Letting go

Today, when I was getting my coat from the rack to go on my daily exercise, I noticed that my husband’s leather jacket is still hanging in the hallway. Some of his shoes are also in the shoe rack. Most of his clothes have gone, to charity shops, homeless shelters. So why am I hanging onto the leather jacket – it’s not one I particularly liked, although he loved it?  Then there’s the two pairs of jeans, shorts, some shirts, all at the bottom of a basket I keep upstairs  After all, I know he’s not coming back.

Maybe it’s for the same reason that I still have my mum’s jacket hanging in our hall cupboard 13 years after she died.  Getting rid of the very last things a person owned seems hardest of all.  As though saying goodbye to those last remnants will somehow make it real. As if it wasn’t real enough already. 

But I also wonder if it’s more than that. It’s as though by letting go of the last of their things I’m letting go of them.  As though I’m ‘getting rid’ of them from my life, pushing them out of it, so that I can go on living, rebuilding unencumbered. 

And then, maybe, there’s a sense that the last jacket hanging in the hall or the summer shorts folded neatly in the basket upstairs represent the last vestiges of normal life before this terrible thing happened. That’s what we really seek in this time of bereavement, our normal, pre-bereavement life.

What’s slowly dawning on me — and forgive me as I’m sure you’ve all got there miles before me — is that when we get out of this global pandemic  what I had begun to regard as my new normal isn’t going to be any kind of normal at all.  The baby steps I had taken will have to be retraced.  All the plans I’d made for this year, which have now been cancelled, can’t just be rebooked exactly as they were before.  I can’t pick up where I left off.  Too much has changed.  Not only for me, but for everyone. 

So maybe it’s actually a good thing my husband’s jacket still hangs in the hallway? The one stable, anchoring thing in the tsunami that’s currently my life.

My lovely thing for May

In this time many people are realising that it’s the simple things that deserve most focus, because in general, they’re the things that make us happiest.  As I look across this month, with its mix of highs and lows, one thing really stands out and it’s the afternoon of the VE day bank holiday when my daughters and I made a lasagne!  We shared out all the various stages of the preparation and cooking, chatted and drank some wine while it was cooking, and then we all sat down in the early evening to enjoy eating it together.  It was enormous fun, and we chatted and laughed long into the evening.  It was a glorious, glorious day and a memory I’ll cherish.