Abrielle

Meeting Dr Armstrong

Acknowledgements;

Many thanks firstly to my sister, Georgina and my friend, Curtis for their wisdom and patience in guiding me through the process and for the encouragement to write this story- a story I wanted to tell..

Diary of Ed Stonely, submitted in evidence at the Coroner's Inquest, 15th May 1993

My doctor (I refuse to call him 'my shrink', although that's what he is. It seems like an admission of madness.) has said that the dreams might stop altogether if I write everything down. It would be, he suggested, a kind of purging. It would clear my system of what he calls 'unresolved guilts' I felt a fool consulting him in the first place, but my dreams were becoming so dreadful that I was deliberately keeping myself awake for as long as I could every night. This meant that I was irritable and moody at school, tearing strips off both pupils and colleagues for no good reason. I was also horrible at home, to my wife Annie, whom I love more than anything except my little daughter, Beth. I had not yet reached the point of taking my moods out on a four year old, but I can't have been the pleasantest dad in the world. The worst of it was, however hard I tried to stay awake, my eyelids closed in the end. They always did, every night, and every night, there she was: Abrielle. 'Start at the beginning,' Dr Armstrong said when I made some remark about not knowing where to begin. 'Don't leave anything out. Go on to the end of what you have to say and then stop. Write it as a kind of diary, whenever you feel you have something to say.' He made it sound so easy. Here goes:

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