It’s taken me eighteen months, several hundred bottles of red wine, counselling, pills, the support of friends, strangers and a spirited editor at Virgin to try to articulate how it feels to have lost Mark.
It took my daughter thirty seconds, a cup of warm milk and an Oreo to sum it up last night :
I’ve spent the morning cross-legged under my letterbox, awaiting a delivery from the postman.
It’s all the words that are putting me off…
And lo! Said delivery finally dropped onto the doormat (Inevitably just after I’d given up hope and left my vantage point in favour of Facebook.)
The first, long-awaited copy of Me After You, my memoir about life since Mark’s death.
Thing is, I hardly dare open it.
It’s all the words that are contained within it that are putting me off – the ones which raged from my broken heart onto the keyboard over five fraught months. They’re as precious to me as little pearls, those words; they are fierce, tender, raw, profane, downright dirty in parts.
But most importantly they are truthful, which is all I really wanted from them in the first place.
But what if they don’t look right? What if, now they’re out there, you don’t like them, or the calamitous tale they recount?
The book has been a labour of love. It has permitted me to spend time with my husband every day, to exhume Him and all the memories that go with Him.
It is also proof that if you believe in and love something passionately enough, with all of your heart and every sinew, you can achieve anything.
Ah fuck it. Mark, pet – this is for you. I’m going in…
“Curse of an Aching Heart”, 1913 sheet music cover (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
It’s a warm and fuzzy theory and everything, but the deeper I sink into the hell of losing my husband, best friend and soul mate, the more I think it may just be another of those placatory statements which means absolutely fuck all.
A steely, love-free heart would be preferable to the broken, aching organ which currently occupies a cavity in my chest. At least then there would be no pain – it would simply be deflected.
If I’d never met Him, how much easier the act of living would be. He would have died and I would never have known. I would have always looked for Him, I’m sure, as I spent 26 years looking for Him, but this sensation of being somehow bereft of a limb would be muted. Selfish thing to say, but try a mile in these shoes.
We were cut from the same cloth, you see. Fitted together like the last two pieces of a jigsaw. Distinct personalities, yet fundamentally linked. How do I proceed now He’s gone, so suddenly, so definitively?
I’m on the pills, doing the counselling, distracting myself with child, dog, wine, writing! Child, dog, wine, inappropriate men! Child, dog, wine, new sideboard! I’m playing my role in this act of living to great effect.
But something’s shifted in the grief process. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I feel different. The weight on my shoulders feels heavier. Even the thought of His name is too much.
Listen, don’t worry though. Tomorrow’s another day. Life goes on. Onwards and upwards.
And assorted other clichés.
This is you and your daddy
My Mother is a keen curator of what M used to call ‘photographs of dead relatives’.
Sepia miniature of unidentified raggy-arsed forebear? Mother’s all over it like Old Etonians in Parliament. She’s got the census from 1743 and worked out it’s a great, great, great uncle’s love child. She’s been on a pilgrimage to an outpost north of Inverness to visit the grave.
The significance of this ancestor differs among family members – most couldn’t give a monkey’s, but for others (well, my Mother), they are an important part of the jigsaw of family history.
I’m doing some historical research of my own at the moment, for a piece of writing I’m doing about Newcastle. This morning I’ve been in the city looking at other people’s raggy-arsed forebears in a collection of photographs from 1860. In one or two of them I thought I recognised myself – the bone structure of the face, the slightly hooded eyes. It is possible, I conceded, that I may be looking at a forebear without realising it. It is certainly conceivable that I am related to a Geordie fishwife, somewhere down the line.
Being in Newcastle always brings out a yearning for M, but I have begun to notice that He has started to take on saintly, almost mythical status in my mind. Thoughts of Him infuse everything I do.
It struck me today, as looked at the photographs and wandered around the Quayside, trying to absorb the history of the place, that M is now ‘a dead relative’. All that remains of Him for my daughter are scant memories (if any memories at all), photographs and some personal effects. I can record, recount, curate and archive His life until my fingers bleed, but for her, He will always be in 2D.
Yes, she looks like Him. Her kids will probably look like Him. Her kids kids will probably look like Him. He ‘lives on’, as people keep telling me.
But the fact is that He has already become a photograph of a dead relative to add to the pile.
As someone who has a morbid fear of flying , what better programme to tune into last night but ‘The Plane Crash’, a documentary about a Boeing 737 which was deliberately crashed in order for engineers to see what really happens at the point of impact?
