I’m the first to admit that this approach is not for everyone. I’ve been very scathing about the counsellors that I have met, but the key, I think, is to keep searching until you find someone you feel fits your grief, and grief, like counsellors, is not a ‘one size fits all’ emotion. Some people don’t need or don’t want counselling, or get it on a more informal basis through family and friends, and if that works for them, good. Some people want to spend an hour a week rehashing the past and sobbing, and if they come away feeling better, then great! Traditional counselling didn’t work for me, because the reason I was falling apart wasn’t because my mother threatened to give my prized patent-leather shoes to poor children unless I behaved (Doktor R’s ‘Tell me about your childhood’ approach), just as it wasn’t the reason I was bolting from the queue in M&S with panic long before JS died (Beardy-Weirdy and Flaky Face). The reason I am in despair is because I have watched my husband drown.
But just as there are different counsellors for different people, perhaps we need different counsellors for different stages of our grief. I was so shocked and traumatised in those early weeks, perhaps I needed to just cry and shred tissues as I did with Doktor R. I became so angry about the hand that life had dealt me, I’d have sneered with contempt at anyone who sat at my kitchen table and trotted out stock sympathy phrases whilst cocking their head, not just the strange woman in black from Cruse. I hope there will soon come a time when I won’t need Shelley to give me my tasks for the week, at which point I’m sure she will be delighted that I feel strong enough to set out on my own.
The Chakra woman? She was just bonkers.
PILLOW TALK
Many, many nights I picked myself off the floor, having flashbacks, and made pie, because I had to do something. I couldn’t eat it, and never wanted to, but I had to do something. ~ Megan Devine
As summer comes to an end, I’m looking for ways to make things better in the bedroom.
I’m not talking about strange internet sites, late-night, subscription-only TV channels or the address of Fettered Pleasures, which I already know, because JS and I used to sit in a traffic jam outside the shop twice a day and giggle at the window displays which altered each season. One highlight was a spring tableau featuring a woman dressed as a bee cavorting amongst daffodils, a scene that brought a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘Sting in the tail’.
But as usual, I digress.
No, I’m talking about the thing in the bedroom that I long for, don’t get enough of, think about for much of the day and hope will happen spontaneously once I get to bed, leaving me feeling refreshed and relaxed.
Sleep.
In the first few months after the funeral, although it often took me until the early hours of the morning to nod off, with the help of American over-the-counter sleeping tablets procured from a friend, I did sleep and I slept in. Even if I didn’t get to sleep until three in the morning, dozing until nine or ten still gave me a good run of zzzzs. I used to read posts on grief forums about sleep-deprived widows and seriously wonder if I could have loved JS as much as these insomniacs loved their partners, guilty that whilst they were tossing and turning, watching the hours tick by until dawn, I was out like a baby stuffed full of Calpol.
It’s now September and, oh, how things have changed.
I am now one of those widows I used to read about, awake at all hours, unable to get to sleep or stay asleep. I’ve tried hot baths with smelly oils, herbal sleeping tablets, which didn’t work, and the once ‘magic’ American sleeping tablets now make me feel drunk in the morning. I bought an electric blanket to try and make the bed more inviting, but lying with wires down the side and a controller on the bedside table reminded me of a hospital bed. I flirted with Horlicks, but sitting in my ‘hospital’ bed under the electric blanket in my Snoopy nightie, drinking Horlicks with The Hound by my side, on his back with his plums in the air, I felt ready to be carted off to the sort of nursing home where the telly is too loud and everywhere smells of wee. So I stay up and look at strange internet sites and late-night TV channels, but these are grief forums and QVC, and I’m so exhausted that even if Alastair Campbell appeared at the end of my bed swinging a bag from Fettered Pleasures with a come hither look in his eyes, I’d be too weary to pour myself into a bee outfit, and anyway, I’d be worried the electric blanket would melt the PVC.
I do listen to the radio, but even that is fraught with danger. A piece on camping which seemed totally safe listening (the only tent I’ll go into is one serving Pimms) had me tearfully reminiscing about a cottage in Northumberland we stayed in, right next to a camping site. A phone-in on what makes a long and happy marriage resulted in me shouting into the dark, ‘Not dying helps!’ As to the phone-in on widowhood, it was grimly fascinating listening to the Welsh fireman who coped by sleeping with every available female; I presume his uniform was the pull – it certainly wasn’t his personality. Marieke, a widow I know, rang in and came over brilliantly, but then straight after her, the radio host said, ‘And now we have a caller from Barbados . . .’ Even The Hound looked sorry for me when I sighed, ‘Can someone, please, just give me a break?’
I try to read, but I can’t finish a book. Magazines seem to be full of articles featuring smug marrieds and advice about improving your sex life, or recipes that feed two or four or six.
And when I finally fall asleep, night after night there are the dreams; terrible, anxious dreams where I am desperately searching for JS. I’m in a taxi with him, but when the car stops, he’s disappeared and the taxi driver denies all knowledge of a second passenger. I go to our office and a strange man screams that there is no one there by the name of John Sinfield and demands I leave. When I finally get through to JS’s mobile, someone else answers and says he’s never heard of my husband. I plead with him not to put the phone down, to try and remember how and where he got it from. Then, at the weekend, the dreams took a new turn: JS had run off with someone else, left me for another woman. My bereavement coach, Shelley, says this is good, that I am processing JS’s death on every level. I tell her that I am exhausted.
The thing is, I’ll be upfront and say that for the last six months of our 22 years together, JS and I had started to have a problem in the bedroom.
He’d begun to snore.
He’d always snored after a late-night curry and a few too many drinks and that was fine – a dig in the ribs would have him snorting and turning over – but the combination of carrying a bit of extra weight and a few winter colds had recently taken their toll on his nasal passages and my sleep. What I could never understand is why he could hear me growling, ‘Stop snoring,’ but he couldn’t hear himself snore. My complaints in the morning were met with protestations that he couldn’t possibly be as loud as I made out.
So, I formulated a cunning plan. Next time he snored so badly that it was like lying next to a truffle pig with bronchitis, I was going to use my mobile phone to record his snoring and then play it back the following morning to prove how loud it was.
I didn’t have to wait long.
The snoring started.
In the dark, I tried to get the record feature on my BlackBerry to work, but instead managed to load just about every app except the media feature. Eventually, I thought I’d found it, so, leaning over, I held the phone by his face, pressed the button and turned on the flashlight, right into his eyes, causing him to wake with a start, The Hound to jump up and bark, and me having to explain why I was holding my phone over my husband’s head in the middle of the night. JS loved my eccentricities, but that night and with an early morning meeting on the cards for him, there was a strong possibility that I could have ended up a divorcee rather than a widow.
But now, as I lie in the dark, I would give anything to hear my husband snore again. If he came back and still snored, after a while it would probably still annoy me, and I can’t pretend I wouldn’t dig him in the ribs or try