What if?

R's uncle Les was a troubled man.

He had signed up for the army right at the start of the 2nd World War. He was injured at Dunkirk and captured a little later, and then spent the rest of the War in a PoW camp. After his camp was liberated, he spent months and followed a very circuitous route trying to get back to Britain.

As a result, he didn't make it back home until 1946, by which time the son he had left behind was a young teenager who had essentially grown up without a father. The family never really gelled, and Les's relationship with his son was a difficult one throughout his life.

In my memories, Les was a friendly, yet slightly reserved man, who was always kind and courteous to me. We got along fine, but it was easy to see that his relationship with his adult son was very strained, and they saw very little of one another in the later years beyond a short 'duty' visit every six months or so.

I have no idea what their family situation had been like before the War, but the 6-year separation combined with the very different courses their lives had run made it impossible to simply resume where they had left off and they were unable to ever make up the lost ground. To such an extent that, when he died, it was R's Dad who arranged Les's funeral - not his son.
It was so sad to see.

Lately I have been musing about how it would be if the thing I have hoped and prayed and begged and yearned for were to actually occur and R were to come back. If he were to just walk in the front door one Friday evening as he always did.

After the initial joy and euphoria had worn off, would we be able to take up our life together again where we had left off, as though he had simply been away on business for a while? Or would the forced separation have taken its toll on our relationship?

I have changed. I know I have, even though it has only been 18 months.
I am smaller, fitter and tougher for a start. Although I wasn't exactly fat before, I was on the verge of contentedly tipping into middle-aged spread. The food I now put on the table has changed a lot from the hearty meals we used to eat and I am very conscious of the need to stay healthy.

Naturally the intensity of emotion I have experienced has changed me. Tears come so easily now, and I have more empathy for other people who are feeling pain. Clawing my way up from the pit of despair has made me stronger. I have a different understanding of what is and what isn't important.

Of necessity I have become more independent and am learning to make my own decisions. I feel I am slowly becoming more confident in dealing with people and in social situations. I have burned most of his useful wood!

And R? How would he be? Where would his journey have taken him? Would he be the same carefree soul he was when he left? Surely he could not be unmarked by what happened to him.

How would we knit these two lives together again. Could we do it? Or would the divergent paths our lives had taken be too far apart to join once more?

A simple equation

X
(R's Useful Wood collection, of which this is but a small selection.)

+ Y

(And I know it isn't in the ideal place, but I can't get to the work bench until I have dealt with the wood problem).

=

Aaaah. That's better.

Spring cleaning

It is a little early, I know, but there is something about the low late-Winter sun shining through the windows that triggers a cleaning frenzy in me.

I have always been very conscious of not wanting to turn the house into a shrine to R. There is a lady in our village who hasn't changed a thing in her husband's office since he died 20 years ago. While I acknowledge that she may gain comfort from this, I think it would ultimately have the opposite effect on me - keeping me stuck at an early stage of my grief and not allowing me to move forward. I want my house to be a home, not a museum.

In some respects I was 'lucky' in that I spent 3 nights at the hospital with R, while his family stayed at our house. This meant that they had to change the sheets on our bed while I wasn't there. At the time this didn't matter as we were all expecting him to come home again, so when I spent my first night at home alone, it was in a bed with freshly-laundered sheets. Would it have been a comfort to have had the scent of him there with me as I slept? Possibly. I don't know, but I survived without it. And at least I didn't have the dilemma of when to wash them!

As I was cleaning the bedroom yesterday morning, I suddenly had the urge to move the furniture around.

The room had essentially frozen in the configuration it was in on the day R died: the furniture was in exactly the same position, the same pictures on the walls, ornaments on the dressing table, ...

So I changed it.

Different duvet cover, swapped the pictures for some others that hadn't yet found a home, removed a chair, moved some other bits and pieces and bought myself some flowers.

It was nothing dramatic - it's a bit girlier than before, that's all - but there was something very symbolic about changing the way the room looked.

And the last thing I did before leaving the room was to take a deep breath and remove R's dressing gown from the hook where it has remained for the last 18 months.

Wallowing

I'm not sure if wallowing is exactly the right word for it. But certainly feeling uncharacteristically sorry for myself.

I went into the Christmas period in a very positive frame of mind.
My family were coming to me for the festivities, I had managed to buy gifts for everyone, had organised everything like a military campaign and was very much looking forward to it. And it was a happy time. Even without R, there were fun, games and laughter, and it was a joy to have everyone - particularly the children - around me for a couple of days.

Then they went home. And the snow came back with a vengeance.
The rest of the holidays were mostly spent confined to barracks. Friends who were planning to visit couldn't make it because of the weather, and a trip I had planned also had to be cancelled. Had R been here, it would have been wonderful to have been snowed in together with no work to do, and no means of getting to it in any case – there is always a freezer full of food, a stacked woodpile and a full wine rack - we could have lasted for weeks!
Instead it was a frustrating and not a little lonely time.

I once read on another widow's blog that the 2nd and 3rd years were the hardest. At the time I was still bound up in all my raw-edged pain and shock, and couldn't believe how that could be possible. There was no way it could get any harder.
But I am now starting to understand what she meant.

The only way I can find to explain it is that I have spent the last 18 months grieving entirely for R.

Now it's my turn.

