Back in January 1998 , I had what I described as the 'worst week of my life'. It was a traumatic and tragic period of my life, where, inside the space of 5 days, my mother died and my employer unhappy about the timing, fired me because my work for that week was not up to standard, He claimed that 'in the real world, people have to overcome their problems for the good of the company' and that people would not understand and wouldn't care about my problems, so therefore he had to take the same stance.
It was quite a horrendous time and I always hoped that I'd never have to go through another week as bad ever again.
Over the last 9 years, there have been some bloody awful times, but thankfully, these awful times have happened at better times (if there is such a thing as a better time for a bad thing to happen?) and have made them easier to deal with.
Most recently, as little as one year ago, I talked about a colleague who died and how that affected all of the people she worked with and the aftermath of that. Januarys are not good months for me...
2007 arrived quietly and, with hindsight, a little bit of menace. We had been having reoccuring problems with the youngest of our two elderly dogs and while Christmas had just about convinced us that he was on the mend, the New Year arrived and so did the spectre of death and destruction. I had bad guts on NYE and opted to avoid drink, January 1st was a strange day, I was worried about the dog's lethargy and also battling with some tummy virus and my wife had torn a muscle in her back and was in agony.
January 2nd, we took the boy to the vet's and they could find nothing really wrong, apart from him seeming to be suffering more from his arthritis. His medicine was upped and we left feeling happier. But 7 days later, he had died from what appeared to be a blood problem. He was old. He was 15 and he'd had a long and happy life outside of this bout of illness.
It was devastating.
20 years ago, my wife and I decided that we weren't going to have any children. It was a conscious decision and we've never regretted it. Our dogs became our children and losing our youngest has hit us probably as badly as any death could.
When you have spent literally 15½ years of your life living with something, especially something as loving and attentive as a dog, it becomes a completely different kind of grief - it isn't like losing a parent, or a sibling or a good friend; I can only presume it is like someone losing a child of 15 - you've spent their entire life with them and now they're gone and there's a huge void, a cold emptiness that really feels as though it has decided to take hold in you for good.
That's bad enough, but while we were struggling to come to terms with the loss in our lives, my best friend's father was killed in a road traffic accident. He was 80 and just walked in front of a car. So suddenly, we had to deal with our own grief, our friend's double grief - his father and the loss of one of his best friends - our dog.
Wednesday gave a little respite from the bad news, but everything fell apart completely on Thursday when I received a call from work.
The local council has to make nearly £800K of cuts, of which 10% of that has to come from my department, that means a 10% reduction in the staff and I'm one of the last in, so I was one of the first out. I get one week's notice and that's it. 17 months of excellent service and they couldn't even wait a week to tell me, they phoned me at home, in the knowledge of what a shit week I was already having and made it even worse. I suppose, I have to thank someone that it all came in four days.
My wife has suffered a breakdown. The stress of losing her boy, a dear old friend's father, my job and her own physical problem has meant she's plunged headlong over the precipice. My work means that I know that people prescribed Diazepam need some big help and presumably the doctor thinks my wife needs big help.
I'm just staring at walls and wondering what will go wrong next.
It's always darkest before the dawn...
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