What do you do when someone you love goes to prison? Those enormous feelings of helplessness, desperation, overwhelm are all consuming, ravenous in their appetite to devour the very breath out of your soul.

I got a call the other night, completely out of the blue. The caller greeted me kindly, gently and caringly asking how I was. It’s my birthday soon, you see, so I thought perhaps they’d got the date wrong and were very sweetly calling to wish me a happy birthday. What they said next pulled the rug out from under my feet. I literally had to sit down and try to breathe, try to find my thoughts, my vision again.

I think in those few moments, one of my worst nightmares came true. It was as though I’d woken up in the middle of a horrible dream, one where I was trying to run but couldn’t propel my body forward. There was no real movement, no escaping the monster chomping at the back of my heels.

A few years ago, a friend’s close relative was murdered in his home. His death was the result of a vicious crime by somebody he was close to, someone he knew and trusted. I helped my friend’s family in their recovery process, identifying their loved-one’s body, cleaning and packing up his apartment and then walking alongside them on the relentlessly long road of grief. I watched their journey with the constant “what if” thoughts in the back of my mind – what if MY nightmares come true, what if something awful like this happens to one of MY family members, what if I have to face an unthinkable reality?

I’m so thankful that this is not a death, not a gruesome end to my loved one’s life. There is always hope, always opportunity to recover and rebuild. But the reality is that it’s an enormous new learning curve for us all. For me, simple questions like, how do I contact them, how do I communicate with them, what does their new reality look like? All the things taken for granted in our lives are now no longer a part of their daily experience – supper at 5pm, locked in your cell for the night at 6pm and the doors not opened again until 8am the next day. No checking Facebook quickly, no reading the internet, making a phone call, earning a living, popping down to the shops or walking the dog to the park.

In a breath, life as it’s always been known has changed and I’ve found that once again, I’m called upon to reassess priorities. Once again, I need to re-set my focus and perspective. There are so many “what if’s” still hanging around, but at least there’s one less that can no longer be weighed down by a feared nightmare. That nightmare has become a reality and now I need to face up to it, eyeball to eyeball. This time though, I know the movement in my legs will in fact push me forward and give me momentum, unlike the legs I owned in my bad dream.