These are the Casablanca Steps, which I have written about in A Widow’s Words.
A jazz band that plays cheerful, humorous songs at the country shows – I have seen them often. It was horribly difficult the first time I saw them after my loss – knowing that the person I had watched them with before would never see them again.
They can’t know how poignant they have become for me.
One of my goldfish has died. Farthing. (Came after Orange, Lemon, and Clement.)
It was the most placid fish, and seemed to have a calming effect on the others. It was a ‘neutral’ fish – it was never aggressive, never bullied the others, and it seldom got chased or bullied itself. I thought of it as probably female because of this behaviour, but can’t be sure.
For about a week it became listless, sitting at the bottom of the tank and not swimming around. I separated it yesterday morning and it was clearly not well, not able to right itself, floating on its side.
It once before nearly died, after I first got it, but somehow it recovered, so this had sort of been its extra life anyway (about two years).
I hoped it might survive but found it dead late last night. I have buried it in a place that only I know.
It’s only a small death, but nevertheless… the spectre of death presenting itself again.
It does of course make you aware of the parallels of when a person close to you had their last few days and died.
Poor Farthing. You shared a bit of my life with me, in a small way.
I do wonder whether the remaining fish, for a moment, in some part of their brains, notice the absence of one of their companions. (‘What happened to that nice quiet orange fish with the big tail that we used to swim around with?’) This is something we humans will never know – such a thought could not be detectable or measurable. Maybe if there were only two fish, the remaining one might change in its behaviour, indicating an awareness of loss. But with several remaining, they all behave as normal and there’s no way of knowing if they know or care (unlikely).
Never mind, I care.
Dear John
It will be three years soon, and I’m still living in the same house, the same area.
I need to move and am working towards ‘letting go’. I don’t want to be faced with difficult spots, painful memories wherever I go. I think a fresh start would be a good idea now.
But I’ve lived in the same house for 20 years. I’ve spent 2 years tidying and sorting and now know every corner and where everything is.
I’m attached to it, I’m comforted by the familiarity, and I don’t fancy the disruption of a move.
Nevertheless, it has to be done.
In other news –
I keep seeing things in my local area that I want to tell you about, that you would have been interested in.
That new school has opened already, by the station, which you thought was in such a bad spot because it would add to already ridiculous traffic.
They have added more ‘street furniture’ everywhere in the form of benches, which promptly become used by large groups of vagrants drinking beer all day. (I remember your opinions on street furniture!)
Yet another place we knew well has closed – the Indian takeaway ‘Depa’ which we used for so many years for deliveries. I don’t like things that provided me with comfort not being available any more (!!!)
You would hardly recognise the area around Victoria station – so much new building, huge new office blocks and new bars and restaurants (which we could have explored).
And finally –
I saw a small dead black and white bird on the pavement right in front of me today, in the town centre. Must have been a pied wagtail, hit by a car.
Unusual. Not nice. I refuse to give it any significance.
Everything earlier than this point in the ‘Bereavement Blog’ has been included within ‘A Widow’s Words‘, as has the whole of ‘John’s Blog From Heaven‘.
However this is still an issue for me so I’ve decided I will continue it periodically.
It has occurred to me that this is probably the first time in my whole life that I have spent a Christmas or New Years Day entirely on my own. We would always have shared them together, and before I’d met John I would have been with family.
I did spend Christmas with family, but today I’ve been all day at home alone, trying to treat it like any other day, and getting on with things like sorting and washing.
But it’s not any other day. It’s the first day that it’s already that he died last year, not this year any more. Everyone comments on the passage of time, my life is racing on. But I feel utterly adrift with a completely uncertain future.
I didn’t stay up for the new year. What’s everyone celebrating anyway? The fact that the world has kept on turning?
I don’t think I’ll ever be singing Auld Lang Syne again, not without John to sing it with.
