Backward Travelling 

By a loving, Bereft father

For about six months since our darling son passed my trauma was dominated by a single flashback. A single thirty seconds in time that kept its grip around my throat and my mind. When it swept into my day or night I felt strangled gasping for air and had this enforced inability to think outside those thirty seconds that our Son peered into my eyes with that forlorn look.

I was receiving so much support, as too was my wife and our Son’s brother, from our Grief Counsellor, our Son’s friends and our own friends. Whilst most of these support people had never experienced our loss, their empathy was overwhelming, their friendship genuine.

Having related the flashback to my Grief Counsellor their advice was to do a timeline in reverse up until the time of that single flashback moment in time. Every time I sat down to pick up the pen, open the page and write, I froze. The memory of that thin time slice would grab at me again and again…

...until one day the spell decided to break itself. I had no flashbacks for almost three weeks. My writing class leader had given us a writing prompt that same week…Start your story with an ending and work backward toward the beginning..

I sat down....didn’t need a pen or paper…my story flowed like a mountain stream would as it widened to a creek at the foot of the tor, and then to a river…finally the story reached its delta and here is my offering.

Backward Travelling - The Chasm and the Niche