Author: Ellen Bell

I wake in the night and it grabs hold. It is usually about details, and the fear of not having done enough. Never enough. I am never enough. In my eyes.

I used to get it alot. Now not so much. He’s bought me some cranberry juice online. Let’s see. My body hurts. He says that it’s because I am coming down from all that stress. It is still there but more manageable, so he is probably right. It is nothing, I know, to what some people have to live with. I know my blessings and he is one of them.

It was such an insult of a present, the sort of thing you give to a retiring bank manager. I feel for him. I do. I believe he did what he thought best. I wish him well. A new start.

They about people who die young as not “making old bones”. Will I? My bones begin to feel old. And it is a worry, along with all the other things I grow anxious about, for how will I manage if I cannot work or even walk without pain? I am not alone, I know this. And it is how it should be, I suppose, for it heralds death, doesn’t it? And that, as they say, like taxes cannot be avoided.

I suppose it is the heat and the not be able to stand the duvet on top of me that is keeping me from sleeping. I lie awake staring at the wall, the window, and turning this way and that. I get up to pee over and over. It will pass, he says, and I am sure that he is right, but it does suck the energy out of me. Heigh ho.

I think I have it in my shoulder now, as well as my hips and left hand. Will this ghost my late sixties, then, that sometime ache, sometime pain? I must weather it, I think, as my bones and my skeleton must. We will do it together, moving as well as we can, and accepting life’s distractions as a gift.

I am sorry. I am sorry to see him go. Watching him on PM Questions yesterday, he looked relaxed, but there was a sense of bemusement as to why he was going. I wish him well. A lordship next, perhaps?

I want to write challenging rather than difficult, or at least I feel I ought to, thus rendering the experience open to a less negative take. But it was difficult. I hadn’t expected it or my response to it. Is it easier if you cry in front of people online, instead of in person? I don’t know. Either way I feel ashamed. They kept going, telling me what I needed to hear. I am made battle-weary by it today.

He says he won’t read her article about the Israeli torturing of the doctor from Gaza. And yet, I know that I should learn about it. I should, if only to acknowledge what he is going through, day-after-day. And all those others who the world, including me, have forgotten. They are not living, but are held in this nightmare of an existence, waiting to die. Lord bless them and keep them. Please.

I keep thinking about her. Nobody should have to die in such violent circumstances, and then to be left unfound for over 24 hours. We watched a snippet of her dancing at breakfast. Gloriously bad and gloriously wonderful in its badness. I am so sorry A. May you rest in peace.