There are dangers everywhere, even from the hapless Kebab shop owner...

The day, I heard about the events in South Africa, my world started to take on speed. Everything that I saw, heard, smelt or felt took on an added dimension.   Here is an excerpt from the internet, to try and put my reaction into some context.

Signs and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

The symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can arise suddenly, gradually, or come and go over time. Sometimes symptoms appear seemingly out of the blue. At other times, they are triggered by something that reminds you of the original traumatic event, such as a noise, an image, certain words, or a smell.

My son’s urgent request for a call back, following my short lived delight at a phone call from him, started the ball of my PTSD rolling.  The tinny echo in my head started as the shock took hold.  It was a Wednesday afternoon and details were hazy. I allowed myself the benefit of denial and non acceptance as everything was being filtered through time, geographic locations and bad telephone connections. I allowed myself the shadow of doubt, that perhaps it wasn't true and that I had somehow misheard. Still, the shock stalked me and by the time I woke up the following day when I learned, irrefutably, that she had been murdered, I shook uncontrollably, wept, became nauseous and began to experience a sense of a limited future (you don’t expect to live a normal life span, get married, have a career).

It is one of the elements of PTSD that I struggle with when I am triggered. I couldn’t venture outside, except once in several days, or in company and locked myself in the flat.  Even then, I was worried that somehow someone could get into it and lie in wait for me, if I took a shower or used the bathroom and couldn't hear them entering. To that end, I would not put on the light, because it has an extractor fan attached and muffles external sounds.

There is a fire escape off our bedroom into a communal stairway and I imagined that would be the point of entry.  So I locked myself in the bathroom, when I needed to use it, but then had great difficulty leaving it.  I armed myself mentally with a scream whenever I emerged and even looked under the bed, just to make sure that no-one was lying in wake.  A scream is something I find difficult to muster when under threat and wonder whether my lack of vocalising my fear during my two hijackings, helped to save my life. 

All the time I was mourning the loss of my beautiful, wonderful, wise, ally and friend and also someone who has been the only professional constant in my battle with mental illness.  I was imagining what it might be like for her beautiful sons to have to face a life bereft of their mother.  A woman who had seized upon motherhood like no other I know.  Her children are 10 and 12 and it is beyond me to think about what life will be like for them.  My own children were roughly the same age, when I was first threatened and the parallels, to me, were uncanny.

Most of the time, I was waiting to hear that it was not true, that somehow there had been some awful mistake and that she was not dead.  In my head, I layered the blood shed and violence I had witnessed during the birth of her oldest son, with what I had heard of her death.  Images surfaced and haunted every recess of my mind, as I created a reality with threads of memory of her with that of my own terror, when faced with certain death.  The days following my second hijacking I wondered whether I was, in fact, dead and that I was living in some sort of parallel universe.  This is, apparently, quite normal behaviour. 

Normally, while I work, I am aware that I can be overlooked by the offices over the road but it doesn’t worry me.  Now, I imagined that someone could be specifically watching me and perhaps had been, during the time we have been tenants. There was every possibility that they could be waiting to cause me harm.  I became paranoid about whether I had inadvertently given whoever it was, a false signal, by exposing something of myself unconsciously.  My desk is in our bedroom and although I am very careful never to do bedroom stuff, like change, with the curtains open, I began to wonder whether I had, somehow, slipped up and had consequently given said office worker licence to come on to me, perhaps violently, if I declined.

I had also been intending to invite the Kebab shop owner and his cohorts into the flat, to show them that we did not have a widescreen television because, as a joke, I had owned up to abandoning an enormous old telly on wheels in the passageway.  They have never seen the humour and to this day, I believe that they blame me!  But I began to see that there were elements of such an invitation which could easily be misinterpreted.  So, the Kebab shop entourage, were filed in the threat drawer, together with a note to self not to fraternize or joke with any of them in future, just in case.

Because of my hyper vigilance, anything that I did see or hear skirted perilously close to my interpreting it as a sign. A sign that I was being guided to see and hear things so that I could sense her presence even though she was no longer here.    I felt that I ought to live my life fully because it was going to be foreshortened. 

