Burning houses - past and present

God, I've literally just watched the house opposite ours burn out! I was mucking around in the bathroom and kept hearing sounds of breaking glass. My stupid thought was that we must have missed the recycling day - again! But when I looked out of the living room window, there was black smoke billowing out of the first floor window of a house a terrace below ours! What I'd heard were the windows exploding! I almost went into shock. This seems ridiculous, there was no danger to our house and I'd seen lots of fires before on TV, but this just sent my mind spinning. God, what do I do, do I call the fire brigade? Yes, of course that's what you do. Is 999 the right number for that??? I kept thinking 112, 112, but that's flipping Germany - I've not even lived there for 16 years!!! So I grabbed the phone and dialled 999, forgot to say what town I was in until prompted and when I put the phone down the sirens where already sounding anyway. I couldn't help but keep watching, my heart beating fast, as the smoke billowed and squeezed itself through every gap in the tiled roof. The fire started to eat a hole through the roof, threatening to spread down the terrace to the houses on either side. Not much later and I saw the first fireman on the groundfloor. I was relieved, this was going to be ok now. Perhaps 10 minutes and it was all under control. However, in those few minutes the first floor of the house had been almost completely burnt out and next door's curtains looked half gone - the fire had made it across after all.

I couldn't get over how shocked I felt and of course, as they always do, my meaning-making faculties set in. Given that I was writing about loss yesterday, this is the kind of random event that can put things into perspective.

Not so crazy after all - the cycle of grief

Psychology is everywhere now, we are all busy throwing around a lot of psycho-babble (as my husband would say), but often when it comes to our own stuff we're a bit blind. As I was writing yesterday, I couldn't help see the parallel between my strange poker attachment and someone hanging on to a dead person's things. This brought to my mind a model called the "cycle of grief". It was developed by Elizabeth Kuebler-Ross from her work with dying people and their relatives. Since then, we've understood that it is actually much more widely applicable to situations of loss and change. I'm not going to write and essay on it here, but it suffices to say that in her model grief comes in different stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It's pretty widely known these days - hell, it even featured in one of Grey's Anatomy's little verbal preambles. It is also a somewhat contested model in that we are all unique and we are not going to fit neatly into those stages like a programmed automaton. One of the things that many people going through grief will tell you about is the "rollercoaster" experience of flipping through different emotional states, at times going round and round and round. If all goes well, each agonising cycle may bring you a little closer to that place of acceptance.

Crazy behaviour

Have you ever watched yourself do things and thought "I can see what you're doing, but this looks a little crazy to me", whilst at the same time feeling compelled to carry on? I guess you must have, most of us must do at some point. So why do we carry on? Surely we could stop if we really wanted to. Yes, I think we always have that choice. I also think we don't because carrying on feels like the only thing that makes life bearable at that moment.

So what am I doing that's so crazy? I'm getting into Poker. Ah, gambling addiction, you may think! Actually no, I'm not even playing for real money.