4th February

It has been one year and five months. Tonight I realised I can remember the feel of your kisses. I'm glad of that. (Those kisses that I'll never have again ... except in memory.) And tomorrow is the date of your  birthday. No, in fact it is today, already; I'm up so late. 

Now it makes sense that tonight I pulled out that chapbook of poems I wrote over the three months immediately following your death, and finished getting it into shape for submitting. 

It is so hard to believe so much time has gone past, although I can feel and see the ways I've changed and adjusted. But part of me is forever with you in your last days, and indeed in all the days we had together. Surely it was only yesterday? 

Time Has Passed, and Now I'm Different

It took a journey, different places, time away, for me to realise this. I went on holiday to places and people from my past, many of them pre-dating Andrew. It was an emotional pilgrimage and a wonderful holiday, both — but it was not that which changed me.

I returned, walked up my front steps and opened the door. It was a pleasure to be back. I enjoyed being home again, and my reunion with the cats. It was some little time before I noticed what was missing — the pang of grief at Andrew's absence from our home. Then I noticed what it was that was present — pleasure in my home, the one I have spent the last 15 months creating. It's no longer exactly the same one I shared with him. New furniture, new pictures on the walls, various items re-arranged ... one room has been completely and others partly transformed.

It has been a year. More than a year. During this time, by bit, I have remade my home and my life. They are mine now, not shared. I have gradually adjusted to living alone, to considering only myself. This took all of these past months. Even just before I went on holiday, I was noticing small ways in which I still had the habit of thinking what Andrew would like. (As soon as I noticed, I started reminding myself that he isn't here any more and I can do whatever I like. He certainly wouldn't grudge me — but even if he would, that's no longer relevant.) 

The very fact of going on holiday is an example of how I've changed. It was last-minute and spur-of-the-moment. I realise I have become quite spur-of-the-moment now, newly spontaneous. I often go to movies alone (which I don't mind) because the local cinema is so close that I can look at the program, think, 'I'd like to see that,' and then realise, 'I could go right now.' This was not possible when Andrew was ill and I was his carer. 

In case that sounds lonely, going off to movies by myself, let me add that I have an active social life. Back from holidays just a week, I've been out for coffee twice with different friends, had others visit me at home, made an arrangement to go swimming with yet another.... These things also were not so easy to manage in Andrew's last few years of life. I am in many ways freer now. 

Yes, there has been much grief and pain. I can still be triggered into tears quite readily. Yet I have adapted. Grief is no longer my main focus. Home doesn't feel so empty any more. Instead, it is nurturing. It has become my home; I fill it all by myself. 

But wait! Perhaps, after all, the holiday did have something to do with this — one event of the holiday, anyway. I had a lomi lomi (Hawaiian) massage from my friend Michelle, whom I stayed with while I was away. It was a blissful massage and also an amazing energy healing in which I released a lot of tears and toxins. It can’t be coincidental that I’ve come home to this big shift within myself. It is true that I have been adapting and adjusting over time, yet before I went away I was still finding it hard not to stay stuck in the grief. I believe the healing I received from Michelle allowed me to complete the process.

Afterword. New Resolution: Don’t Look Back

Mid-November was my wedding anniversary. Last year, so soon after Andrew's death, it wasn't an occasion for extra grief; it blended in with the rest, one long grieving process. This time, having finally arrived at quite a nice place after a year of grieving, suddenly I was hit with another round of crying which lasted the rest of the month. 

Looking back to the happy times, I cried because those times are past. Looking back to the traumatic times, I cried because I was unable to make life perfect for him. And then, watching a TV program about someone far gone with Alzheimer's, I cried with thankfulness that he (who had it only mildly) never got to be like that. 

Additionally, I've again experienced shaking and breathlessness, things I need to remember popping out of my mind almost as soon as they pop in, and the deadening effects of depression. 

'So I know the grief is liable to recur at all sorts of times, in all sorts of ways. I am not so stupid as to imagine I'll ever 'get over it'. But I don't want to court these recurrences. I've decided I must stop looking back. It will happen unbidden of course, so in practice that's likely to mean nipping it in the bud, switching my thoughts as soon as I catch them. 

It's not as if I've been suppressing my feelings for the last year. I don't think it's unhealthy if at this point I refuse to wallow. I might have many years of living left. I'd like to live them, not stay tied to the past.

