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Strange Days - and a magazine interview

I woke up today and felt normal.

I'm going through the grieving process.

First days in the house after mum died were horrible. The house had lost its soul. It was unfamiliar, cold (literally) and unwelcoming.  

I've got a lot of memories from this period; I won't share them here.

5 days after she died a large group of the Norwegian family arrived.  My aunt's and uncles. Family in the true sense of blood, and love, and shared memories stretching back my lifetime.  It's been so good to have them here.

On the first night I took mum's two sisters and her brother upstairs, and gave each of them a chance to spend some time alone in the room where mum died.  I know I would have wanted to.  I did this with the room when my dad died three years ago...

I'm sitting in a cafe in Jesmond.  The skies are a freezing grey with patches of ice blue, ground is wet from last nights torrential rain: it's been raining for days.  The guttering at the back of house has a problem, ground level drain is blocked with leaves, I've been unable to fix it... and now I'll have to pay for somebody to come and do it.  I'll have to pay... the house is now my responsibility, and my sister's.  On one hand it is a surreal concept to get my head around; on the other hand it's simple, you own it, you look after it, you manage the estate.

My sister is going to remain living in the house for a few months, until the paperwork is sorted out.  She's been there since February, nursing mum, so this is her home as much as anywhere these days.  I feel for her, and wonder how she will cope when everyone is gone and she is there alone.

Every day I go and sit in mum's room. There is still an indent in the pillow where her head was.  The funeral director brought back mum's pink PJs, neatly folded... I placed them on the bottom of the bed. MY sister and I light a candle every day.  Sometimes I kneel beside the bed like I used to on those last days, except now there is no hand to hold onto.  I find deep comfort being in that room.

When Jo flew back to Bristol on the weekend, she whispered to my mum, "if you're there, show me a sign." Jo looked out the window of the aeroplane and saw a rainbow below her.

Rainbows now mean the realm of God and the Angels to me.

The funeral is tomorrow, so I'm aware my state of feeling "normal" is probably a finite thing.

I don't know how I'm going to feel.

I think I'll take the Metro to the coast the day after... rain or sunshine, I'll walk along wind blasted shoreline and remember my mum and my father who had their first date here in 1964... a place that's been a meca for nostalgia ever since.  A nod to Sharky, as I'll be eating Marshalls fish and chips, sadly no longer wrapped in newspaper, and I'll wander out to the end of the vast Tynemouth Pier.

Strange days.

Big Pete, my mate who lives next door to the family home, he lost his Dad the same week as my mum passed over. So he's lost his last parent and a dear friend next door (he was very close to my mum).

He's a few hundred miles away now, dealing with the estate on his own.

We ring each other and swap notes on what we're going through / experiencing.

Strange days indeed.

EDIT: just had an email from editor of SFX Magazine, they've published an interview with me regarding my writing, focussing on Edge and Yellow Dawn. You can read it here.
Interview with David J Rodger, by SFX