How am I?

 Grief is strange! I want people to ask me how I am, and I think that is mainly because I want my grief recognised, and yet it is too big a question to answer. When people have asked (and this is so much better than when people just ignore the fact that B has died), I have employed various answers: I’m ok; I’m up and down: today hasn’t been too bad; today’s been a better day; I’m fine (!), etc. I don’t tend to say I feel miserable, which is often nearer the truth. I try not to cry, although I don’t always succeed. In reality, though, the truth is, I don’t know how I am.

The other day I was having another sob and I wondered how long this was going to continue as, paradoxically, I don’t actually like feeling this miserable. I was then looking at Facebook and I saw another widow had written that she was still crying after nearly three years. This both encouraged me (okay, I’m only two and half months in, so this is normal / alright) and disturbed me (I don’t think I can bear to feel like this for three years).  Later, I watched Richard Coles speaking about his experience of losing his civil partner, David. One of the things he said really struck me: we don’t do grief, grief does us, and we don’t have a choice. That is exactly it! The grief is deep inside me, part of me, and I can’t change it, nor would I really want to as I miss B terribly. I have to learn to live with it. It is hard at the moment, particularly as I look forward and see nothing, but I know this will eventually change. I know it will get easier living with his loss but, in the meantime, I just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other. So that is what I am doing.

At the end of last week I scattered B’s ashes. It was a sad but good day (the sun helped, as did the beautiful setting), and I did have a sense of peace afterwards. It was where he had chosen, and when some of the ashes were carried off by the wind I had a sense of him re-joining the great creation of this universe, blowing out into the space that he had spent so much of his life studying. (I do know that in reality these ashes will probably end up in a different patch of soil, or in someone’s house, or under someone’s feet on a pavement, but it’s a nice idea!)