New year, new start

I have not blogged for a long time on my personal blog.  2018 was a truly awful year for me, in which my estranged husband had a stroke and needed help, my mother fell ill and needed nursing and then died at the end of June, and my partner Eelco died at the end of November.  I wrote an obituary for him on my Caliandris Pendragon blog here.

It feels like I was never able to take the time to adjust to the previous shock before another came along.  The death of Eelco so suddenly and so young (he was 47) was so shocking I barely felt it for about a month, emotionally.  I've heard people say that they were numb after a death before; I never really knew what it meant.  I do now.

The impact of his death has come in the last couple of weeks, and I have begun to miss him dreadfully.  Although we spent a lot of time apart, I talked to him in the mornings, we texted during the day and then talked all evening, and so I probably spent more time "with" him than a lot of people who live together.  

Speaking to someone recently, I realized that I was thinking of my future as one enormous blank, because all my plans had involved him.  We planned to live together permanently once he was able to.  His father has been seriously ill for a long time, and had deteriorated recently, and so Eelco had been helping his parents at weekends, and was unable to visit and stay with me as often. 

It dawned on me during that conversation that I needed to sort out my future for myself, and not wait for the universe to sort it out for me.  I have allowed my blogs to fester for about a year, since I wasn't able to blog while looking after my husband (we'd been separated since 2010) and then my mother.  Since her death I hadn't really felt like it, and since Eelco's I haven't really felt like doing anything at all.  

I've had a cold the last couple of days and so I've been watching a lot of Netflix.  So I thought I'd start my reblogging with a couple of reviews of the shows I've been watching.