Apologies for not writing on this blog for a while, but I’ve been focussed on writing my first novel, and the great news is that it’s now available on Kindle! (Paperback version should follow in the next couple of weeks.) It’s called Friends for Life and is about three women who meet after their husbands die, and who try to help each other face a very uncertain future in the face not just of bereavement but family conflict, insensitivity and some shocking secrets. Readers of this blog will find a few of the topics I’ve covered here are also in the book, which obviously has some sad moments, but is also funny and heartwarming – just right for a winter weekend read. It’s just 99p on Kindle and here’s the link to find out more and to buy your copy. I hope you enjoy it – thanks to all of you for all your support.
Out of the picture
Isn’t it interesting the way each of us deals with grief in sometimes polarising ways. A relative, whose husband died several years ago in circumstances very similar to mine, filled her living room with pictures of him, including one taken on their last holiday together. She says she found comfort from being surrounded by all those happy smiling images. I can hardly bear to look at pictures of my husband.
I haven’t taken down any that were already around, but nor have I added any new ones. My eyes deliberately skate over the pictures hanging on the wall or propped on the mantelpiece. The one by my bedside – an old one of us together taken 30 years ago, before we were married, and after a dinner at a quaint (and expensive) Scottish coastal seafood restaurant paid for by my late father-in-law, (which was very generous of him because I remember my husband choosing the most expensive thing on the menu!) – is pushed to the back of the table making it difficult to chance upon it when the alarm goes off in the morning.
As for more recent images, I have one of both of us taken on the day he died. I’ve had a print made of it because in it he looks happy, we both do. We were having a lovely day out by the sea. But I can’t look at it for more than a split second, so it’s in an envelope, somewhere.
Why is that I can’t find the comfort in pictures that my relative does? Especially as I LOVE family photographs, have albums of them and spend hours pouring over them, looking into the faces of those pictured. Is it because the only reason I’d be looking at the images of my husband, finding that comfort, is because the real person isn’t here?
It reminds me of an event shortly after my husband died. His work colleagues had very generously organised an evening to celebrate him. He was a university lecturer, so this grand hall was packed with students and work colleagues, all sampling whisky – his favourite tipple – and Scottish cheese, and chatting, sharing stories, laughing. Playing on a big screen in the background was a loop of pictures and short videos of him on field trips, at general department get-togethers or on graduation day with his students and their families – my husband was a phd Dr so wore the rather unflattering ‘cushion’ hat to graduation complete with relevant robes and full dress kilt so he was always in a lot of souvenir photographs! As I was watching the film I was generally thinking what a character he was and how loved he was by the university community. Then suddenly I was struck by the fact that the only reason I was watching this film, looking at these pictures, recalling these memories was because he was dead. I felt as though I’d been smacked in the face.
The evening was a wonderful idea and I am grateful beyond words that it was held because it WAS comforting for me to know that my husband had been remembered in this way, and it’s important for everyone to grieve and to celebrate in equal measure.
But, for me, while images on a screen, in a photo album or in a frame on the wall are, yes, colourful souvenirs of happy, fun or important moments from the past, they’re also a stark reminder of what’s been lost. While that person is still alive, I can accept times gone by because there’s a future with and for them. Or if they’re an older relative, there’s a knowledge that their death follows the order of life. But when that death is sudden, unexpected, way too early, a shock, then to me those images seem to represent not just what’s gone before, not just what’s missing now, but also what’s been lost for the future. I can’t yet find any comfort in that.
Celebrating women all year round
This blog is taken from something I wrote for my local Women’s Institute – Lee Green WI – as part of our 10th birthday. I was asked to recall a special WI memory from the last decade, and there were plenty of fun and memorable things to choose from, but there was one event the stood out in my mind – attending a garden party at Buckingham Palace to mark 100 years of the WI.
Obviously that’s a pretty unique occasion and not one you forget in a hurry, but the thing that made it most memorable wasn’t the event itself. I’m sharing here just a part of what I said because I feel it speaks volumes about the relevance of the WI today as a movement, and also about how fabulous women are and how we should celebrate ourselves not just on International Women’s Day, or even on Mother’s Day or our birthdays, but all year round.
