Letter to a Dead Husband.

I thought of you as I photographed this, and I said to our elder son, 'Dad would have loved this'. He said, 'Yes, he'd probably have fallen out of the cable-car trying to see it better'.

It's the beginning of a new shed, half way up a mountainside in Kazakhstan.
You never went there. You never knew that your son lives there now, although you visited him in Moscow where you were entranced by the drainpipes, great gleaming drainpipes that disgorge snow and slush over the pavements.
You liked drainpipes and sheds and the practicalities of building useful structures.
Especially sheds.
You would have really enjoyed this one. You'd have been determined to get up the ski-slopes for a proper look, and you would have have wanted to join anyone who was building it, to see how they make the logs interlock securely.
These things mattered to you.

I think you knew that our younger son would become more like you, become something of a Shed Man, an enthusiast of alternative energy sources. We had to dissuade you from attempting to colonise the nearby railway embankment with wind turbines based on old bicycle wheels.
You never knew that this son is married, has been for over a year, and that you have a beautiful daughter-in-law.

You were the ultimate recycler. Your garden structures are still safely here, built of old railway sleepers, recycled carved stone, and a vast range of materials pulled from roadside skips.
Oh, how you embarrassed me with your inability to pass a skip without removing something from it. But your buildings are still here, uniquely so, and, dare I say it, improved by my ministrations? I keep the stained glass windows free of cobwebs, I have stained the insides in subtle National Trust colours, I have put in rattan furniture and cushions and I hold tea- parties in there. You would be rather disapproving I'm afraid. The sheds have lost their masculine edge. Some things have changed because they have to.

Exactly five years ago, almost to the minute as I write this, you died.

It was a morning like this, with hazy sunshine and glorious glowing autumnal colours.
For me I think it felt like the peaceful end of a life richly and unconventionally lived; an appropriate end to a period of confusion and distress. But I am looking back over five years of a different life, and my perspectives have changed. It really may not have felt like that at the time.

For you, as one of the most devout Roman Catholics ever, it was miraculous timing. You would be up there for the greatest annual heavenly celebrations, All Saints on the first of November - the great get-together of those purified and safely arrived.
If, by any chance, you had been delayed there was another celebration on November the second, All Souls, for those on their way, but not yet fully purified.
I have the strongest possible feeling that your time with us would have provided valuable if somewhat unexpected elements of purification. That's what marriage and parenthood do for us all.

As well as our thoughts of you on the mountains, your son and I lit candles for you here:



(Cathedral of the Ascension, Almaty, Kazakhstan)

You would have been totally captivated by this wonderful building. It is made entirely of wood.
You are with us in our thoughts, in places where you have never been as well as in all those you knew and loved so well.

A Different Place.

A difficult time.
These are a few of the books belonging to my husband. I don't want to say 'late husband'. He was a carefully punctual man. I don't want to say I have 'lost' him, which is a term used by many who don't like to use the word 'dead'. I have not lost him, nor is he late. He died but the evidence of his past life is here, in our home, and the memories are everywhere.

Nearly five years after his death his books are boxed, ready to go to a new place. I am grateful to have found an appropriate home for them; a home that wants the complete collection, and where they will be kept, still under his name. A glance at the titles may indicate that this is a specialised collection, mainly of theology, with some philosophy and a great deal of devotional material. Not everyone would want it but for those who do it is a great resource.

I live through the paradoxes of death and bereavement. Nearly five years, and yet I still have the feeling that he'll be furious when he comes back and finds his books are not here. Not if, but when.
There is no sense in this, and I know it. Yet it happens, this bizarre fusing of reality and complete illogicality, not just to me, but to many who lose a husband, a wife, a life-partner.
The worst thing that people say to me is that they are sure that my husband is watching over me. It is said with the best intentions of giving comfort, but it's bad because I have that feeling anyway, and I know, in my practical, common-sense way, that I must work hard to create a new and different life, to stay positive, not to be a nuisance. In doing that I know that I'm doing things that would cause him annoyance, anger even; radical surgery on his favourite tree, throwing away boxfuls of old newspaper-cuttings and now, worst of all, giving away his beloved books.

If I believed in any sort of after-life I would not find it comforting, for with his deeply held religious convictions he will have streaked ahead in the spiritual race to sanctity, while I will be floundering about on some dark and indistinct shore-line, and this is somehow an even greater separation than death. Few things make proper sense in widowhood, except for simply getting on with it.

Widowhood is a shockingly different country. After the inevitable drama of death the reality begins to hit, but it may take years, or it may take forever. You do not 'get over' the death of a life-partner, but you do learn to live a different way. You simply have to do so.
Marriage was the country where I lived for nearly thirty years, secure, happy, busy, fulfilled, engrossed, irritated, exhausted, light-hearted, miserable - the whole spectrum of human emotion experienced when living with another. I find, somewhat to my surprise, that somehow I can accept the huge changes, but it is the trivial losses that hit hard. Every time I asked if he wanted a drink my husband would respond by looking at his watch or asking, 'What time is it?' It drove me mad, but now I find myself thinking, if not actually doing the same thing.

