The slowness of my wits these days is quite shocking. I've been driving myself insane over getting Elder Daughter down to the coast, when the solution wass there all the time. Son in Law has been evasive whenever I've invited him down or suggested he bring her down until he finally said this week that he didn't have anyone to sit in the back of the van with her, which is a valid reason. The journey is almost all on busy motorways with nowhere to stop apart from the hard shoulder if she gets distressed, and he's right, that's not a situation I'd want her subjected to. I've been fucked, because all I could think was that I didn't have it in me to drive there and back twice in one day, nor could I even contemplate staying at SIL's when there was just me and him. But I don't have to do all the driving. YD will fetch her on Saturday morning, with her husband, the SIL I like, and Bloke and I can take her back in the afternoon.

Honestly, this has been preying on my mind for months. When ED was still talking, whenever I asked her where she'd like to go she always said 'the beach', and all we can give her now are sensory experiences to enrich her existence a bit. So we want wind (for once) and waves crashing, seagulls squawking, a salty tang in the air, that kind of thing. Then back here, to just be in our home, with the cat yowling and jumping to sit on her lap.

I met some friends at that funeral last week, a couple I hadn't seen for about fifteen years. Their son, the same age as my son, was killed in a car crash five years ago, and seeing his mother's raw face I truly felt for the first time how lucky I am to still have ED, but it didn't last long and now it's back to normal and it's all I can do not to howl like a dog, day and night, night and day, with the awfulness of losing her, of her losing her life like this, of creeping inexorably towards her being gone.

That's all, really.