‘Walking through those familiar palace gates, and under the stone archway where on TV we have seen so many dazzling horse-drawn coaches enter was a once in a lifetime opportunity. The queue to get in was massive and I’m ashamed to say that we sneaked in behind a group from Wales by pretending to be with their party! Once inside the palace, the hallways and rooms we walked through were of course vast and splendid and led us onto the lawns, where hundreds of our fellow WI members were gathered from all over the country- I’ve never seen so many fascinators in one place! We were selected to be presented to Princess Alexandra and managed to do a decent curtsey with very little practise!
But wonderful and exciting as all of that was, it’s not the prime reason this day sticks in my memory. I remember it most of all because of the wonderful women that I met there and the stories they told. There was Mary who’s president of her tiny WI in Wales, a group that was started by her great aunt, of which her mother was also president, and which she’s desperately trying to keep going in honour of her relatives, despite falling numbers because she knows how important it is for the elderly women who currently attend. Without it they’d have very little social contact.
Then there was Gillian, who told us about her terrible first marriage, where she suffered emotional bullying at the hands of her husband, lost self-esteem and the ability to see how she could go on. She told us it was the support of the friends she met through the WI that helped her to see she deserved and could have a happier life, and that gave her the courage to leave that toxic relationship, and rebuild her life. She’s now happily remarried.
It was hearing those stories, and more, that changed my view of what the WI is. Not just cakes and Jerusalem, not resolutions and campaigns, but women being great friends to other women; women feeling and showing loyalty to others; women using their strength and encouraging courage in other women. To me THAT is the importance of the WI, and the memories of those women will stay with me always.‘
What I’ve learned…
We’re all dealing with something, and no one person’s grief is worse than any others. Thank you to my friend Lindsay Nicholson for writing about this topic which we find difficult to talk about, but which touches everyone’s life in one way or another.
Out with the old…
Can you hear me cheering? After what seems like an interminable number of weeks, finally dreary January is over and we’re into the much more brisk and cheery month of February. I can’t tell you how relieved and chipper I am to see the back of the first month of the year. What it is about January that makes it so awful?
Perhaps it’s a culmination of things – feeling poor after spending so much money on Christmas, the short grey days and long dark nights, the cold weather which keeps me indoors, and the fact that January has 31 days in it and therefore counts as a five week month – a long wait until payday. But then of the 12 months in the year, more than half of them – seven to be precise – are 31 day months and I never hear myself complaining about how May, July or August seem to draaaaggggg on. I wish they did!
In past years I’d try to book a holiday to add some spice to the month. I’ve even been on skiing trips all on my own, like Lizzie-no-mates, to make the weeks go quicker – although anyone who’s ever been skiing in January will know how atrocious the weather is then with either thick fog or driving snow making getting down the slopes tricky, never particularly stylish, but definitely an achievement!
This year of course has been a bit different as it’s the first time since school that I’ve encountered a January without having a job to go to. I will confess that I did allow myself a chuckle as everyone went back to work on January 4 while I lounged around the house in my jammies feeling smug. I filled in my new diary (my absolute favourite way to start the new year), adding in birthdays, annual plans, regular tennis and pilates classes and even allowed myself a New Year resolution (which I thought I’d noted near the front of the book, but I now can’t find!). The next day I went to tennis and played all morning under a sunny sky, and thought how lucky I was. And then the sky greyed over and my spirit drooped and I’ve been lacklustre, without energy and a real slug-a-bed ever since. I’ve done several lateral flow tests, so it wasn’t covid – but what is it?
Trying to analyse my feelings, I’m aware that I do have a sense of waiting – for the days to be lighter, the weather to be better, the buds to appear as that all signals the start of Spring, perhaps? Waiting for the end of January payday? Or just waiting for life to start again and the return of my mojo? One thing I do know is that life is way too valuable to spend one 12th of it hanging around for better times.
A wise friend suggested that I start planning now how I’m going to make next January more positive. So I’m creating a new section in my diary – the January Survival Guide – to which I’ll add thoughts and ideas, some sane others outrageous, over the course of the year so that by the end of 2022 I should have some fun, positive things all set up for the first month of 2023. Exciting times? I’ll keep you posted!
