On 27th February, I had no idea what was in store for me. Six months later, these are just some of the things that I have discovered: That I can be blotchy-faced, red-eyed, gaunt and with zits so large they need their own postcode, yet people will still proclaim, ‘You’re looking really well!’
That I have just enough self-restraint not to punch someone straight in the mouth when they trill, ‘You’ll find someone else and build a new life,’ but not if they add the word ‘soon’ to that sentence.
That I still don’t believe people – even other widows or widowers – who tell me that one day I’ll feel happy again, not unless it’s drug-induced, straightjacket-wearing, manic happy.
That God doesn’t make bargains with people who plead: ‘Please let me die in the night and let someone who wants to live survive.’
That it’s easy to forget that I’ve put soup on the stove or started to run a bath, but impossible to dim the memory of my husband walking away from me into the sea.
That a dog is truly man’s best friend.
That Arsenal losing is even more dismal without someone special to discuss it with.
That finding my purse in the fridge and a can of dog food in my bag is perplexing, but as old walnut face sings, it’s not unusual.
That people who know where and how JS died will still say, ‘Perhaps going on holiday would do you good?’
That even if every fibre of my being wishes that I could spontaneously combust in Tesco, I never end up a pile of ashes in the chilled meal aisle, just a wreck of a woman clutching a chicken-korma-and-rice meal for one.
That so many of the jobs around the house that JS did and I worried about can be fixed by putting an advert on mybuilder.com – in exchange for a heart-stopping bill.
That strangers can be unbelievably kind.
That friends can be breathtakingly crass.
That strangers can become friends.
That widows can be incredibly competitive.
That it really wasn’t necessary to get the roof fixed, the windows cleaned, the Virgin engineer round, a woman to tidy the house and invite a friend for tea, all on the same day so soon after the funeral.
That when I sobbed as a teenager to Janis Ian’s ‘At Seventeen’, I would be sobbing to it at 47, but feeling a million times lonelier than I did back then.
That you can’t get away from watery metaphors about death and grieving: waves of emotion; tidal wave of grief; all at sea; drowning in a sea of grief; pulled under, etc. etc. etc, but that it can be quite amusing to see the horrified face of someone who realises they’ve just said, ‘I suppose you’ve either got to sink or swim at a time like this.’
That when Catherine Deneuve said after the age of 40 a woman must choose between her face or her figure, she had a choice. The Grim Reaper has taken that choice away from me.
How to change halogen lightbulbs.
That my cunning plan of committing a crime and being locked up in prison so that I could run away from my responsibilities, failed to take into account that I found the violence and sex scenes on ITV’s Bad Girls unsettling, or that MacBooks are banned in cells.
That 98% of my wardrobe either no longer fits or feels appropriate for my new life.
Just how much paperwork is involved when someone dies.
That often after laughing, I burst into tears, but rarely do I laugh after crying.
That QVC makes excellent wallpaper TV.
That playing Kamikaze Pedestrian doesn’t kill you, it just pisses off cyclists who have to swerve to avoid you.
That call centres in India are the invention of the devil.
That cooking for one is only fun if you know that you won’t be doing it night after lonely night.
The price of gas and electricity.
That when I go out I want to come home.
That when I’m home I want to go out.
That when friends are round, sometimes I want them to leave.
That when they leave, I want them to come back.
That I still can’t look at recent photographs of JS without feeling my heart is being ripped out without an anaesthetic.
That drinking alone isn’t sad, it’s vital.
That I don’t have as many true friends as I thought I had, but the ones I have I can never thank enough for their love and loyalty.
That if I meet someone in the street who looks like they have constipation, it’s almost certainly caused by their embarrassment at bumping in to me.
That I know JS would want me to be happy again, I just don’t know how to go about it.
That the number of condolence cards and offers of help bears no relation to the number of people still around now.
That if there are too many messages on the answerphone I feel hassled, but if there are none, I feel abandoned.
That life without my husband is hard, but it would be so much harder without the internet and the wonderful men and women I have met through it.
That looking at the photograph of The Hound sitting in my suitcase the night before we left for Barbados, still makes me unbelievably sad.
That I still can’t bear to unpack either of our suitcases.
That life goes on, and that orphan Annie was right when she screeched that the sun will still come out tomorrow, but the sun shines less brightly even on those days when it does shine, and I’m scared my life will always be this dark and cold.
But most of all, at this six-month mark, that I love and miss my husband, the man who thought I looked better in a bikini than a blonde, professional swimwear model.
HOWLING AND HOUNDS
Oh my god, I remember the wailing, the body shaking, the face pulling, the noise. I said to a fellow widow friend, ‘I seem to have developed this ridiculous cry’ and she said, ‘Yes, me too.’ ~ Sue Smith
I was going to write about ‘Courage’ today. I knew exactly what I wanted to write, and I’m a super speedy typist so it wouldn’t have taken long, but, annoyingly, work got in the way. So, instead of sitting at my iMac fiddling about on Facebook, sending or replying to emails or writing a post for my blog, I’ve had to buckle down and do some ‘professional’ writing. It wasn’t a great deal of prose, just a letter to go in the front of my next book and some answers to questions that the marketing department want to include in the back, but as I’ve been majorly ‘Bleurgh!’ since my birthday, I’ve either been putting it off or genuinely forgetting to do it. But yesterday, The Grammar Gestapo sent me one of her ‘I don’t want to chase you but . . .’ emails, which means that she doesn’t want to chase me, but she has to. So this morning, I buckled down to the task.
Mornings aren’t good for me. Actually, neither are evenings, afternoons, lunchtimes or bedtimes. There is a reasonable two-minute period when I come back from taking The Hound for a walk and put the kettle on, but I wouldn’t get much done in two minutes, especially as I am an expert at tidying my desk, polishing the monitor screen, shaking crumbs from the keyboard, adjusting the blinds and so on before putting words on the screen, at which point I’m off like a ferret down a trouser leg, my fingers a mere blur over the keys. But starting anything new is always difficult, which is perhaps just one of the reasons why I find the start of a new day so difficult. Or it may be entirely down to the fact that my husband died.
Whatever