Closeup photograph the catkin of a pussy willow. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I met up with some old friends today. When I say old, I suppose I mean mutual. Of His and mine, from the life I led before. I have avoided them since He died. He is too conspicuous by His absence when we are together, and there is a tendency for them Not Talk About Him for fear it might upset me. I’m already upset. Really – they can’t make it any worse.

Lives move on. Their lives have moved on. My life has moved on, in spite of me. Kicking and screaming, I have left Him behind in 2012. I make attempts at memorialising Him – today my daughter and I painted a plaque to go in the garden next to the pussy willow we have planted for Him – but it feels hollow, because in order to memorialise someone you have to have accepted that they have gone. Perhaps this is why the ashes remain in the wardrobe, the clothes are still vacuum-packed in the cupboard.

It may seem odd to not accept that someone has gone, especially when you were there at the moment when they drew their last breath and saw, unequivocally, that their time on earth had ended; a machine, shutting down. But somehow, I can’t accept. Not that I expect Him to come walking in through the door. I know He’s dead. But I just can’t believe it. The distinction is subtle and impossible to explain.

So I focus on the new friends, the ones who don’t know or remind me of M. They demand nothing of me emotionally, their conversation isn’t heavy with the weight of what isn’t being said. A shrink might call it denial. I call it survival.

Friends and family are without doubt the safety net for the hollow-eyed young widow and her small child; they protect against the buffeting of the fiercest waves of grief, and can make the difference between survival and drowning. Even those who admit they ‘aren’t very good at the emotional stuff’ are, by their provision of wine and a Bridesmaids DVD,  keeping me afloat. I’ve received parcels, books, cards from both expected and unexpected places. New kinships have been forged and other have dropped off.

There is a tendency for some to chivvy me through it, as if it were a particularly bad hangover. Others can’t resist but ally it to their own experience. At Christmas, for example, I told people I wasn’t sending cards – for me, it wasn’t Merry or Happy, and the omission of M’s name from the card provided yet more incontrovertible evidence that he had gone. One friend nodded sympathetically and said she hadn’t sent cards the previous Christmas for exactly the same reasons – it was the year H had left her for The Other Woman.

Friends and family just want ‘the old me’ back. I can sense them, waiting patiently for me to turn the corner, to come to terms and move on. A day without tears is progress. The healing is well underway. But the old me has gone. I died with Him.

So I am becoming acquainted with the new me. And I am discovering a disconcerting set of new traits: I am at once reckless and anaesthetised, but also surprisingly strong, resourceful and independent. I laugh often and cry infrequently.

The void is permanent and unrelenting – an unmistakable M-shape, branded onto my heart. So friends, be there for the new me, but don’t wait for the old me to return. That departure is as definitive as M’s.

Plumber hammers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the whole, people are uncomfortable about my affair with The Plumber. Some are vociferous in their disapproval, others simply tilt their nostrils up and eye me through slits like Kenneth Williams.

Their disdain has nothing to do with the memory of M, of course, although they’d like to fool themselves – and me – that it has. It has, I have discovered, more to do with plain, old-fashioned envy – they’d love to be in the midst of a sexual cliché such as this one, where they are shagged senseless on the stairs by a six-foot, tattooed workman once a week, who then returns to fit their sink.

Admitting this though, in these circumstances (the circumstances which must be acknowledged in HUSHED TONES ONLY, if acknowledged at all), would be like pissing on M’s ashes (which are still in my wardrobe by the way), so instead they feign disgust or concern or both because it makes them feel better.

I mentioned I’m adrift in some sort of sea. The waters are violent and unpredictable and I have few buoyancy aids at my disposal. The Plumber is currently one of them. Swim awhile in these waters, bearing the weight I am carrying, and you’ll not make any apologies either.

Thank god, The First Year is over. It’s the worst, apparently. It’s when you feel everything at its most acute. Things gets better, after The First Year. You start to accept, to miss him less. Because you have to accept in order to move on.

I’m almost two months in to The Second Year and I still haven’t begun to feel. The numbness hasn’t abated from around my heart. The shock of the night that he left. I’m moving through life, dodging the emotional stuff like those little bombs on Pac-Man. For what would happen if one of them exploded?