Is widowhood a question of black and white?
How does one be a widow? I am one, but I don’t know how to be one. It’s a horrible word, isn’t it, conjuring up images of black, spiders, weeds and danger. Things that are dark, mystical and to be avoided. But I don’t want to be avoided.
In the olden days, widows dressed in black mourning clothes – widow’s weeds – for the rest of their lives. It’s a dreary thought to me as I sit here writing in my fuschia coloured jumper, but I can also see that at least those women knew the script, what was expected of them, how to behave, and how their future was likely to pan out. They stayed at home initially for months following the recognised period of mourning, and then if they felt able they could gradually re-enter society, usually accompanied by family and friends, but always wearing that badge of darkness with maybe a frill of white. If they were young or rich enough they might attract a new suitor, someone who knew their situation and could either accept it or take advantage of it. A repressed life, yes, but they knew where they stood.
As a widow of more than two years now, I have no idea where I stand, and the more I think about it, the more I find myself wrestling with the idea of what widowhood is, means and represents.
First of all I hate the word. It’s an ugly, frightening word which reeks of failure. One of my saddest moments was the first time I had to use it to describe myself. I could barely get the word out and the second I did I wanted to snatch it back again and shout: ‘But I don’t feel like one!’ Society needs to find something more sympathetic to describe bereaved spouses, both male and female.
Second of all, how should I act? I’m single but I’m not. I’m not a carefree singleton, a dumped lover or a divorced ex-wife. I have a lot in common with each and all of these, but for me the extra element is the overwhelming sadness of a relationship that has only ended because of death. The reality that your husband is never, ever coming back, that you’ll never, ever see them again, is a tough one to take. It hits you in tidal waves when you least expect it, knocking you off of your emotional feet. And it can send even the most gung-ho of characters, the most ‘life’s for living so get on and live it’ into a pit of despair, and when you’re down there it’s hard to keep perspective, maintain relationships, and see what positives the future holds.
The lasting effects make it difficult to tread a consistent path forward – your expected future has been stripped away and you’re creating a new one from scratch as you go along, with no foundations to build on. The last time I was single was 33 years ago, when I was full of drive, ambition and excitement for what lay ahead. Having achieved most of those ambitions (one of which was marriage) and with a wealth of life experience behind me, I’m suddenly single again. It’s as though I’ve traveled through time and crash landed back where I started but having lived a life in between. So what do I do now?
Then there’s the outward sign of marriage – wedding rings. I’m no longer married, so should I keep wearing them? Yet I love my wedding rings. I have two – both slender gold bands, one studded with small diamonds – and I chose each of them because I loved them. As they don’t fit on any other finger, if I want to keep wearing them, they have to remain where they are.
And finally, there’s the question of surname. I kept my maiden name for work, passport and financial matters, and only used my married surname in a few circumstances, including my medical records. However, I’ve recently had to revert to my maiden name entirely so that my passport and official identification documents match my vaccination records. As I’m now no longer known anywhere by my husband’s surname, I feel as though the married segment of my life has been washed away, and even in name I’m back to where I was. Only I’m not the person I was then. Which brings me to my original question – how does one be a widow?
I can see that society has moved on so much that probably no-one really cares a jot how widows present themselves any more, but my question and my confusion stems not just from what’s acceptable to society, but from what’s acceptable to me.
Does taking off my wedding rings, adopting the lifestyle of a (not so young!) footloose and fancy-free singleton, and signing up to Tinder (I never will) wash away the 33 years I had with my husband, all the things we did together, the happy (and not so happy) times, the things we achieved, the things we planned to do? Does it blank them out as though they never existed? I feel that it does, and that’s a huge loss to bear and feels disloyal to him. On the other hand, I appreciate that as the lucky one, the one who’s still alive, I should make the most of my life, have fun, wear pink, abandon work and play tennis instead.
Maybe I’m suffering from survivor’s guilt, or perhaps I haven’t come as far in processing this terrible event as I thought I had. Or maybe I’m clinging to sentiment, over thinking things, and letting it stop me from going out there and living. For now it’s a question unanswered…
In the pink?