So, OK, no looking back — but how do I look forward? The unknown future confronts me. I have no idea what direction it will take. Anything could happen. My only plan is to be present for it.

Becoming Someone I Don't Yet Know

It is already a little over a year. At first, when the year was up, it seemed a turning point. I could come alive; I could come into joy. But now I find myself sobbing again at unexpected moments, when a triggered memory reminds me that he's gone. It is as if I were reliving what it was like a year ago, so soon after he died. But I know it's not like that. (That was worse.)

Then I was not only grieving but very busy with all sorts of things that must be attended to when someone dies - paperwork, disposing of possessions, executing the will.... 

Now I have more time, less duty. I leave the dishes in the sink and feel guilty that in his last months, when he wanted me to leave them and come to bed, I would wash them anyway. I feel guilty not to have pleased him in this small way, but I also know that I was run off my feet in those months and was saving myself from being even busier next morning. The circumstances were different; I acted (and act) accordingly. I cry to think of cuddles I could have had instead of standing at a sink. Then I remember how often he stayed awake reading until I did join him, so we could have the cuddles anyway. Or we would have them in the morning ... or both.

I encounter feelings of surreality. I find myself thinking that nothing's normal any more — 'normal' being the way we did things as a couple. Now that I am single, I don't even eat the same food anymore. And I find, strangely, that I don't fancy watching movies I would have anticipated with pleasure seeing with him. That's a revelation: that some movies are pleasures to be shared and much of the pleasure is in the sharing.

There are others, of course, that I want to see anyway, and enjoy for myself. Some of them he'd have liked too; some he wouldn't have — none of that is anything new. But to find that movies I would have looked forward to now leave me indifferent because he is not with me, that's amazing.

After doing a Sunday market stall yesterday, I treat today as my Sunday. I think, when I get up, that I'll tidy the living-room some time today, but in fact I do very little of that. I spend most of the day reading. Again, I feel guilt. I know, at the same time, that if he had still been here, we might have had a lovely, lazy day together, both reading, and not feeling a bit guilty. It would have been cosy, companionable, a sweet treat. It's of course not the same now, but wouldn't you think I could at least enjoy this kind of day for its own sake? But I can't revel in it, and the thought of how it used to be makes me cry some more.

We had a companionate marriage, I decided last night, thinking about my three marriages. That's what made it so much better than the other two. Bill (husband number two) and I had some companionable times too, but we basically had different ways of operating. Although we enjoyed many of the same things — books, movies, travel — we had different ways of being in the world. He was an active man, and a lover of talk. I'm sedentary, reflective, and bad at making conversation.

For most of the time since Andrew died, my memory went over and over the last few weeks of his life, then the last few months and years since our move to this, our final home together at the beginning of 2010. It was six months after we moved in that he became ill and (as I now know) began his decline. I dwelt on that decline, as if we had no previous existence. But eventually I must have processed it enough, and began remembering further back, over the whole of our years together. More recently I have gone further still, back to my life before Andrew was in it — my long and eventful life. We both had long and eventful lives before we knew each other; then we shared another long, eventful life together.

I seem to be doing a kind of stock-taking. 

A year has gone by, and a bit more. The years will keep going by. I think that the time will come when my life with Andrew will take on some unreality. I am no longer afraid of forgetting him, as I was at first: trying to cling to the memories, even the traumatic ones. I have remembered that, 30-odd years ago when someone I was in love with died suddenly, afterwards I never forgot him. To this day I remember, and that was a much shorter and less intimate relationship than I had with Andrew. No, I won't ever forget, but I fear there will come a time when it isn't quite real any more — when it becomes just a story that happened to me once upon a time.

That is not quite how it is about Bill, nor about the other love who died. Those are things that happened a long time ago now, but they are still real and vivid. No, it is more that I am another person by now, to whom a lot of other things have happened. And of course I shall continue to live and evolve and experience new things. One day I won't be the me who lived with Andrew, who worked with him and travelled with him and made new friends with him, the one who taught him and was taught by him, who nursed him and lost him.

The me who experienced earlier sections of my life is still within me, part of me. So will Andrew's wife / lover / best friend be — but the whole of me will be something else again, incorporating that along with everything else, but also a new and different person. 

It must be so. Indeed it is good that it will be so — better than stagnating. But I see that what I am mourning now is probably myself as much as him: this self which is already in the process of changing.