Received an update this morning from our lovely solicitor. I opened the first attachment, read the opening lines and felt the excruciatingly intense pain that comes with reading the incomprehensible. The enraging. The beyond saddening. Emotions kind of familiar now but still (thankfully?) alien. So beyond any understanding. So beyond any rules, norms, expectations of what is. And what should be. Everything we’ve been brought up to believe. To understand. Smashed beyond recognition.

I closed the document. Went for a work lunch (a work lunch, not a lunch jolly). Got back to the office. Did some more work. Felt intensely distracted. Re-opened the email/attachments and read more. Felt sick. Read some more. Did some more work. Printed off the documents. Failed to print them all. Did some more work. Slowly. Laboriously. Eventually gave up, left work and caught the bus home. [Having a flexible workplace is an essential component to even beginning to deal with this horror. Rich and I completely appreciate this on a daily basis].

I dug out the documents and started to read some more. The young woman next to me was on her phone. Her one way conversation punctuated the words I was trying (not to) focus on. The contrast between her Christmas arrangements – a bumper pack of Trill sprinkled over a cast of cheerful and feisty family members – and what LB experienced in the unit was impossible to reconcile. I bundled the papers back in my bag.

All the while, the new details bouncing around my brain. A refreshed form of torture. Almost impossible to engage with. But at the same time impossible to avoid. Any mother’s worse nightmare.

Rich met me off the bus and we went to the supermarket. I filled him in briefly while we shopped. He cried in the freezer aisle. Among the Christmas bustle. Among the fish fingers, oven chips and Birds Eye peas.

I can’t write publicly about these latest details. As I can’t write about the details we already knew. I can write about them though. And that’s what I’m doing.

I want to scream them from the rooftops. I want to shake the necks of the various people/organisations who were complicit in what happened to LB. And there’s quite a list.

How could you? How could you?

And I feel horror and despair that so many dudes like LB (though not necessarily quite as hilarious/artistic/eccentric and downright fucking brilliant as him, of course, cough cough) are more than likely experiencing such hideous treatment and non or anti-care.

What a fucking mess.