A SLEEPLESS NIGHT

I hardly slept at all last night. Perhaps I slept a while, on and off, with some remote part of my brain insisting that I was still awake. A curious sensation, the inability of the mind to switch off completely, even while most other parts are down.

Perhaps it's not surprising. We leave for an hour or so for the memorial park, where Flora is to be buried. I had to make what felt like a major shift when I heard, yesterday, that she was not cremated, as I had thought. She had left no instructions on this point, and her daughters decided that burial would be what she'd want: it appears, to my mind counter-intuitively, that this solution is in fact more environmentally friendly than cremation. But I had prepared myself for the latter, and the image of the presence of her mortal remains at the memorial distressed me enormously the first time I heard about it, and a new wave of grief arrived...

So that was consciously on my mind as I first tried to sleep. Later, I suspect, it slipped quietly into the unconscious mind and must have stayed there for the better part of the night. I checked my watch for the last time at four o'clock-ish, then actually did fall asleep until 6:30.

Later this morning, I'm first up at the service after the introduction, with the poem Bluebells which I wrote, unknowingly, the day that Flora died.