Travelling through the third year

 Well, I’m here again! Sometimes I just feel the need to write… I write in my journal most days but, somehow, my blog is different – I write differently. Perhaps, knowing I’m going to make it public helps me to process my thoughts rather than just vomiting up my feelings onto a blank page in my journal. It might sound daft, but I think more when I write my blog rather than just venting and forgetting (not that that can’t be helpful).

Recently, someone I know lent me a book called ‘Levels of Life’ by Julian Barnes. If you’ve lost a partner I can’t recommend it highly enough, or read it if you just want to understand a little about what losing a partner is like. Read it anyway! It’s a short, simple read, and yet so eloquent. Barnes wrote it four years after his wife died. The first two sections are interesting and add to the third, or just read the third section where Barnes talks explicitly about his grief. The book did make me cry, but not because it is sad but because I identified with so much (though not all) of what he has written. It felt a kind of relief: ‘yes, that’s exactly it’, ‘I’m not the only one!’, ‘it’s okay to feel what I’m (still) feeling’… One thing I am very envious of is Barnes’ experience of the dreams he had of his wife. I have dreamt of B only a very few times, or at least I remember dreaming of him only a very few times, and, when I do, the dreams are sometimes weird and not always comforting. I wish I dreamt of him as he was, but I don’t! 

It’s nearly June, now, and another month has slipped by. Of course, the third year is different to the first year and different to the second year but as each new month arrives I still wonder how another thirty days or so can have passed by without B. Another whole month further away from him and, for better or for worse (it depends on the day as to which of these applies!), getting more used to his absence. I know this has to be a good thing, but it doesn’t always feel like it - it’s that head and heart thing, again! Perhaps the opposite to what one might expect, time seems to be going too fast. It’s almost two and a half years since B died – I’m no longer counting, but sometimes the distance just smacks me in the face! Another of his birthdays, the third without him, has rolled away. Time feels important and yet strange. It seems to fly by whilst, somehow, leaving me behind. It’s a bit like being at an airport and watching everyone else moving forward on one of those travelators, carrying on with their lives, whilst I’m still trying to step onto it. I’m not stuck but rather hovering in a strange liminal place between the past and now, not quite able to leave behind the time that has provided me with so much love, happiness, contentment, (as well as the odd row!). And, perhaps, I don’t need to but it’s learning to live with both worlds. It might sound like an anachronism, but the past is still here, present with me, just in a different reality or unreality. It's a bit like, I imagine, Sleeping Beauty must have felt having fallen asleep and woken up one hundred years later. She was in the same place except, of course, the changes over that time must have been bewilderingly different! It’s living in a familiar and yet now strange space whilst wondering what the heck has happened and why everything, even now, feels so peculiar, and then trying to find your place in it again. Barnes coined the phrase, the ‘past-present’ and that just about sums it up! Saying all this, it is, mostly, getting easier, though sometimes I wonder at the person that is emerging. I am me but I am different me (and some of the changes aren’t really explainable): I drink coffee; I eat more fruit; different things interest me; I listen to Radio 2; I go to pop concerts; I listen to / watch far less news; I go to bed later; various things are more, or less, important to me; I am more reflective; I get stressed too easily…

And that is one thing I’m still trying to cope with, I still get overwhelmed by things that I wouldn’t have thought twice about before, and it doesn’t feel good when this happens. And it annoys me! So, what I now try to do is to turn my thinking around and think about these situations as challenges - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but hey-ho! The trouble is, when I feel overwhelmed it tends to bring up all those feelings of grief, and it’s harder coping with things on one’s own when previously there’s been another to share with. It can still feel as though I am on a rollercoaster. Up and down I go, but I’m learning to accept the sad or the difficult days - they still come, and then they go. I used to tell myself off when my grief reared its head, but I read somewhere that that was not good, as it just reinforces the negativity, so it is as it is, par for the course, and I know that it will pass (though sometimes I have to remind myself of this). Some days I miss B more than others, and that is also okay. There hasn’t, yet, been one day when I haven’t not thought about him. I wonder what I will feel like when I realise that this has happened! Most of the time he’s just ‘with’ me; Barnes’ past-present. I do sometimes wonder whether I should I be doing better than I am but as Barnes asks, how do you measure grief? Grief, my grief, as least, has become a dance between the past and the present, darkness and light, hope and despair (though the latter is not nearly as bad as it was, thankfully), joy and sadness, laughter and tears, and reality and the unreal (and, it’s hard to explain, but these last two keep changing places with each other, just to make it more complicated!).

