Numbers are symbols we use to measure by, and beyond summing the fingers or toes on one hand or foot, I had never really attributed special significance to the number five.
A mathematician might smile knowing that numbers have more to reveal than the rest of us are able to acknowledge. A quick view of Wikipedia, the modern oracle, will reveal rational and irrational numbers, prime, negative, complex even hypercomplex numbers, mythical numbers, transcendental and figurative, the special qualities of numbers start to look innumerable. Five is an integer, a prime and a Fibonacci number. Five is a Pell, Markov, Perrin and a Sierpinski number. I read that five is conjectured to be the only odd untouchable number.

Gimme five…

Apparently five is an interesting number. There are five oceans, we have five senses, and in traditional Japanese society there are five virtues. I’m also compelled to mention Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. My overriding interest in five is the five stages of grieving that came out of Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross ground-breaking work with dying people. The Five Stages of Grief are regarded as common knowledge and assumed by many to be universally applicable to anyone suffering bereavement.

Having reflected on the stages of grief I went through, after suffering the traumatic loss Mottsu through suicide, I feel that my experience has a little in common with the five stages of grieving based on Dr Kubler-Ross’ published works. I appreciate that her intent and the full wealth of her experiences with the dying and grieving are not readily summarised. The stages of bereavement must not be easy to generalise about and my experience was a little different, like the rest of you I like to think of myself as somewhat unique.

Grief is as personal as other emotions we experience and I’m documenting my journey to share in this blog. I can’t help myself, I was never any good at keeping secrets or being particularly discrete. My grieving was such a roller coaster of experiences all delivered in living technicolour and dolby surround sound, that sometimes my only refuge from the full-screen experience was to journal episodes. I could always write myself back to sanity by recording the madness of the rest of the world (if not myself) through it all.

Maybe it is true that there is strength in numbers. I will summarise my own five stages of experience in subsequent entries.