I’ve just been shopping in the town centre, looking for a few Christmas gifts, and buying myself some ‘special’ bits of food, the sort of thing that’s only available at Christmas. As I walk around town I find myself constantly cross-checking everything against John’s existence, and my loss. So it’s, ‘that’s the shop I bought him that expensive anniversary watch in’, ‘that’s the shop that used to be Past Times where we often used to look at things together’, ‘that’s the bench where we sometimes used to meet up’, ‘that’s the shop where he bought me such and such’, ‘this is where I once bought him a nice shirt’, ‘we once ate spag bol in that cafe’, ‘that’s the car park pay machine we’d go to together’, ‘this is where he’d wait for me when I went to the Ladies’, ‘that’s a book he would have liked’, ‘that’s the shop I bought some plastic flowers in for his grave’, ‘that’s the street I walked along back from town, the night he actually died in the hospital’… and so on!
I realise that this sort of thinking is becoming totally debilitating to me. I’m annoyed by it, but can’t seem to stop. John himself would be annoyed by it if he was here. I have to get a grip on things, I know. Put a giant pair of blinkers on, and just walk from A to B, do what I need to do, without thinking back constantly over everything, and being distracted by reminders. Live for today, not in the past.
I had to look something up in my old diaries – when I previously went on a particular course, turns out it was eight years ago.
I didn’t like the experience of having a pile of old diaries in my hand and thinking, for every one of the days here, he was alive (well that’s the good and comforting bit) but didn’t know he was soon going to die (that’s the nasty bit).
I particularly didn’t want to look up the day he died in previous years, but I couldn’t help glancing at a couple. I was sort of afraid it would be something nice and significant that happened, which would then have an awful tinge put on it, to think that at the time we didn’t know that x years later, he would die on that day. For the two years I looked at, it (22 January) was an insignificant day, nothing particular noted down. But I’m still thinking – that day passed and I didn’t know it was the day that…
So I’m holding those diaries and thinking – one of these days, these dates, will be the date that I die. And maybe someone (but probably nobody) will be looking through these diaries and saying, oh how poignant, she ended up dying on the day that such and such happened.
I expressed this sentiment to someone and was told it was unhealthy thinking. Quite true, clearly. Everyone on the planet lives through the date they’re eventually going to die on – but you don’t know which it is and there’s nothing you can do about it. You have to forget about it and just live.
I’ve always thought my over-profoundness is an affliction. Seems it’s at its worst now.
Went to a Bereavement Group meeting and heard some horrible stories about other people’s recent experiences. I suppose there does come a point when that isn’t helpful – it would be better, maybe, to go to some different type of meeting now, that would help me to be more cheerful and move on, rather than dwelling on horrible things and sadness.
I talked about how I felt about it being the one year anniversary of the start of the ‘hospital period’, how I had to push it out of my mind a bit because it made me flinch to remember what it was like, visiting him every single day for so long, and never being able to communicate, and gradually losing hope. If I’m not careful, it can feel like he’s still there in that hospital and it’s all happening again. I can so picture every part of it, all the details of what happened.
On the day that was the anniversary of.. it happening, I went to the place and ‘paid my respects’, and also went to the Cemetery and left a beautiful big bunch of purple lilies (which neither he nor anyone else he knew will ever see). I must be careful or my profundity about all this will become debilitating.
I deliberately went Christmas shopping afterwards, and now I am keeping myself busy finishing off my newly decorated bedroom, just as a way of trying to return to normality and stay in the real world.
It doesn’t mean I’m not (very) aware, or that I’ll forget.
Earlier on, I wrote that at first feelings of grief take up most of your mind, like a paddock taking up most of a field. Then the paddock shrinks and other feelings reappear as well, but the grief in the paddock is always there, you have to learn to live with it.
Metaphor for today: At the moment I feel like grief keeps escaping from the paddock, it won’t be constrained. I imagine it like a horse that I go and catch, and lead it back through the paddock gates, into the space it’s supposed to be kept in. Stay here, grief-horse, I’ll come and walk with you sometimes, but let me have life apart from the grief, can’t I? Keep out of this grief-free part of the field that is my mind.
But he escapes, the horse. He jumps out, he crashes through the fence, he charges round all the areas he isn’t supposed to be in. He won’t be ignored, he won’t be shut up in one space.
It’s not working, this trying to keep the grief in one place.
I was sitting in a nice place recently and suddenly remembered the idea of John being with me in my heart, seeing the world through my eyes. It inspired a rather sentimental short story, exploring the idea.
I wonder what you think. See ‘Together‘. (Click on link)
Cathy's Castle 
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