Lace

Today it is thirteen years since Greg died. I still remember those last 24 hours vividly as we sat around his Intensive Care bed and watched him fade away.  I have said before that I should stop counting the years, but it is hard to do. Like any anniversary or important date, it is hard to stop the mind from remembering and wanting to somehow mark it. If it were a wedding anniversary it would be called a Lace one. I feel as if I am looking through the gossamer fine threads to recall a time when all was well in our marriage and we were a normal couple, a normal family living in a normal household. Alcohol shot all that to pieces - to the fine gossamer thread I look through now. 

His death has in some ways left me strong enough to cope with living alone and dealing alone with everything that most couples share. Although friends sympathise, I am sure they don't realise that household chores, gardening, DIY - everything - are solely my domain now and not things that can be shared with a partner. If I don't do it, it doesn't get done. For the last week, I have been decorating one of the bedrooms, up to my eyes in paint and dustsheets, heaving furniture about, but still having to cook a dinner, wash-up, put the bins (trash) out and deal with all the minutiae of everyday life. Meanwhile the garden needs tidying and I need to get someone in to check an electrical problem. The list is never-ending, but I have no choice but to do it all alone. 

A few people have suggested I am young enough to look for another partner. For sure I spend far too many days alone and far too many a long evening watching far too much television to pass the dark evenings, but I am nervous to go down a route that might cause more problems than it solves. "Once bitten, twice shy" springs to mind.   Also, part of me now feels that after 13 years of making decisions for myself, I might find it hard to share decision making with someone else, over even the simplest of things. I'm reading a novel at the moment, where it mentions "women mourn, men replace". In other words men remarry faster than women. Whether I have mourned enough remains to be seen, but it is hard to shrug off a lifetime of memories and habits.  I also feel I would somehow be betraying Greg to move on.  

I admit freely that I miss the company and going for a spontaneous walk with someone, or sharing a thought, sharing a meal. It is not even as if I have any siblings or cousins I might spend some time with - I am the only child of an only child.  I have thrown myself into choir rehearsals and volunteering at the local foodbank to keep me busy and distracted, so as not to spend a day without talking to a soul.  Thank goodness, since November,  I have my daughter Kay, now living a fifteen-minute walk from me, although she is very busy with her career and has limited time to herself, let alone with me. I have spent the last couple of months helping her with her much-needed garden makeover, which has helped distract me and pass many an hour. I know it could be far worse, as you do hear of widowed people who are completely cut-off and don't see a soul from one end of the month to the next.

It is even harder in some ways for Kay at the moment. As part of her work, she is now working in the very Intensive Care ward where Greg died and sees his bed with someone else now lying in it. How hard must that be? She was just starting a Medicine course at university, when he died. She could have gone off the rails, turned to drugs or drink, and slipped through the net herself. To her credit, she fought hard against her emotions, studied hard, became the excellent doctor she now is and carved a bright future with a partner and home of her own. 

Meanwhile, today sees Kay and me visiting the crematorium to place flowers and look at the Book of Remembrance where Greg's death is listed. Proof it happened. Proof he existed. Something that, in reality, looking through the lace, seems to be slipping further and further into history.