As The Hound did back-flips with excitement over a visitor, Sister Mary and I shook hands.
I have a bit of a thing about handshakes – I’d rather my metacarpals were crushed in a firm confident grip than my digits held in a limp dangle: Sister M’s handshake was like grasping a fillet of raw halibut.
Sister Mary refused my offer of tea, coffee, wine, water, shortbread and Mr Kipling’s finest, so I sat down and then thought, ‘S*d it! Just because she isn’t having anything, doesn’t mean I can’t,’ so I got up and made myself a cuppa and sat down again waiting to start. But Sister Mary didn’t speak, she just smiled at me in that sad, pitying way I have come to despise, even if it’s meant kindly. And it was then that I noticed her teeth. I had never seen anyone other than Julia Roberts with so many teeth in one mouth – it was like being grinned at by a dolphin, and if you’re already feeling disorientated, being counselled by Flipper wearing a black blouse and brooch whilst sitting at your kitchen table doesn’t help.
Still Sister M didn’t speak. Decades of running business meetings has given me the irritatingly high-handed habit of taking control if others fail to, so unable to stand it any longer I said, ‘Perhaps you could tell me about your experience of bereavement?’ As she began to talk about the training courses she’d been on, I realised I hadn’t made myself clear. I clarified my question: How had bereavement touched her life?
The poor woman looked very uncomfortable: she shifted in her seat and wrung her flippers and twisted her mouth and kept saying, ‘Um . . . er . . . um’ at which point I thought I’d put her out of her misery. I told her that if she wasn’t allowed to share her personal experiences, that was fine. I hadn’t intended to put her on the spot. Finally, she said, ‘If you’re asking me if I’ve lost a partner, then no, I haven’t. But I have lost my parents.’
And at that, the glass screen came down.
I had two sessions with Sister Mary before I called it a day. I know that Cruse has proved invaluable for thousands of people, and in no way would I wish to ignore the work that they do. Like so many things, your experience is only as good as the person you’re dealing with, but for bereavement counselling, I feel strongly that counsellor and client have to connect at some level. Sister M believed (according to my internet ‘research’) that faith grows stronger if it is tested. I don’t share her belief system, but even if I did, I’d wonder why JS’s immediate family has been singled out from our wider circle to be subjected to such a brutal and searingly painful test. Not only that, I’d want to hunt God down and punch his ruddy lights out. I’m not belittling the loss of a parent, but to lose a parent when you’re ‘grown-up’ with an independent life (as it transpired Sister M had done) cannot compare to losing your partner, and I challenge anyone to argue that it does. But more importantly than our differences of experience and faith, after each session with Sister Mary I felt more depressed than I did before she arrived. I am sure she is a kind person who meant well and would be wonderful for someone with a different personality to mine, but I needed someone with energy, flair and verve, with experience of losing a husband or wife or other catastrophic life event; someone I could look at as a role model for widowhood, someone who not only talked the talk but had walked the long and painful walk. I wanted to be able to sit across from someone and see not a smile of pity and sadness, but a look of compassion and understanding. I needed someone who knows first-hand the pain I feel, yet has built a new and richly fulfilling life from the ashes of their old one.
It took a while, but eventually I found just the person I was looking for.
THE TIES THAT BIND
The ties get me: James had so many, and such lovely ones. I have tried to give some of them away to people who knew him – I don’t want some stranger who doesn’t appreciate how lovely he was wearing his ties – although I think some people were slightly freaked out by my insistence that they have a tie. I did not get many acceptances so they are still there in the wardrobe, reminding me what I have lost. ~ Linz
It’s been the most shockingly tearful start to August I’ve ever known, even worse than the time when my parents warned me in advance that I wouldn’t be getting a pony for my twelfth birthday. I’ve sobbed the length of Oxford Street, at the bus stop and on the bus; all over a poor woman walking her dog on the Heath (I bet she wished she’d never asked how I was); on the phone, and in the changing rooms at Uniqlo whilst trying (without success) to find a pair of jeans to fit my depressingly flat butt.
At just over five months, I thought the days of the Widow’s Wail had gone, but I was wrong. Along with feeling completely overwhelmed by the terrible past, my frightening present and a bleak, JS-less future, that uncontrollable guttural roar of grief and frustration returned to further knock me off my already unsteady Converse-clad feet.
On Friday lunchtime, I was in tears whilst frying some out-of-date halloumi cheese, when suddenly I couldn’t stand at the stove for a nanosecond longer. I felt incredibly restless and anxious and began pacing the kitchen crying out, ‘No! No! No!’ clenching my fists. Then – ‘WAAAAAAHHHH!’ The noise was so loud, such a lion’s roar, it sent The Hound ricocheting through his cat flap in a barking frenzy.
The Widow’s Wail is perfectly acceptable (if horrible) at home, but a bit more difficult to deal with when out and about. I remember some months ago sitting on a loo in the toilets of John Lewis in Oxford Street, weeping, when one suddenly emerged. In an attempt to get myself under some sort of control, I tensed up only to realise that I was beating my thighs with my fists whilst making squeaking noises. To those washing their hands at the sinks on the other side of the door, it must have sounded as if a chimpanzee was using the cubicle.
As if life isn’t hard enough at the moment, I’ve been having lots of problems with my BlackBerry: the touch-screen keeps freezing and the phone goes through a total reboot without warning, usually whilst I’m using it.
JS loved gadgets, and when my BlackBerry started playing up I fantasised that the unpredictable nature of the phone was due to his ‘energy’ interfering with the electronics. Then I faced up to the more mundane reality that it was a software, not a soul problem. I really should go back to the Orange shop, but I can’t face explaining my problem to some eighteen-year-old, sinewy lad called De-Wayne who oozes with street cool and wears a diamond stud in his ear, the outcome of which will undoubtedly result in me being cut off, or emails going missing, or SIM cards not being recognised and lots of frantic calls to Orange and tears, because even in the best of times, that seems to always happen to me and my moby.
As a stop-gap, I keep taking the battery out and starting again, but I’m going to have to sort it out because the phone keeps randomly ringing the first name on my contact list: a woman who I don’t want to speak to, though as she never rings me back, I suspect she doesn’t want to speak to me either. I’ve tried to delete her contact but when I press on her name there’s a delay, and instead of going to my address book it rings her, cue frantic battery action.
But on Saturday, as a break from Grief Googling, I looked up my BlackBerry problem on the internet. Just as I had no idea that there were so many grief-stricken widows and widowers out there, nor did I have any idea of the grief a frozen BlackBerry Torch screen can cause those who are addicted to their CrackBerries. It seemed that I could do some sort of re-install via my computer, IF I had the right lead. I have lots of leads – they lie entwined like a basket of snakes snoozing in the sun – but of course none of them were the right lead, so I went hunting for other places the lead might be lurking. I became quite manic on the lead-hunt, convinced that if I didn’t do the back-up and re-install within the next few minutes my BlackBerry was going to die along with all my contacts, texts and random photos of The Hound looking cute. So determined was I to find this wretched lead, I rushed into the spare bedroom, opened a cupboard door, and then I saw them . . .
Ties.
Beautiful, shimmering silk ties.
Row upon row of them hanging on tie racks.
Though a quietly understated man in most areas of his life, JS did like a statement tie and