do when I start to create the woodland garden.. The results are good and I covered up the rubble with woodland soil so it looks fairly natural. Today's reflection is on the role of 'sustained slog' in trying to accomplish anything of significance. Once the initial enthusiasm of starting is over there is usually a lot of labour which is not very rewarding emotionally. I'm going to use John Cowan's idea of finding two hours a day to keep chipping away at the 'problem'. I probably won't make any more entries until I get to the next stage.

I haven't felt like writing anything for a few weeks... in spite of spending a week in Spain on holiday.. I know its because I felt in mood that I have only ever felt once before - when I was trying to come to terms with the knowledge that my wife was going to die.. That's the only way I can describe it and I just did not feel like writing anything positive. The source of course was thinking about my daughter and her small babies struggling to be given a chance to live a normal fulfilled life, and the news that one of them may have suffered some brain damage at some point in his early life with all the anxiety that brings.. Actually not 'might' but according to the doctors who have had little positive to say - 'will'. What has made me more positive and happier than I have been for many weeks was the babies coming home and seeing my daughter happy again and seeing these two little identical babies guzzling their milk. a.nd being loved to bits. And more than anything else the hope that my daughter was given by a physiotherapist who on examining them before they were allowed to go home, said that alfie was behaving like any other baby.. Just a few positive words was all it took to rekindle the spark of optimism.. that we all need to live our lives...

I often say that we are who we are because of all the experiences we have had and the meanings we have chosen to create for ourselves through those experiences. Today is a special day for me and my children. Its thirteen years since my wife Jill died of cancer at the age of 48. It's also true that you never stop grieving for and missing the person you have chosen to spend the rest of your life with. They remain an integral part of who you are for the rest of your life. Indeed, one of the  reasons I have tried to live a positive and fulfilled life since she died was to try to honour her. Had she lived she would have seen our three children grow up to become fine young people, she would have enjoyed two of them getting married and the third talking of marriage and enjoyed our grandson and the thought of twins on the way. She had that rare gift of being able to get so much enjoyment from the smallest incidents of life - like a cup of coffee and a chocolate biscuit. She taught me to see the joy in the simplest of moments. Whereas I complicate life she simplified it to the essentials and enjoyed it for the sensual experience it is. She helped me see that it is the simplest of things in life that are worth living for.Generally I am able to be positive abouit most things and people often comment on my enthusiasm, energy and positivity but there is nothing positive about losing the one you loved. Sometimes I feel sorry for myself and my loss, at other times I experience intense feelings of guilt that I am alive and she is not. I tell myself that she would have wanted me to try to live my life to the full and I know she would think I had done the right thing to marry again and try to be a good step father to my three children. But I am not religious so I have no concept of her awareness being in another place and that makes me very sad sometimes. I have to comfort myself with the thought that her spirit lives on in mine and of our children. Perhaps all I am doing is really a tribute to her. 

My wife knows how I feel because she feels the same about her husband who she lost when he was only 35. We are united by a shared experience that has profoundly shaped us both.

These two pieces of music to express how I am feeling - when I am feeling melancholy I love to listen to the Chinese erhu. Jill never saw the film crounching tiger but here is some of the music from the film that really touches me. The second is Jill's favourite ever song - fields of gold by sting. The first makes me feel unbelievably sad the second reminds me of our happiness.