One of the things I have wanted most since B’s death was to find other people who understood what losing a partner is like, and to meet with them in person, not online. I didn’t need counselling or therapy, but just wanted to share with people who ‘get-it’. Recently, I came across a group I had never heard of before, called ‘Way Up’, for people across the country who are widowed, or have lost partners. I joined and a few weeks ago I went on a walk with some of them - there were about twenty of us - and it was so refreshing. As I was new, most people spoke with me and nearly the first question everyone asked was ‘how long is it since your husband / partner died?’ Straight to the point! These were people who have been / are going through it themselves and, consequently, they weren’t afraid to call a spade a spade. They were at ease, mostly, talking about death, difficult times through covid, and bereavement. Several people also said something like, ‘so, it’s early days for you then’, which was so reassuring! We enjoyed a lovely, relaxed walk and we talked about all sorts of things, not just grief. It wasn’t a sad occasion but that was why it was so good, everybody understood, grief is normal and something we live with every day. It doesn’t mean we can’t be happy, but life is different now and it’s okay to be sad too. And it was such a help! I’m used to talking about death and dying, it’s what I spent most of my working life thinking and talking about, but being both retired and bereaved has brought home to me just how little we actually talk about these things. Very few people talk about this stuff. The further down the line I get, the less B is mentioned. I (still) want to talk about him, it helps me to move forward, to process my feelings, to grasp the joy and let a little bit of the sadness go. Not talking about him, and how I feel, makes life harder not easier, but I’m not sure that most people understand this. Bottling things up definitely doesn’t help. 

One thing that is good is that I now know that I won’t forget B. This might sound silly, but for a long time I worried that I might do so. Perhaps the details are getting fuzzier but, somehow, I catch that feeling of deep affinity and the sense of home we had in each other. I know that B is not a figment of my past but remains part of my reality. He’ll always be a part of me. Again, it’s that past-present thing; those continuing bonds have appeared. In turn, I think this has helped me to let some of the sadness go and, somehow, it makes it easier to move forward. I’m not letting B go, I’m carrying him with me. I can live my different life, and that is alright. I know it’s what he would want for me. It’s sometimes easier said than done, though!

So, how am I? Overall, I feel that I’m doing alright, though I did have a bit of a down patch recently. I know it’s a danger sign when I start wanting to avoid people, so sometimes I still have to make myself ‘do it anyway’. Perhaps the hardest thing continues to be the juxtaposition of being alone and of being with others, and moving between the two. I can be perfectly content by myself and I can have lovely times with others, but the strange thing is moving from one to the other. I still find it quite hard when I’ve had a good time with other people to then go home. It’s not about being on my own, but the contrast between the two states. Somehow, it just emphasises B’s absence. It can happen the other way around too, as though being with others upsets the equilibrium I’ve established when I’ve been on my own. It doesn’t really make sense to me, but it still happens. 

So, I continue to put one foot in front of the other and, gradually, my life is expanding around my grief. I am definitely on a more even keel, and the sadness is definitely less. The feeling of pointlessness still comes and goes, but I am doing new things – Pilates, an art class, going to concerts, starting a couple of volunteer roles, going on a walking holiday (holidays are difficult!) - trying to live and appreciate my life to the best of my ability in each moment of time, and that’s all, I guess, any of us can do.