Tag Archives: young widowhood

A Chimp with a Gun

Posted in Every day survival, Uncategorized, Whatever gets you through the night by
Sam is capable of using his own abilities, eve...

Sam is capable of using his own abilities, even if this is something his host normally can not do. Taken from the Season 4 episode “The Wrong Stuff” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Widowhood feels like that programme from the 80s, Quantum Leap.

When that bloke arrives in a new world feeling like himself, only to look in the mirror to find he’s now a naughty nun.

Like learning how to live again, widowhood presents a series of ‘firsts’ and new choices. All to be dealt with whilst fighting off the grief gremlin who is clinging to your back  – yeah, Dr Sam Beckett, you didn’t have to deal with THAT added twist, did you?

Today, I had a ‘first’. Yes, seventeen months in. I thought I’d pretty much fielded all the balls in this ‘new normal’, but an emotional googly came at me today, threatening to deflate an otherwise glorious day.

I’d met with some friends in a park in Newcastle. It was a searing 24 degrees, cloudless sky, the kids were free-range, we were young, bronzed and gorgeous*.  (*OK, the group next to us were young, bronzed and gorgeous, but we were absorbing it. Like osmosis. And that was what mattered).

You just knew something had to come along and shit on it.

And he did. Right at the end, as we were saying our goodbyes. Steve Duncan appeared on the periphery of my vision. (We’ll call him Steve Duncan, for that is his name).

Steve Duncan was an ex-colleague both M and I shared. We worked on a youth project together in Sunderland ten years ago and aside from a wild Hallowe’en party involving a Hulk mask and a bowl of vodka-laced gunk, I haven’t seen him since. Yet there he was, Steve bloody Duncan, now with blonde-haired child calling him daddy.

My blood instantly chilled. Steve Duncan wouldn’t know about M. He’d be over in a minute, asking me how things were, what I was up to, how was his old mate M? I could see him looking at me with that, “That is her, isn’t it?” half-smile expression on his face, poised for the approach.

It occurred to me that I had not yet had to deal with people who had known M, but who weren’t aware He was dead. I was confident that social media had covered this for me. But Steve Duncan had been out of the loop for so long, the news wouldn’t have reached him.

I gathered my child and my dog and scurried up the hill towards the car. When I looked at my reflection in the wing-mirror, it could well have been a naughty nun looking back at me.

Another experience in this strange new world.

Note on picture: WordPress suggested it as an accompaniment to this post. This baffled me at first – what combination of words could have prompted it? But then I realised that over the past four months, Wordpress has clearly come to know me better than I know myself. For that is exactly what I feel like. A chimp with a gun. Thanks WordPress!

Ooo, Hebburn is a Place on Earth

Posted in Bereavement, Uncategorized by
English: Jerry Springer at a Hudson Union Soci...

English: Jerry Springer at a Hudson Union Society event in January 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Don’t kids say the funniest things? (To be said in Tony Blackburn voice for ultimate effect).

My daughter last night, for example. Lying in bed, exchanging our ritual Jerry Springer-style ‘final thoughts’ before shut-eye.

Her: “Daddy didn’t die in Heaven.”

Me: “Mmmm? What do you mean?”

Her: “He died in Grandma’s bed.”

Me: “…Yes…”

Her: “Where is Heaven?”

My atheist bile began its stealthy rise. “Heaven…well…it’s not real, sweetheart.”

“Father Michael says Cheesus died in Heaven.” Pauses. No response from Mother. Sings: “I am the Lawn of the dance says He….”

It brought to mind the old play-on-words M used to sing about a town in our native North-East: ‘Ooo Hebburn is a place on earth!’

I tossed from side to side for a good while, contemplating religion. I concluded that maybe it would just be easier if I got one.

My daughter attends a faith school (Church of England I think, although not entirely certain.) It was the nearest one and to be honest, when I enrolled her I was in sudden-death induced catatonia. It could have been orthodox Jewish and I would have signed her up. But she comes home with all this gubbins and I don’t know how to deal with it. At Easter time, she was distraught because Cheesus was resurrected from the dead yet daddy wasn’t. But why wasn’t He?

“Because Cheesus is…a fairy?” I proffered.

It didn’t wash. A man in a dress had come into school and suggested that Cheesus was a real, live human being who had come back from the dead. The man was adamant about this point. He completely confused my daughter. And me.

Maybe it is just easier to believe that M has gone to Heaven. To an, ehem, ‘better place’, because actually the prospect of anything else is too much to cope with. In a sense, it’s too difficult to explain.

Yeah, at 10pm on a weary Friday night, that suits me actually.