I rationalised this as imagining how she would have lived, what she would have done and so I did things out of character.  Normally, I would never accept an invitation to go for a drive in a car with the top down during the week.  Now, I felt that I ought to grab the nettle, even though, once in the car, I thought that it would be ironic, if, in trying to live, I was mangled in an accident.  My drive, as passenger, was a mix of elation at being alive and seeing things in technicolour clarity, feeling the elements touch my skin, rush through my hair, and vibrate through my core and near terror and certainty that my number was up. 

Here is an excerpt about PTSD from the internet.

Many risk factors revolve around the nature of the traumatic event itself. Traumatic events are more likely to cause PTSD when they involve a severe threat to your life or personal safety: the more extreme and prolonged the threat, the greater the risk of developing PTSD in response. Intentional, human-inflicted harm—such as rape, assault, and torture— also tends to be more traumatic than “acts of God” or more impersonal accidents and disasters. The extent to which the traumatic event was unexpected, uncontrollable, and inescapable also plays a role.

I wrote this, two days after I heard.  I didn’t know then that I was hyper vigilant but now, knowing that hyper vigilance was triggered, imagine that this detail and noting it, in the 20 minutes that I sat in the car, is probably an indication.  

I am sitting in our car in the sunshine outside an industrial estate in rural Dorset. My husband popped in unexpectedly for lunch before his next appointment. I didn’t have a work deadline so he asked whether I would like to come for the ride. I think he is more worried about leaving me on my own than he admits.

A last minute phone call and consequent dash out to the car means that I have forgotten to bring a book to read or the book I scribble in from time to time. I do have a hand me down Blackberry- one which failed to deliver what my husband expected of it - but I have gotten out of the habit of texting and have been in contact with many friends and family already today.

But I have found some old directions on a piece of paper shoved in the side of the door and am using the back of the page to write my thoughts and feelings. I have locked the doors but the keys are in the ignition, visible, a healthy sign. I have actually felt the heat of the sun through the windscreen although now clouds are obscuring my vision of it and the physical sensation of its warmth.

Although rural, my view is that which you’d expect from an industrial estate. Green palisade metal fencing, greying, unremarkable buildings, mown lawn, untended flower surrounds and weeds. I see telephone wires strung from pole to pole and signs affixed to old, green, plastic paint lids and attached to a fence that say, ‘No vehicles to be parked along this fence AT ANY TIME.’ There are green hills and trees with autumnal colours. Directly in front of me, a patched tarmac road, gravel driveway and vehicles; one a delivery van with bright neon chevrons on the back door and a roof rack. There’s also a car that I can only see in profile. I’d guess a Jaguar by the shape and the chrome detail.

The sun is once more shining and I can see mini rainbows in a hair that is in front of my eyes. I feel deep gratitude for the privilege of being able to be and to experience this. Some trees appear to be already dead and maybe they are. A great, big, green Scania lorry has just thundered by. The sky is blue with clouds of varying shape, colour and depth. The moon is visible too, almost half. I hear rooks or crows, not sure exactly. Sparrows flit across my line of vision. Now I hear a horse neighing and the sound of an aeroplane. I see a flock of the black birds which I haven’t identified accurately and by the time I look up from writing, they have gone.

I don’t see you here, except in the car, with me, talking and sharing this time. You would have been, as one of your friends has said, fully present. You would not have been living through the moment, waiting and hoping for an improbable rosy future. You would most certainly not have cared a jot what make or model the car was, unlike so many who hang their identities on what they drive or own. In respect of wheels, you said this not so long ago, although just recently you bought something a little more reliable:

No more land rover but I do have a 1973 camouflage green Mercedes Benz, in which we may not entice any young boys but it'll give you a brief Kaddafi-style thrill and the feeling that you really deserve your own personal cavalcade.

No one can believe that it is you that has been severed from our lives. It is the most unlikely future outcome for someone so gentle and alive. You said to me, this year, on my birthday:

Anyway, eat some scones and jam and cream and remember what my dad always says : Never begrudge yourself a birthday. The alternative is always worse!
sorry, bit macabre perhaps. Still, hope it's a good one!
lots love,

To those of us who value material possessions above life, me included sometimes too, fuck you.

For those of you, who spared my life, thank you.

I will try harder to live it, not as her, but in her vein.