About

In late 2016 life as I knew it began to fall apart.

I was enduring a painful recovery following abdominal surgery when we got the news that my father had died following along battle with prostate cancer. The news hit me harder than I thought it would, I knew it was coming but it still felt like a shock.

Two days after I returned from his funeral, I found out that my partner of 5 years had been unfaithful whilst I was in surgery a month earlier. 3 days later mum was admitted to hospital as her heart was failing and we were told that her cancer was back and more aggressive than before.

I didn’t have time to process, it was all hands on deck, focus on mum. The following months mum suffered a stroke, two heart surgeries, lung surgery and the gruelling chemotherapy.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, my sister/best friend was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer, a huge blow as her husband was also a stage 3 cancer patient.

Still I pushed on, I didn’t have time to focus on the emotions, process what all of this meant. I had just lost my father, I couldn’t fathom losing my mum and sister as well.

As the months went by, I watched the people I loved and cared about the most in the world, fade into shells of who they had once been.

I was facing my own health battles, I had not recovered from surgery, I was unable to keep food down and had lost 1.5 stones, now weighing just under 7 stone. I was suffering from malnutrition and enduring my own challenges as I also was being tested for cancer.

After 5 months of constant worry and panic, “would mum make it through the night”, mum died a very slow and painful death a few weeks before Christmas. The walls so desperately wanted to come crashing down around me, but I couldn’t break, I had my sister to think about, her husband, their children.

Simultaneously my relationship went from bad to worse. My partner couldn’t handle emotions very well, so me crying wasn’t an option, as his way of dealing with it would be to ignore me for days. So I continued to hold it all in, but felt more and more alone as time went on.

3 months after mums death, as my focus had turned to my sister, my relationship took a turn for the worse. The man I had loved, cared for and stood by for 5 years became physically abusive. I was forced to flea my home, pack up everything I had and find temporary accommodation.

Still I had to press on, I simply didn’t have time to focus on anything else. I had tasted grief, I knew what was coming.

2 months later my sister died, even then I didn’t have the space to process, my focus was on the children. Then just as I dared think things couldn’t get any worse, her husband dies the day before my sisters funeral, so now its a rush to plan a double funeral.

After a full year of diagnosis, suffering death, over and over and over again I finally broke. The gravity of everything that had happened finally hit home. I was a shell, I didn’t know who I was anymore.

Up until this point in my life, whilst I had faced a multitude of challenges like we all have, the 18th months of ‘hell’ as I have often referred to it, broke me in every way. My foundation was gone, my confidence broken, my joy for life dissipated. The tools I had used in the past of ‘coping’ didn’t serve me, they were hurting me.

I was holding in all the emotions, I couldn’t verbalise what I was feeling. To everyone around me “I was fine”, but I was as far from fine as you could be. I couldn’t change the habits of a life time.

keeping my emotions to myself,
being ’strong’
silently enduring

I was suffocating, I needed an outlet, a way out.

As I searched for tools to help, counselling, self help books I struggled to find the answers I so desperately needed. There were a million self helps on how to deal with a break up, how to deal with the loss of a parent, how to deal with the loss of a sibling, but there was nothing on how to deal with the loss of all at the same time.

I needed a way out, I had to find it for myself, a place where I could be 100% me, express myself warts and all.

I had always sang when I was younger, but stopped almost a decade ago, as I cried out in my flat where no one could hear me, I heard my sister in my heart saying, sing it, sing until you have nothing left.

So I as I sat in my living room, I sang, the songs that had such meaning to me, songs I had listened to over and over again, songs that became my mantra. As I sang, it opened up the flood gates, I put all the pain, the cries into the songs. As I sang, the words came, I could sit down and write.

As I spoke to a friend and shared what I had been doing, she convinced me to share with people, I couldn’t be the only one going though this.

I live in a world of social media, everyone’s lives looking perfect, full of happiness, we don’t tend to share the tough times. Maybe in writing in sharing my journey of rediscovering myself, of trying to heal I could help someone else. Remembering that’s its ok to cry.

So here I am, baring my all as I navigate the road back to recovery, share the lessons I have learnt and co to us to learn.

I AM CHRISTYNETTE
THIS IS MY JOURNEY, MY TRUTH.