He’s in Heaven, sweetheart. With Cheesus and the fucking Wombles.

It’s better than drinking alone

Posted in Bereavement Advice and Support, Every day survival, Uncategorized by
English: KitKat chunky. Français : Barre de Ki...

English: KitKat chunky. Français : Barre de KitKat. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

OK so starter for ten: The following lyric is from which song?

‘They’re sharing a drink they call loneliness / But it’s better than drinking alone…’

Answer at end of post. Scroll down there now if you can’t be arsed with a squiffy widow’s random ruminations on above quote.

In fact, my daughter, aged 5, selected this CD today out of a collection of thousands. (Mine amount to around twenty, the rest were His). We listened to it in the car and I was struck by the lyric, as I have been struck by many a song lyric since M died.

This tune involves barflies congregating around a piano, conjoined in mutual melancholia. It’s also a song about drinking, which has become as much a feature of my life as brushing my teeth and a morning brew.

The thing is – everyone is going through their own shit. I’ve lost my husband, I’m never going to see Him again. This has become my life and my eternal sorrow.

But I have come to recognise that my loss is relative to what everyone else is going through. People are fielding blows of their own. One friend has just found out her sister has cancer. Another’s boyfriend is on bail. Someone else is facing redundancy. My Dad visits my Grandpa in the care home every single day in bewilderment that the formidable character he knew and loved is now solely preoccupied by Kit-Kats.

We all invariably end up in the pub discussing and sharing our woes.

But it’s better than drinking alone, right?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVKtL9VU8rQ

A slippery little customer

Posted in Bereavement Advice and Support, Every day survival by
English: Comfort in Grief

English: Comfort in Grief (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Grief, eh? Slippery little customer. It won’t be defined, no matter how you hard you try to pin it down.

Yesterday I was handed a bejewelled box and a book by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross by my daughter’s counsellor. The ‘intervention’ had come to an end and these were the legacy of the sessions.

The box had been hand-decorated by my daughter and had previously housed shoes. Now it was wrapped in brown parcel paper and covered in sequins. It contained a selection of brightly-coloured toys, stickers and pens, supposedly to comfort her in those moments when she was missing daddy. All I saw was flotsam which would invariably end up strewn about my living room floor. I asked her about the pink elephant.

“It’s a pink elephant,” she said.

“Would you like to cuddle it when you’re missing daddy?”

She looked me as if I’d just shat on the carpet. “……….It’s a pink elephant.”

Six weeks well spent then.

Kubler-Ross was a psychiatrist with an interest in dying, who coined five ‘stages’ which are apparently typical of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I came across her soon after M died – those early days when I sought a ‘solution’ to my grief by spending a fortune on books on the subject.

Some books contained ‘road maps’ to recovery. Some were heavy with case studies and testimonials from people who had gone through it and survived. None of them made any sense to me though. I didn’t want to ‘recover’. I didn’t want to hear about other people’s losses. I wanted to stop retching every morning, I wanted the jags of anxiety to stop. I wanted M back and for Him not to be dead.

So my conclusion is this: Grief cannot be corralled or boxed or arranged into stages. Grief is different for everyone, as are expressions thereof.

The only solution is to put your head down and push through it. And of course, drink wine.

An inbox full of Arnie

Posted in Every day survival, New relationships, Uncategorized, Whatever gets you through the night by
English: Walk-behind lawn mower

English: Walk-behind lawn mower (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ever since I made the mistake of signing up to an online dating agency (and swiftly un-signing up might I add), my email account has been deluged with photographs of ripple-chested, mahogany-coloured males, all branded with the legend, “These are real members!”

This claim is patently untrue.

Even if I were interested, which I’m not, how is it that when I was (momentarily) a member, my matches were all either aged seventeen with plooks or portly jokers with an interesting line in ties? There wasn’t a mahogany torso to be found. And believe me, I trawled the site looking for one.

This is the insidious nature of the Internet about which M warned me time and time again. Never subscribe to or look at anything unless you are prepared for it to come back and bite you on the arse. I subscribed in a fit of drink-fuelled loneliness, and now I can’t escape from it. Doomed forever to an inbox full of Arnie look-alikes.

The loneliness which prompted the whole damn thing persists though. I miss His company, His humour, the feeling of His body next to me in bed. I miss seeing His face, the sound of His voice. It goes beyond loneliness though; it is a kind of yearning which can’t be fixed by a date with a man with a rippled chest.

Even the lawn-mower-like roar of His snoring which caused so many grumpy nocturnal stomps to the spare room – I’d give an inbox full of Arnie to hear it again.

