Ferran's profundity

Ok so I cannot listen to Ferran Adria talk on SBS for much longer for fear of breaking into a spontaneous flamenco. Either that or experimenting with gelatine, a flame thrower, an espresso cup and ascorbic acid.(There is a crazy ass doco on his restaurant El Bulli on TV right now (isn't everything on SBS crazy ass?) and while I love to hear the broodingly mad Ferran lisp and loll linguistically...I have had enough now). Basta, Ferran, basta. And that's right, you young upstarts, loll was actually a word before it became an SMS-inspired acronym minus that jaunty third L. So there.

So, that's as sensible a lead-in to a blog I haven't hopped on to for ages as ever. I think. Really.

I'm fine. Thanks for asking. How are you?

Right now the house is quiet, Jay is in bed and T is working, so I thought I'd pay my respects (penance) to the Blogger gods.

T and I are continuing with our counselling sessions and they have been brilliant. We go every fortnight or so, and the woman we see specialises in grief. Frankly, I don't know when we will stop going...and besides, it costs us $10 out of pocket each time and we get a lovely cuppa and macadamia shortbread every time. So why not?

In the olden days back when I was a smoker, I would have used the analogy "$10 - that's just one packet of cigarettes" until I happened to notice the daylight robbery currently being committed in tobacco vending establishments these days. Christ! Those things are $17 now!! What??

I think we've been four or five times. I've lost count. To the counsellor I mean, not tobacco vending establishments. Those places and their novelty bar mats scare me.

I must say it's hard to put into words what I have learned...even though I know it is large and significant.

For the past few times, in the hours before our appointment, I have wondered if we need to keep going. Is it worth it? Are we cured now?

In the hours after our appointment, however, we often sit in silence driving home just absorbing the profundity of the past hour and a half. That's right, I'm bringing profundity back...even if it makes me think of the word fecund (capable of producing offspring; fruitful - huh, weird).

Melissa, our counsellor, has helped us process what we thought was unprocessable. She has given us a framework to hang our rampant, unpredictable emotions from and validation for whatever the hell we are feeling at any given moment. Frankly, in this acute phase of grief (which she says goes for 12 weeks) anything you feel is right, is normal, is perfectly reasonable. And my, that's nice to hear, when some of those things feel downright terrible/crazy/weird/wrong.

She has also helped me understand people...especially T's parents and their non-reaction to the whole shebang. That, dear readers, is a blog for another day, but the extra heartbreak it has added was initially devastating and is now just...them, and all we can ever expect from them. (Aim low and we will never be disappointed.)

She has opened my eyes to the greyness of life, and made me realise that black and white is what newspapers are, not people or beliefs or situations.

She has slowly helped me heal what I thought was an unhealable, festering angry wound. A few weeks ago, I used to think of this experience as a bloody great big samurai sword that sliced me in half, forcing everything that made me me to pour out onto the concrete. It was cruel and gory and fricking nasty, and I felt as though all of that stuff was literally gushing out.

There was panic at wondering if that stuff would ever be replaced; and if it was, what with? Would it make me harder, bitter, more angry, less able to laugh, what?

Shit, I don't know what's there in its place yet. I think I am still refilling. I have moments of bitterness, sure. I get angry and sad. But I still laugh, and I still cry.

Doesn't everyone?