An Underlying Happiness

I thought I'd be starting this post by remarking that the renewed appreciation of life was fragile. The very next day I found memories triggering tears again. Then I managed to spill a cup of hot tea all over the kitchen bench, and I cried like a little girl.

Despite all that, I find it is not so fragile after all. In quiet moments I notice that I am happy. It has nothing to do with the grief, which is still going on and working itself out. It is underneath that, a foundation. 

I think it may have to do with the fact that he is still here and I have stopped trying to get rid of him. 'He'll always be with you,' people say, but I don't mean it like that. I actually think that, just as a psychic friend advised me, he was around in spirit for a couple of weeks and then went on to whatever work awaited him in the after-life. I don't even mean that he is here in the memories, although that is so. I just mean that his imprint is all over this place, ineradicable. His energy, one might say — but I suppose his energy is now with his spirit, wherever that is. It might be a sort of left-over energy from his time in this home.

I've given up trying to be realistic, to remind myself, 'No no, he's gone, he's dead.' I'm like the character in New Tricks who takes a drink out to his back yard every evening and has a chat to his late wife, whose ashes are interred there. Except I think that character is supposed to believe his Mary really does hear him in spirit. I chat to Andrew quite a bit, but I don't believe it's a real conversation. It just feels natural at times to say things to him, as I would have done if he were here. It's a kind of pretending to myself, knowing that's what I'm doing. It comforts me. I still have to be a bit careful though, because it can easily lead to actual memories, and they can easily trigger tears. Tears could become sobs any second. And yet ...

As I say, it may be the imprinted presence, which I have stopped resisting, that enables me to be in this underlying happiness I've become aware of. Or maybe it's merely my nature. I'm wired for happiness, I think; and if so I'm very grateful for the fact. Even when my life is such that I hate the circumstances, I'm somehow happy just about being. Happy in myself. 

It's not rejoicing, neither is it contentment, nor even peace. (All of which I have experienced often enough to make the distinctions.) It's not antithetical to those states of being, obviously; but it's not them. The accurate word is happiness. My bedrock.