Aside from feeling a sense of vindication (yeah, OK, so it’s the safest form of travel, but Christ look what HAPPENS when something goes wrong!), there was a moment which, for me, provided a perfect visual representation of what grief feels like.
Crash test dummies were placed around the aircraft; some were strapped in, some were left untethered, some were placed in the brace position, others sat upright.
Cameras filmed from inside the cabin and caught the action within at the point of impact. The experts who examined the resultant footage agreed what we all already knew – braced, with a seatbelt fastened was the best position to adopt in the event of a crash.
What the footage also revealed though, was what happened to the dummies who were in the other positions. The poor bastard without a seatbelt was found wedged under the seat in front, folded backwards in a contortion worthy of Houdini.
But it was the guy who was sitting upright who could have been the poster boy for the aftermath of death of a spouse.
He looked forwards, unswerving in the face of the glass, luggage, wires, trays, pieces of fuselage which tore through him. His head ricocheted off the seat in front, whilst debris melted and fizzed all around. Unbelievably, the engineers believed he probably wouldn’t have died. The severity of the head injuries, however, could not be ascertained.
Adopting the brace position in grief is without doubt the safest option, but I’m starting to realise that looking forwards and facing the onslaught is a necessary part of the journey. I have done that very thing today with my counsellor. Lifted my gaze and felt the impact of the debris.
As with all catastrophic events, however, the severity of the head injuries cannot yet be ascertained.
This is Him, and her.
Hello. I’m having a glass of Rioja at the end of one of those ‘Oh sweet Satan’s ball-sack, I’m a TERRIBLE mother’ days. Will you join me?
I have had the emotional resilience of Wensleydale cheese today (crumbly, for all you non-Northern-English people). And I’ve been unable to toughen myself up.
And my child has both a) witnessed it and b) had to stay at my Mother’s whilst I spent time collapsing on the bed at home. It sounds melodramatic, but I swear, today, I’ve not even been able to THINK about, you know, Him, without going all Wensleydale.
I don’t know why it hits you like this. Anyone? Anyone?
If I’d even tried to compose a post earlier I wouldn’t have had the energy to press the buttons on the keyboard. Fortunately, Rioja has the same effect on me as spinach has on Popeye – it makes me strong to the finich.
It’s the school holidays and I’m up to my ears with the sound of kids shouting for their daddies. I’m sick of people rambling on about going on holiday together. I’m weary of people complaining about the forthcoming fortnight they’re going to have to endure with their husband and kids. I’d sell a kidney for the chance of a holiday with just Him and her.
“Are you cryin’?” My daughter asked me, as tears powered down my cheeks.
“Uhuh.”
“‘Cos you miss Daddy?”
“U”- snort- “Huh”
She doesn’t say anymore than that these days. She just goes and gets a length of toilet paper from the bathroom and clumsily tries to stop the flow.
And I thought to myself today – with no level of profundity whatsoever – I thought, nothing really matters. Nothing.
All I want is you, Buble. Can you hear me?
I am the Fun Police.
At least as far as my daughter goes. She wants to take her scooter down a slight incline and I’m there, sucking my teeth on the sidelines, hardly daring to look. She wants to do star jumps on the trampoline and there’s my face, moulded into the mesh like a bank robber.
Yesterday, a group of us went to Newby Hall. Fun central, as far as kids are concerned. Water fountains to jump in. A lake to paddle in. A zip-wire to…zip down. 
All potential death traps. Lynn Faulds-Wood has got nothing on me.
Water fountains = slip hazard.
Lake = drowning hazard.
Zip-wire = one way ticket to paraplegia.
Friends will testify that I have always been on the cautious side. (Except after a few beers – then I’ll do owt). However, since M died, I have become convinced something is going to happen to take my child too. In fact, my buttocks have been permanently clenched for eighteen months.
Prior to this, it was my own health which caused me anxiety. Everything took on catastrophic significance, from headaches (brain tumour) to athletes foot (skin cancer). It was a psychological unhinging which was attributed to M’s sudden illness and near-death in 2008. Finally I was told I had ‘Health Anxiety’ by my weary-eyed GP, who just wanted to satisfy me with a diagnosis of some description so that I would fuck off and leave her alone.
Since M was taken from me though, my anxieties have been transposed onto my girl. To the point yesterday where I was so caught up in worrying, I forgot to take her bathing suit and she refused to go into the fountains nude.
