My wife Christiana and I have always enjoyed travelling and exploring the world. This fact may be a bit odd, as we have also always been very anxious people, and the two don’t often go hand in hand. But I’ve found that the more I see, the more places I go and the more people I meet, the more comfort I feel.
When our daughter Ellie was born, we decided to focus on building our lives at home rather than gallivanting around the globe, but we often spoke about how excited we were to show her the world as soon as she was old enough. When she was four, we decided to test the waters and try our first family trip abroad, to Spain. It was wonderful.
Ellie spent the entire flight laughing like she was on a theme park ride. She was excited to explore and to try new things. She practiced saying “hola” and “gracias” to everyone she met. She even came up with a phrase to describe how being in another country made her feel – she called it “holiday lovely”. It felt like the world opened up for us again, and we spent the flight home excitedly talking about where we could all go next. Two weeks later, with no warning at all, Ellie passed away.
The utter shock and the enormity of the grief was indescribable. For several months we barely left the house. I didn’t want to acknowledge that the world was just carrying on outside. Even walking to the shop took hours of summoning courage, and was treated like a military operation – get in, get out and escape back to the house as quickly as possible, avoiding detection by any means necessary and hopefully making it home without collapsing into floods of tears.
I think I would have stayed living that way indefinitely were it not for Christmas. Ellie, of course, loved Christmas. She would ask most days if it was nearly Christmas yet, and although we didn’t let on, we would be almost as excited as she was. That year, however, the threat of Christmas hung over us like an apocalyptic stormcloud, gathering on the horizon from the start of October. It is absolutely impossible to avoid. There is no way to opt out. You can’t watch TV, go online, go outside, or even just look out of the window without being bombarded with images of happy families, excited kids, lights, presents, and joy – all the things we would miss out on not just this year, but every year from now on. It became clear that we needed to find an escape, or we would spiral further and further into despair.
Christiana was pretty adamant that she wanted to get as far away as possible, but I was terrified. I couldn’t imagine how I would be able to function abroad – if a ten minute walk to the Co-op was such a massive undertaking, how the hell would I last on a long-haul flight, with no escape, no privacy, no distractions? How would I cope in a foreign city, surrounded by millions of people when I could count the number of people I’d interacted with in the last four months on one hand? And how could we justify spending so much money on the gamble of going away, knowing that it could be a nightmare from start to finish, at a time when I wasn’t even sure if I would ever be able to return to work? It would never be a holiday. We would never feel “holiday lovely” ever again.
Through the support provided by SUDC UK (for which I am eternally grateful), we have found friendships with other families who had lived through similar tragedies, and they gave us (or at least, me) the encouragement we (or I) needed to take the leap. Whatever happened, it would not be the worst thing that had happened to us that year. So we booked some flights to Thailand.
As soon as we had clicked “confirm”, I was wracked with guilt. It felt like we were pretending everything was fine, leaving Ellie behind, or, worse, acting like she had never existed. And what would everyone at work think? “Oh, he’s too depressed to sit at a computer but sitting on a beach seems to be ok!”
I hope, if you are reading this and can unfortunately relate to anything I’ve written, that you will believe me when I say that the moment we left the house and closed the front door, I felt like a weight had been lifted.
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