Today it struck me that my world has turned pink. I was fitting new bedlinen – a blush coloured sheet and duvet cover with tones of blush and raspberry interspersed with a very pale teal – when I was overcome with a rush of emotion. The bedding looked so warm, inviting and protective, I just wanted to climb right in and stay there, cocooned. And in that moment I realised that for months I’ve been unintentionally surrounding myself with pink.
When I repainted my bedroom in the summer I spent ages choosing the colour, went for Golden Jasmine, which looked cream on the paint chart, only for it to turn pale pink when applied to the walls.
My new full-length linen bedroom curtains, described as lilac on the packet, were, once hung, you guessed it, pink! Then I went further and introduced a raspberry velvet Art Deco style chair with a grey and fuschia fringed shawl draped over the back.
Well that’s okay, you may say, because it’s your bedroom and pink’s a soothing colour for sleep. Except my pink fascination has leaked out into the rest of the house.
The hallway, which was supposed to be painted two shades of Velvet Truffle – a smooth rich taupe verging on the chocolate – turned out to be two shades of rose. My living room walls are a soft pinky peach that frame a frosty pink velvet cuddler chair. Even my kitchen, which is mainly grey and white, has a splash of pink flamingo in the oven gloves.
My daughters have been teasing me for months about how everything I buy turns to pink, but I truly don’t mean it. I’ve even been worried that there’s something wrong with the colour receptors in my eyes so I don’t see that things are pink until I get them home. But looking at the bedding this morning made me think that perhaps I’ve been subconsciously choosing pink for its warm, comforting qualities. Maybe my brain is creating a rose-tinted world where, surrounded with this feelgood, happy colour, I can feel secure – and goodness knows we could all do with feeling more secure!
Or maybe it’s a reaction to the discipline of the past when everything in the house was either yellow or blue because those are the only two colours my husband and I could agree on. Actually blue used to be my favourite colour, I loved it’s clean freshness, the link with the blue sky, the sea and nature, but now the only blue I’ll entertain is sapphire, which of course has huge quantities of red in it, and even then I’d swap it for a bit of blush.
Either way my home has taken on a womb like quality, and I agree that sounds a little scary. But today as the darkness falls early on this chilly winter day, and it’s pouring rain outside, I feel rather cosy and cosseted in my rose-tinted world. Perhaps I’ll keep it like that a little longer…
Why being Selfish at Sixty changed my life
It’s two years since I started this blog and in that relatively short space of time, so much has changed.
I wrote it to mark my 60th birthday and to kick off my year of being ‘Selfish At Sixty’ – where each month I was going to do something lovely, new or adventurous. Where I was basically going to selfishly dedicate a year to being me, travelling the world, trying new things, and challenging myself.
It was always going to be a big ask because two months previously my husband had died very suddenly and unexpectedly, and I was still reeling from that and trying to find a positive way forward, to fill in the blank that had appeared where my future used to be. But I really wanted to try, and I had made so many plans, booked lots of trips – I was set for a year of challenge and adventure. Then came the pandemic, shortages, restrictions, lockdowns galore, trip after trip cancelled… well, we all know what it was like.
Obviously I didn’t have the celebration year that I’d planned, but as I reflect on that time I realise that what I did have was a ‘selfish’ year in the true sense of the word. Lockdowns were a relief to me. I didn’t have to force myself to accept invitations to lunch, for coffee, or a trip to the cinema – all very well-meaning and ultimately good for me, but the very last thing I wanted to do. Lockdown gave me the perfect excuse to shut the door, lie on the sofa and pull a blanket over me while watching box set after box set.
Both my daughters came home and had to stay in the house with me. Agony for them perhaps, but a relief for me. I had company, they brought conversation and light and fun, and we shared some delicious meals with all of us cooking and then sitting afterwards chatting and laughing and feeling like a family.
Thanks to Zoom, I saw my extended family more than ever as we quizzed our way through Sunday nights, and I could still join in fun times with friends knowing that when it all got too much I could make swift apologies and press the Leave Meeting button. No explanations or prolonged goodbyes required.
