Today has been a migraine day. One of those days when I wake up with a crashing headache and what feels like morning sickness. Vision is fuzzy, ‘things’ flit about in front of my eyes, and my head feels as if somebody is pounding my skull, just over the left eye with a mallet, possibly to find out if my head really is stuffed with old newspaper, or Kapok.
Migraine sufferers will know what I mean.
The only thing to do is to take one of mother’s special pills and go back to bed. Not to sleep—sleep is impossible with the disjointed images, snatches of music, conversation, passages from the book I was reading the night before—simply because I am of no earthly use to anyone in an upright, or even seated position.
The worst aspect of a migraine for me is the nightmarish world it pitches me into. Everything seems hopeless, ‘change and decay in all around I see’. I find myself unable to stop the thoughts of suffering, held at bay when I am absorbed in work, that surface when my defences crumble. The images that flood the internet, rapidly glossed over with a grimace, are still there, recorded on the retina, tidied away, until the physical pain and the scattering of mental resistance lets them out.
Tomorrow the pill will have worked and the pictures will have gone back in their box. But the box is still there, and what it hides is the awful reality for all the helpless victim of man’s violence and unthinking cruelty.
Today an anniversary service was held in Toulouse for the children and the young father who were murdered, shot dead at their school by a stupid, deluded, ignorant young man with a chip on his shoulder. He was shot too, the angel of death, and frankly, who cares? He doesn’t have to see the eyes of the woman whose husband and two young children were butchered, so casually, random victims because one Jew is a good as another. Their lives have been snuffed out, but the mother is left, and the murderer does not have to see the emptiness in her eyes. We see them though, the eyes of all the victims of violence, looking into the camera with a depth of suffering most of us will never know.
Tomorrow the pill will have worked, but today, with no defences, the eyes watch me and all I can do is weep.
Jane Dougherty Writes 