Widowhood happens in a second. That second when the breath and heart of another person stop, and from that second you are changed. You are perceived differently. Externally, nothing much has changed for me. I have the same address, drive the same car, use the same shops, the same library, and yet everything is different.
At first I was beguiled by busy-ness, keeping the bleakness at bay with a host of distractions. Now my life seems to have become focused into islands of silence, peaceful silence, balanced by the voluntary work I love, and times with people I am lucky enough to love too, in person, by telephone, by e-mail.

I send this out into space today, because my husband's books go tomorrow, and it seems, once again, like an ending.
I send it deliberately for others feeling the bleakness, and it goes with the message that endings can often be beginnings as well, and life in this strange place goes on.

Treading Water

It has felt like treading water for several weeks now, and yet a great deal has been happening.
For one of the very few times in my life I have found myself unable to communicate; not unwilling, but unable, because some experiences go so deep that they slip through the mesh of conventional speech and writing. They swim silently, like the little fish in this, the Waterlily House at Kew Gardens. They circle, and occasionally break the surface tension, and then they slip down again, into the dark water.

I have been touched to receive some kind comments on my blog, hoping I'm still around. Then, today, I was helped by fellow blogger 'Zhoen' , who is hoping to start a new project.
I have started something new, too. My own new work is within the 'Hospice Movement.'

Zhoen has had similar experience within her own career, and writes of Hospice work, '....experience beyond words to capture. Too profound to pin to a board. The kind of humour that just doesn't translate to anyone who hasn't been there.....'

Exactly, Zhoen, and thank you.


The giant waterlily is significant, too.
As a child I was captivated by a photograph of a little girl, sitting in the middle of a leaf of the giant Amazonian waterlily, being upheld by the leaf structure over deep water.
My parents took me to Kew Gardens to see the real thing, where, to my extreme disappointment, I was not allowed to sit on a leaf.
Yesterday I went to see it again. It's a bit smaller, as this is Victoria Cruziana, and I am considerably larger. There is no longer the faintest hope of sitting on a leaf.

So I watch the little fish, circling happily in the dark water, and wait for the words to return, for great experiences to be assimilated.
I wait, with a huge sense of gratitude for the ever growing awareness of the richness of life and death.

On Reflection.....

A little while ago 'Pohanginapete' responded to a comment I left on his blog.

'Often I've thought,' he wrote, 'that the turning point in a person's life must come when curiosity no longer outweighs reflection; when we begin living in our own history we begin the process of no longer creating it.'

Oh, cor blimey, gadzooks, what a wake-up call!

He was not to know that I had spent the previous five weeks in a welter of self-pity, recrimination, reflection....wallowing, in short. Living in the past, trying to see the past in a different light, wishing I had done or not done this or that - and then this or that would not have happened, or would have happened differently.

Oh yes, the perils of recollection.

How do you downsize, ridding your life of clutter, without the attendance of a life-time of associations? Everything I touch in this house triggers memories. Three and a half years since my husband's death and I finally take his unworn shoes to the Oxfam shop.
The practical de-cluttering is hard enough; but then there is the emotional.

Finally, I can be ruthless with personal papers and letters, but I have to read them all, just to make sure that I haven't missed anything important, any memories my sons might want to record.
The reading brings laughs and smiles and terrible shocks; for life was not always as I thought it to be. Sad things, once read cannot be unread, just as regrettable words, words spoken in anger and frustration cannot be unsaid.
With the best will in the world, we are isolated individuals, and there is an inevitable point when apology is no longer possible, and history cannot be revised in a more favourable light.

I can make copious contributions to the Oxfam shop. I can shred papers. But how much interior mental clutter must I retain?

In this situation it is relatively easy to use distraction as a means of avoidance.
I'm quite well versed in the processes of bereavement, I can acknowledge its stages in myself. I hope I can be of some help to others. I work for 'Cruse Bereavement Care'. I can occupy myself, stay busy, think of others.
Distraction has its uses.
Usually, in the past, my thoughts wriggled through a cacophony; family noise, work noise, trying-to-shop-in-lunchtime noise.
Now they bubble up from silence.

This, for me, is the turning point in life. The silence.

I realise I wrote about this when I first started blogging 'here'.
It remains a challenge, greater now than ever before.

I work on creating new, meaningful history - as opposed to distraction.
I ask my younger son, now that he has his own house, to come and remove the twenty four keyboards he still has in this attic (I do not exaggerate, he does something called circuit bending). He asks why, and I say I might want to move. He is somewhat shocked.
I tell my older son I'm coming to visit him. He lives in Kazakhstan. He promises me a business class ticket.

I cannot help but live in my own history. I would never be able, nor would I wish to discard it, but, hopefully I can build on it.