Instead she stayed close to me, wrapped up in the safety of the towel.
leg warmers photo from flickr by iluvrhinestones (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Sudden death of a spouse is fucking rude.
It waltzes into your life without invitation and gives you no opportunity for recourse. I want to tap it on the shoulder and say, excuse me but…fuck off. Can you come back in, say, 50 years time? And give us warning next time?
It brings to mind those excruciating moments when one ‘breaks up’ with a boyfriend. The build-up. The announcement. The returning of items which held so much weight at the time:
“Please send back my leg-warmers and the Belinda Carlisle album, asap.”
Sudden death affords no such luxury. One minute, the love of your life is alive. The next, they are dead. You have no chance for discussion, no build-up, no demands for significant items to be returned. Indeed, you are left to look through things belonging to your beloved and decide what is significant or not.
When M died, there were a couple of boxes of memorabilia I’d never seen. Not that He’d hidden them from me – we just hadn’t got round to them, as a couple.
I asked my oldest friend in the world to come and sort through them with me. Contained within were photos, letters and pictures that revealed a whole other side to my husband.
“What’s this photo of?”
“Who is this?”
“What does this mean?”
We spent an evening trying to decipher His life ‘before me’. Of course, we reached no conclusion. There were no answers, because the only person who could provide them was gone. So I have boxes full of unanswered questions in my loft.
I wish I had a few moments just to ask Him about the contents of those boxes. What? Who? When? Where?
But this is the nature of sudden death. It gives you no time.
Fucking rude.
The Inconsolable Widow (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There are certain things that only widows know. And like any exclusive group, we like to keep our knowledge to ourselves.
This is mainly because people outside the group don’t have a clue what we’re going through and rather than get irate about their reactions (last post notwithstanding), we don’t bother them with the detail. But really, there’s an underground revolution going on. Widows are communicating via closed fora and private coffee meets all across the world. It’s like the Resistance, with cappuccinos and Kleenex.
At the risk of being cast-out, I’m going to share one pearl of received widow-wisdom. It is known as…’The Six Month Low’.
It is the point in widowhood when friends have stopped their cross-country pilgrimages to see you, their daily pep-texts have dwindled to once a week. This isn’t a criticism. Lives must go on and just because M was a central part of my life, I can’t expect the loss to be felt with the same sense of perpetuity by anyone else.
Six months is the point at which you feel at your lowest ebb. You have to reach into the pit of your resources for the last remnant of strength to pull you through.
Except, here’s the thing – for me, it didn’t happen. Six months was no worse than four months or nine months. In fact, I’m about to propose a new timescale theory: how about eighteen months? Because actually, today, as I approach eighteen months without M, I’m feeling a mixture of rage and heartbreak, and wondering if I can carry on.
I’m so fragile you could break me with a breath, and so angry I could kill someone. I’m feeling the loss in that space between my shoulder blades and in the joints of my fingers. My bottom lip won’t stop wobbling. I’m scrabbling about in the pit of my resources and emerging with nothing.
I am aware this is liable to change. After all, two days ago I was all for living it up. I guess what I’m trying to say is that timescales don’t work. It’s not an illness from which one recovers. This will go on and on.
Today I’ve got a head full of funk. Tomorrow it may be the musical type instead.
English: Newborn Golden Retriever puppies. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The therapeutic benefits of writing this blog have been challenged this morning, people.
Last night I had a dream about one of my more macabre posts (one in which I contemplated whether taxidermy had been a missed opportunity as an option for my Husband’s body – read it, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Honest.)
In the dream, I had indeed taken the decision to have Him stuffed. However, He was not immobile. He was able to move about in a kind of lobotomised state. Like Nick Frost in that zombie movie, but better looking.
He was lying in bed next to our daughter, not realising He was dead. And I was frightened of Him.
I woke into a disconcerting semi-reality – half awake and muggy with sweat. I had to get up, starkers and hung-over, just to check He wasn’t lurking in the corridor.
Much to my chagrin, I hardly ever dream about M. I would love to dream about Him more, because the odd time He has made an appearance, He is always alive, flashing that mega-watt smile that my heart aches to see again.
As it is, by transcribing my psychotic innermost thoughts about His death, I fear I may have doomed myself into some kind of ghoulish Jungian dream cycle, in which He always appears as an extra from Shaun of the Dead.
Maybe I ought to ditch this as a subject and write about puppies instead.
Wife After Death 