If You Died I’d.

Posted in Bereavement, Every day survival, Uncategorized by
DSC03355

The two loves of my life, six days before the big one died.

Cardiac surgeons! How come Eddie Large (20 stone and aged 72) lives on and prospers ten years after a heart transplant, whereas the love of my life foundered three years after aortic reconstruction surgery aged 37?

Answers in plain English on the back of a postcard please.

I became aware of Eddie’s death-dodging triumph tonight whilst watching – well, not watching, exactly, staring dumbly at – All Star Mr and Mrs. Ever seen it before? Me neither. I wish I’d never tuned in.

The premise hasn’t changed for a hundred years, only the prize (it’s gone from carriage clock to charity donation) and the calibre of the contestants (formerly members of the public, now people who were famous but are back to being members of the public again.)

Eddie Large and his wife Patsy – er – Large came stumbling onto the stage (no really, they did, Eddie tripped) and announced the startling transplant news. Happy though I was for Eddie, I couldn’t help feeling affronted. What’s his secret?

The show went from bad to worse, as VTs of the three happy couples showed them all at home, fluorescent-toothed and in love, kissing in slo-mo and telling the public how they couldn’t live without the other.

“I can’t imagine life without him,” said Yvette Fielding of her husband Wotzizname.

“I can’t talk about how wonderful she is, otherwise I’ll just fill up,” said Eddie of Patsy.

And who can blame them? I feel the same about my husband. I couldn’t, and can’t, imagine life without Him. I can’t talk about how wonderful He is and was without filling up.

I feel resentful, though, that other couples still have the luxury of only imagining the worst. I feel resentful that Eddie survived what my husband could not. This is a selfish, reproachful and childish response, I know, but there it is.

We used to say to each other, M and I, the line from Lemn Sissay’s Love Poem: If you died I’d.

He did, but I haven’t. I feel selfish about that too.

An Argument for Staying Drunk

Posted in Every day survival, Uncategorized, Whatever gets you through the night by
"The Hangover" (Portrait of Suzanne ...

“The Hangover” (Portrait of Suzanne Valadon) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Which joy-killing bastard invented hangovers?

Drinking is one of my favourite pastimes, one of life’s great pleasures, yet for some reason I am punished for it, horribly, the morning after.

Actually, I rarely suffer from them anymore (presumably my body has acclimatised to its post-spousal-death increased alcoholic intake), but today I genuinely considered asking the emergency services to come and administer something to make it all stop.

The usual alcohol-induced physiological atrocities were present, but I found that in addition to the sweating, the loose bowel and the retching, I was gripped with terror about the fate of my husband. In my paranoid, palpitating state, the fact that He was no longer alive seemed even more absurd, more obscene, more unbearable. I had to repeat the mantra, ‘M is dead’ in my head in order to believe that it had really happened.

I lay on the sofa while Saint Dick van Dyke entertained my daughter (by virtue of appearing in one of the longest, most convoluted children’s films of all time, he provided me with an extra three hours in which to get my shit together), but I could neither close my eyes nor keep them open, so I held them at a squint whilst I contemplated the fact that He had really gone.

M was the type of person you wanted around on a hangover. He took no pleasure in making smug jibes if I’d over-imbibed. Instead, He’d make me a bacon butty, give me a paracetamol and rub my feet.

Alcohol anesthetises against the sharper jags of grief, but lack of it the next morning brings reality into starker relief.

Abstention is not currently an option. Perhaps the answer is to stay drunk…

“Would you love me if I walked like this?”

Posted in Every day survival, Uncategorized by

M

As someone who needs something to worry about, my current fear is that I might forget Him.

OK, not Him, but the little things He used to do.

One buried memory came to me in my sleepless state last night. Sometimes I would wake to find Him propped up on His elbow, asleep, swaying to and fro like one of those wooden pecking bird toys. So enthusiastic was the swaying, that occasionally His nose would nudge into my back. (Yes, you sniggering at the back, it WAS His nose.)

Another bed-based memory is of Him sleeping, perfectly straight, in a diagonal across the mattress, bisecting it into two equal-sized triangles, leaving just a tiny corner for me to curl up into.

I found the empty wrapper of a Breathe-Right strip at the back of a drawer and it reminded me of how I used to hold His nose during the night to stop Him snoring.

Sometimes when He walked in front of my daughter and me He’d lift His knees up one by one and say, ‘Would you love me if I walked like this?’

Photos hold static memories, or memories surrounding a moment in time. But the camera cannot capture the essence of the person, the precious M minutiae which made Him, and our relationship, unique.