But most of all, I spent that time looking inwards, allowing myself to feel what I felt, to sit with my thoughts and emotions. It was hard, uncomfortable, and there were times I hated it and had to give myself a virtual shake to stop myself sinking too low. But that prolonged period of self-reflection allowed me to see what I really wanted from my life, to appreciate what that often used phrase ‘you never know the moment’ means in reality, to work my way through all those feelings, thoughts, emotions and desires, and to make a profound change in my life.
So, at the end of my celebration year, rather than having a party to mark 12 months of adventure and travel and fun, I took a very deep breath and resigned from a job that, for a decade, I’d been unhappy doing. More than that, I closed the 43 year long chapter that was my working life, and I opened a new chapter where the focus is on spending my days doing the things I enjoy and want to do.
That year of reflection allowed me to consider each element of my life and to see what was really important to me. Alongside that I worked out what I’d need financially and practically in the course of the next five, 10, 30 years, and put in place a robust support system that means I can afford the life I want to live. It’s not lavish or big spending, far from it. But it’s enough.
A few weeks into my ‘new chapter’ (I refuse to call it retirement, as I’ve definitely not retired from life) a family member asked me: ‘Without work and the purpose it brings, what is it that gets you out of bed in the morning?’
My reply was instant: ‘I only ever do things I want to now, so getting out of bed for that is easy!’ It was, on reflection, a true year of being Selfish at Sixty.
Today I celebrate my 62nd birthday. I’ve had nine months in my new chapter, and I’m absolutely loving it. I hope that in recounting all of this I don’t come across as smug or ‘sorted’, because I am neither of these things. There were and still are times of crashing sadness, worry that I’m doing the wrong thing, and soul-searching. There is still so much about my future that is uncertain and scary, and so much about being me that I need to work on or discover for the first time. But now I have the freedom and a more open mindset to help me learn, and I hope to share these with you in more regular blogs.
Thanks for reading, and here’s to the power of selfishness.
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.
The virtual life
So this week I’ve sung in a choir every day, sweated in two pilates classes and taught another, had afternoon tea with my cousin, chatted to all my nieces and nephews in Scotland and Yorkshire, had a game of bingo with friends, enjoyed a gin-and-tonic- fuelled girlie evening with another group of friends, and spent all day every day in the office doing my normal job – all without leaving the house.
Lockdown may be a strange and scary world of isolation and sacrifice, but I’m also finding it a really interesting time of innovation and challenge as we all think differently about how to stay active, occupied and sane.
Before I go any further I would like to say three things: firstly that I’m in the hugely privileged position of having a job that I can easily do at home and where my company is still employing and paying all its staff as normal; secondly that my home has three floors, four bedrooms and a garden so if I want a change of scene I just walk to another part of the house; and thirdly that I understand completely the sense of devastation and loss felt by the family and friends of every one of the thousands of people who have died as a result of Covid-19.
I’m therefore not cooped up in a flat with children and no garden, nor worried about paying the mortgage, bills or for food. So perhaps I am able to look at this situation through a different lens to others, and it’s a perspective that’s helping me to focus on the positives.
As a bereaved person, over the last six months I’ve expended a huge amount of emotional energy forcing myself off the sofa and out the door, back into the outside world rather than just moping around the house. Now the Government says I HAVE to stay at home. Result! In fact the moment lockdown started, I felt much more relaxed, and anxiety levels that I didn’t know I had, began to lower.
Life is more intense but also rich and vibrant. Instead of running for the train I’m strolling round empty streets looking at flowers and trees on my daily exercise, instead of traffic I hear bird song, instead of rushing around trying to fit everything in, I’m chatting over the fence to neighbours.
The safe space that home now represents has helped my concentration levels and I find myself powering through work in a way I haven’t been able to in a year. Video meetings keep me in touch with friends and colleagues from work, and I’ve bonded with people I wouldn’t usually spend much time with because there’s a sense of us all pulling together to make things better.
My daughters are both now at home and taking the advice to Stay Home Save Lives very seriously, and I’m really enjoying having them around me. Enforced it may be, but I’m loving it!
We bake, cook from scratch, and find inventive ways to use up all the food in the fridge because with shopping so much more difficult now, we don’t want to waste a scrap.
