People – talk to your loved ones, particularly your life partner, about death.

We generally avoided it because it was too morbid a topic and made us cry.  But I’m advising you from my current perspective – just once, sit down and talk things through, particularly think through what the person who’s left will have to deal with and will feel.  If nothing happens to either of you then all to the good.  But if the worst does happen, it will be so valuable to have had some idea what the other person would have wanted, and their comments while they were alive could be so useful and comforting to their partner down the line.

For example:

– Do you want to be buried or cremated?

– What would you want to happen to your ashes?

– Where would you want to be buried?

– How do you feel about reclaimed graves?

– Would you want your spouse to eventually be buried with you?

– What words might you want or not want on your gravestone?

– How would you feel standing by your partner’s grave and thinking about what was there?

– How will it make you feel to know the grave will have to be disturbed for you to be buried there also?

– Which of your friends might you expect your partner to stay in contact with?

– What things would you never want told or said to your remaining family and friends?

– How would you feel about your partner having to go through all your things after your death?

– Are there things you particularly wouldn’t want them to see or find?

– Do you have special requests about how some things should be treated?  (Eg please don’t bother to go through all those boxes there when I die, you can just throw them all out.  Or, whatever you do, please don’t show those old photos to so-and-so.)

– What would you say to your partner if you could speak to them six months after your death, as they walked alone through the cemetery?

– How would you feel about your partner moving out of your house/leaving their job/finding someone new?

– What words could you say now, to help your partner after you have gone – maybe to stop them thinking of suicide or getting deeply depressed?

Say these things to each other, just once, so you are prepared.

Just saw a balloon floating across the sky.  A child’s helium balloon, shining silver in the sunlight, high up.

I feel like all that’s keeping me in my current situation (I mean work, not life) is a tiny thread which just needs to be cut.  Then I’d be like the balloon, floating fast away, utterly free.

But of course I wouldn’t really be free (says the sensible part of me), I’d plunge immediately into money worries, and I have the responsibility of this house, which will take me months to clear out/pack up.

And there’s all my life to date, and all my memories.  Do I want to be free of them?  No.

(But I do overwhelmingly want to be free of work, so I think I’m going to cut that thread.)

In my sorting of John’s many miscellaneous boxes of stuff, I generally find they are 99% old newspapers and catalogues and bank statements etc, which can all be thrown out, but usually one or two precious things per box, like an old birthday or Valentine’s card from him, or something poignant or funny in his own handwriting.

Today’s such treasure is a typed piece of writing in a plastic pocket.  Now it’s not signed so I don’t know whether he wrote it, or if it’s a quote.  It’s also not dated but strikes me as very old.  If he did write it, I don’t even know in what context, because it was him who was bereaved early in his life (by the death of his parents during his teens), so why is it about someone else joining him in death?  (Unless maybe he just wrote it when he was walking the Pennine Way and I was his ‘backup’, and I’m just reading the symbolism into it.)

Was it written with me in mind?  I’ll never know.

Anyway – in the current context – it’s just about the most moving and significant thing I’ve found, and near the top of the list of most precious treasures.  It’s like message from him to me, from beyond the grave.

I am with you now,

I am sitting in the lee

Of a large rock, in a high place,

On a warm and windy day.

Can’t you see me waving?

From where I am I can see you clearly –

You are not so far away,

But your eyes are looking at the ground.

I have a flask of tea

To share with you.

It’s inside my coat, next to my heart,

Keeping warm.

I call to you,

I call to you –

But my voice is carried off into the hills

Still, I do not fret…

You are climbing closer all the time,

And soon we will be together again.

“Here’s me, reading one of your Charlie Brown books (“You’re on your own, Snoopy” – wonder why I chose that one)”

“Here’s the grieving widow, having to park in the car park under the flyover we used to go to together.”

“Here’s the grieving widow, looking at the spot on the ramp, where I always used to drop you off for work, thinking that I just have to see that as another life now, a previous life.”

“Here’s the grieving widow, trying not to look up at the building in which you used to work.”

“Here’s the grieving widow, going into the Solicitors which we once used when we were buying our house, thinking how strange it is that I’m now going in on my own on different business.”

“Here’s the grieving widow, imagining you walking round the streets you were familiar with, knowing I’ll never bump into you again, never be able to tell you what I’ve been up to.”

“Here’s me, overwhelmed with profoundness (yes, I know, profundity) and loss.”

“Here’s me, on my own.”

John and I used to talk about ‘synchronicity’ – basically, coincidence.

Recently I keep getting synchronicities.  Today at work I did a horrible thing that I had planned to do on a quiet day if possible – printed all John’s emails to me at work, so I can keep them in a file (and delete them from the system so no-one else could ever look at them).  I can’t bear to read them now, I had to try and look away as I picked them off the printer, but I want them for the future, as they are at least a record of some of our interactions and conversations (as opposed to all those actual conversations that I made the mistake of never recording or videoing).