I can finally allow myself to really mourn my lost future.
I can let my guard down long enough to admit how bloody difficult this all is. Not just the fact that I have lost the person I loved most in the world, but also that the day-to-day reality is hard. That shovelling snow on my own makes quite a good workout for a couple of days, but the novelty has very much worn off after a couple of weeks. That it really is sodding unfair when the melting snow brings down all the guttering from the back of the house, sending it crashing through the porch roof. That I’m allowed to cry with frustration when I can’t get the 4x4 started – and the only reason I had kept it was to see me through the snow season. That the day-to-day reality of keeping animals is so relentless when there is only one person to do it – and that person has to work full-time to keep the whole house of cards upright. That there is little joy in planning the next phase of the house renovations on my own. That the apparently cheerful, outwardly-coping person is so tired of feeling sad and lonely on the inside.

That was my mood through most of January.

It didn't help that I had a long and difficult assignment to do for most of the month that prevented me getting outside to do the chores that needed doing out there.

Self-pity isn't pretty, so I kept that to myself.

Happily I seem to have found a path out of the Slough of Despond for now. I have made some decisions, started planning things again, and once more appear to have the energy to deal with problems as they arise.

February would appear to be my month for resolutions.

All that is for another post, though.

Flat-pack furniture

The Ikea Vika Artur. A useful piece of kit. It is so much easier for me to lug around the trestles and table top separately than as one whole unit.

They take just five minutes to assemble.

And 45 minutes to find where R had hidden the Allen key.

Sigh.

Two steps forward...

No sooner do I find my way back to the blog than British Telecom decides to pull the plug on me!

Yesterday afternoon my Internet connection just stopped working. The line itself was fine - I could get a dial tone - but the broadband had disappeared.

Here at the unfashionable end of the communication network this isn't an infrequent occurrence. My house happens to be right next to an exchange box, and often the problem is simply that an engineer working on it has thrown the wrong switch. On occasions, I have been able to rush outside and say something to the effect of, "Excuse me my good man, would you mind awfully giving me my broadband back", which generally has the desired effect.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to do this yesterday and as the job I am currently doing requires me to work on a remote server, and no Internet = no work, this could only mean one thing....
I would have to ring BT Customer Services.

Cue the Hammer House of Horror scream!

These phone calls go something like this:
Me: Hello, I think there is a fault on my line.
Customer Services: Oh I'm sorry to hear that, shall I test the line for you, Madam?
Me: You won't find a fault. I am ringing on the line. It is simply that my broadband has been switched off.
CS: I'll test it any way....[Tests line]... No Madam. Your line appears to be working fine.
Me: Yes, I know it's fine. But someone has switched off the broadband part.
CS: Oh, then you have come through to the wrong department, if it's a BT Broadband problem, you need to speak to them.
Me: No, I'm not a BT Broadband customer. You have just switched off the ADSL part of the service.
CS: If you're not a BT Broadband customer, then you really need to speak to your own Internet service provider.
Me: [Losing will to live] But the problem is with the line...

At one point in his career, R had worked on a help desk so he seemed to know the magic words or secret handshake that you need to move from the person in the call centre reading a script to the real techie person who can actually do something about your problem. Sadly he didn't get round to sharing it with me before he died, and I had a conversation along the lines of the one above last night.

By that time I was tired and exhausted from banging my head frustratedly against the wall and simply went to bed.

This morning I had a phone call from a neighbour who told me that everyone in the village had lost their broadband and that BT were working on it down at the exchange, but it would take another few hours to get it back.

So what did I do in those few hours?
I drove to Shrewsbury and bought myself a mobile dongle thingy so that next time it happens I can simply plug it in and keep working. So there, Mr BT. Who needs your silly part-time land line?

****

A propos of very little, as I was driving through town towards Shrewsbury this morning, I saw no few than 5 older gentlemen with large (natural) white bushy beards.
Do you think they might have been interviewing for a certain job...?

A new level

A couple of months ago I took what I thought was going to be a short blogging break.

There didn't seem to be a lot of point in announcing it as it was only supposed to be for a couple of weeks.
At the time I was rehearsing for a play - an 'entertainment' really - and assumed that I would get straight back to blogging when the rehearsals were over.

But something happened in the intervening period.
I don't know whether it was the intensity of the rehearsal process, or the fact that it allows you to make a fool of yourself in a safe environment, or just because it is darned good fun, but it was like a huge injection of life-giving vitamins.
I really rediscovered my 'normal'. The fun me, the person who gets involved because it is good to be out there with people.
I didn't realise how much I had missed her until I became reacquainted.

And my appreciation of R's death seems to have changed as well.
It seems weird to be saying after 15 months that I finally realise he is dead, but that is almost how it feels. I now know it in my heart as well as my head. It is bloody hard to type those words, but I know they are true.
This knowledge, this belief has opened up a door to another level. As in those old-fashioned platform games like Prince of Persia. A monumental leap to another rooftop has allowed me to escape some of the demons that have been dogging my tracks, leaving me lighter and able to run forward faster.
I don't know whether this is acceptance, or something close to it, but it does give a feeling of peace.

I still sigh and I still cry. I still have periods of total inertia when I can't get up from the sofa. I still talk to R in my head all day long. But I feel different.
I feel like me again. Not R's widow. Me.
My get up and go has come back from wherever it went. I'm starting to make plans again. I'm starting to think about what I want to do, rather than just getting through the days.

All this made me reluctant to come back to the blog. It felt as though it would break the spell somehow.
But a chance visit to the e-mail account that I use for my forays into the blogging world found an e-mail. A message from 2 months ago from someone who had visited this blog and had taken the time to write me a kind, generous and interesting reply. I felt a little shame-faced that this had gone unanswered for so long, and so dropped in here - only to find some more messages wondering where I was.

I am so sorry to have caused people to worry, however momentarily, so an update seemed in order. Now I have started to write again, I am remembering how good it made me feel to sort out issues in my head and transfer them to the screen. And my mind is full of things I want to say once more.
So I guess it looks as though I am back. For the next while at least.