Sunday

We went to see Bink on Thursday.

On our way back from Norfolk, we went via Cambridge to have lunch with the very kind people who have taken her in.

She didn’t make it. Downstairs from her room. Or even into the daylight of being awake. So we all sat downstairs having lunch without her.

Her hostess said Bink panicked during the ten days they were away, terrifying herself with thoughts that they might change their minds while they were away, ask her to leave on their return. It has happened so many times before: friends very kindly take Bink in... and then break, or realise they will. She really has not been easy to live with for the last few years.

It will not happen here, her hostess said.

And I believe her. Not, actually, primarily because she is so obviously such an intelligent and reliable – and gentle and kind – person: Bink has had all this many times before.

But because of the change in Bink. Which is a much better reason, isn’t it?

The change that she is off Lorazepam.

What a momentous statement that is!

How can it be legal, that stuff? How can it be, when it wrecked her mind and her life so comprehensively, and took several years and four and a half months in The Priory to be free of it?

I think, Shaun said after we got home, Bink is going to be all right.

Of course, it all depends what “all right” means.

Incapacitated for life, but at least alive, and living on benefits?

Or dare we hope for more?

I think, her hostess said in that gentle way of hers, it’s not helpful to think in terms of well and ill.

Bink hates it when I do that, I admitted.

Well, she does it a lot herself.

Probably my fault then.

I have been hugely helped by reading this blog written by our friend Alison Whale, about living with ME. So much talent, so squandered by such a devastating illness.

So much worse an affliction than Bink’s, in so many ways. Why does God allow it?

So, yet again, I fall back on the exercise of measuring the drops that are in the glass:

She is so much better off than a year ago.

And that was very much better than a few years ago.

And it is springtime.

(Ten years ago, twenty, I raged and wept about Alex. So much of his life, his energy, his many talents squandered trying to explain himself to – and understand – a world with no time for Asperger’s syndrome.

Last week we went to enjoy him singing a solo in a concert with a choir from the firm he loves working for.

It can come good. It really can.)

Rose and Serena – and the big Viking, and the little – at home for the next week. Bink invited.

I am praying she comes home for Easter but not expecting it.

Give her a month, her hostess said, to recover from her panic. Then we might start doing a few things again.