But what’s most amazing of all is that I’m still able to keep up with almost all of my usual hobbies. Only tennis has fallen by the wayside, but even there my eldest daughter and I took part in Andy Murray’s #100VolleyChallenge over the Easter weekend – and we smashed it!
Being able to still sing in the choir AND see all my choir friends while doing so via computer has been quite amazing. Online pilates where the teacher can still see me and correct me is a revelation. I’ve also been able to teach my own class this way, keeping us all moving, fit and in touch.
I don’t feel that my social life has suffered at all. In fact, I speak to friends and family more than usual. So much so that it’s getting hard to find slots in my diary for new virtual events! What should be a difficult and lonely time has become one of invention and bonding and it’s been so much easier than I ever imagined to feel positive.
Of course, there are sadnesses – not having my husband beside me, putting on hold my Selfish At Sixty plans, cancelling exciting trips and holidays. But as I look forward to next week taking part in a virtual treasure hunt (no idea how THAT’S going to work!), recording myself singing for a virtual choir, and having virtual dinner with a friend, the overwhelming feeling is that every day presents another opportunity to experience the good things of life, albeit virtually.
My lovely thing for April
In a month where there have actually been quite a few nice and unusual things, the highlight has to be reading my niece Shari Low’s new novel My One Month Marriage (Boldwood Books). Not only because it’s a brilliant story (as all 20+ of her books have been!), but because she has dedicated this one to me, my girls and my late husband. I feel very touched and proud.
Seasons of sadness
There’s a tree at the end of my back garden. A giant horse chestnut. It’s my barometer of the seasons. Each year since we moved into our house 23 years ago this month (March), I’ve looked out at it longingly, waiting desperately for the first buds to appear on the bare branches, the first signs of spring. This year I can barely look out of the window at all.
I hate winter and live for spring and summer, but this year I feel almost a sense of betrayal that Mother Nature can go on renewing itself, making buds and blossom, filling out bushes with new growth, even encouraging geraniums in sheltered places to fully flower. Because all of this renewal marks the start of yet another season without my husband.
It’s a reminder of the passage of time, the number of days, weeks, now months since I saw him last, that the world keeps turning, getting on with itself, while I feel as though I’m reeling off in a different direction.
I first felt like this after my mum died. She slipped away one May night, and as I walked back heartbroken from the hospital just as dawn was breaking, I couldn’t believe that the sun had the nerve to shine so brightly. We had the summer and then before I knew it came autumn and a tangible sense that I was moving away from her. She was still in Spring and I was being swept away from her, bundled almost, against my wishes into another month, another season, and then eventually another year.
As my husband died in September, we quickly moved into autumn without me noticing, and then deep and darkest winter, when it was fine to shut the door and close the curtains and just lie on the sofa and be sad.
Yes there were lots of fun times and celebrations along the way – my special birthday, Christmas, New Year, a family wedding, trips – but in winter it’s easy to slap on a smile and join in for the short time each one of them lasts. And in the many remaining hours, you can think and think, and cry, and start to plan but somehow without feeling the passage of time.
Spring has changed all of that. Each day new life arrives outside. The Acer in our front garden – the tree that my husband planted and always loved – is now lit up with crimson buds ready to burst into flower and light up the street. Usually my husband and I would look at it in awe, discuss with the neighbours how beautiful it is, take photographs of it to share with family around the country. But this year, well, I’m finding it hard to even look at it.
Time goes on and we learn to cope. But it’s a hard lesson.
MY LOVELY PLACE FOR MARCH…
Is home…. Regular readers of this blog will know that this started as a celebration of my 60th year, and then became a sort of life-after-bereavement with mention of special things, trips and adventures I was doing each month to still try to mark this year. With the coronavirus I guess the blog having to take yet another new turn because it doesn’t look as though I’ll be going anywhere but the garden for the next few months.
The developments of these last few weeks and the lack of any certainty about the future, have sent me spinning back to September. Just when I was beginning to emerge from the turmoil of losing my husband and feeling like I was entering calmer water where I could think straight, I’m back being thrown around, out of control, discombobulated. But one thing I am sure of is that I’m determined to still have some nice things to share. Stay in and stay safe.
Selfish At Sixty 