I stood protectively by the printer for ages, waiting to be challenged about what I was doing, in which case I would probably just have said, printing 8 years of emails from my husband.  There were over 500 and it resulted in a massive pile of paper which I’ve brought home with me.

But the weird thing was that one of the emails that caught my eye was about the ‘Philips Building Noise’.  We had a couple of periods, probably at least 5 years ago, when there was a noise pollution problem, a high pitched whine coming from a building near our house that’s been converted into flats.  We had a visit from someone once but they didn’t take us seriously, because you couldn’t hear it very clearly when there was a lot of traffic noise.  Anyway eventually, we ‘won’ though, because someone from the Council ended up going up on the roof of the building and actually sent us a sound recording asking if that was the noise we were on about.  It turned out to be a faulty boiler, and we were so pleased when it eventually got sorted because it had been something that had depressed us.

So – today at work I come across that issue again, and tonight when I get home (with the pile of emails under my arm), guess what?  For the first time in years, I can hear the Phillips Building Noise again.

“Synchronicity!” John would have said.  Quite a big one, I think!

This is sort of a private horror now, when something happens which was previously an issue that you were both concerned with or talked about, but now there’s just me experiencing it – the person you used to share something with has just gone from the planet.  It seems unbelievable, it was something that was so much part of our shared history.  To hear the dreaded noise again and not have him here to tell about it – or about the synchronicity of having seen the emails today – is just horrible.

When it first happened, I had a big reaction against possessions, all the things in our (my) house.  What value does some small trinket have, when you’ve lost the biggest, most precious thing that was in your life?  What’s the point of collections of china and horse models, of thousands of books and CDs?  I would have given everything, every last possession without question for his life, so what’s left is meaningless.

But then I’ve gone through a phase of valuing the familiarity of the things I own.  I’ve lost him, but I’ve still got some other things from my previous life.  Now possessions seem precious again.  Of course no-where near as precious as him, but reminders of so many past times and different places.  And they have given me pleasure and comfort, to hold something, to look at things.

I’ve pulled out my collection of brooches – they look so beautiful all together, a shame no-one else sees them.  I have put miscellaneous objects which I’m coming across in my clear out in a cabinet, things that catch my fancy, that’d I’d forgotten I owned.  Some wooden carved lizards, a painted ostrich egg, an unusual teapot.  Am I allowed to enjoy them?  Am I allowed to spontaneously order another Breyer horse model on the internet, even though I’m supposed to be packing the collection up and throwing things away?  Just because it gave me a moment of pleasure to choose it, to unpack it, to have it in my hand?

I suppose I’m like a child with an urge to have a new toy for comfort.

The trouble is I think I’m going full circle again.  What will happen to these things when I’m gone?  Who will care?  What’s the point of possessions?  What’s the point of anything?

How poignant that things – all those museums and shops and houses full of things – outlive people.  He’s gone forever, but the little round Bakelite container he so liked sits on a shelf still, guiltily (unforgivably) continuing to exist.

I’ve tried to cheer myself up by going to see a film today – Jurassic World!  I thought some nice straightforward dinosaurs would lift my spirits.

It sort of worked during the film.  It was captivating and escapist and I enjoyed it.  The trouble is, I’ve noticed, that when you’ve been absorbed with something like that, it’s actually more of a blow, a wrench, to come back to the real world and remember your situation and your problems.  It’s happened to me before recently, when someone gave me a computer game to try.  Your mind is drawn into this escapist, unreal place, and then it’s like reality is more real when you return to it.  You’re upset and reminded of your new status all over again.  You’re dragged down deeper under water.

Of course I can’t help thinking, poor John will never see that film.  I can’t talk to him about it, discuss it with him.  We always used to laugh about this concept in the Jurassic Park films that because something is a herbivore and not a carnivore, it’s okay to wander around right next to it and pat it on the nose, because of course it won’t hurt you.  What, like elephants and rhinos and hippos?  Like a bull in a field?  Like a stag, or a wildebeest, or a buffalo?  It’s only a herbivore, so let’s just walk right up to it, shall we?  Brachiosaurus?  Largest land animal that ever lived?  No problem, it only eats leaves, so let’s have a nice safe stroll between its giant feet!

Well, they still had people going on rides right next to herds of massive herbivores – but otherwise, it wasn’t too annoying.

I just have a problem at the moment with the world going on.  Every person in that cinema is just living, not thinking about dying every moment.  Everyone still here is here by default.  Yet I’m so overly aware, now, that it’s all temporary.  It’s all just like a funfair ride, and we’re all approaching the moment when we have to get off.  And we won’t even know about it.  And the world will go on without us.  There’ll be another Jurassic Park film we’ll never see.  There’ll be seven billion people still living on the planet, still reading the same books, listening to the same music, watching the same films and TV programmes we’ve seen.  So you’re gone from the world, but it goes on.

It’s difficult to explain – just something jars so much with me, that the world still exists to be experienced and commented on, but he’s not here any more to experience it and comment on it with me.