I have been a widow for very nearly three years and that significant third anniversary looms just head like maths homework on a sunny weekend when I was fourteen years old. I don't quite know why three years seems so momentous but it does. I've always thought there was something special about the idea of three. I should have come to terms with all the misery by now but I haven't and to be totally honest I never really expected to. There is sometimes great consolation in bouts of sadness.
I still talk to him when I'm out walking, especially when tracing the paths of those walks we did together and I've largely stopped caring that passers-by are apt to give me strange looks. This time a year ago when walking in London nobody even noticed such minor eccentricity or perhaps if they did they considered that despite my advanced age I had somehow or other managed to equip myself with an ultra-sophisticated mobile phone system that needed no obvious physical manifestation. When home alone I still converse with him - about books and History Channel docos and even suggest restaurants he might have once upon a time liked to try with me and where I hesitate to go alone. I still look around me at those he knew well, studied alongside or worked with and then at times I shamefully wonder why it is that they are still here and walk among us and he is not. And yes, I am well aware that such thoughts are not in any way healthy.
When I married him it did not occur to me for a second that I would have such difficulty when the time came to finally relinquish him. That was essentially a time far into the future and in any case for me it wasn't a marriage entered into out of love or at least not love in the way I had previously experienced it. I married him because he was clearly a good man, a decent man - and an interesting man. And furthermore because I thought he would treat my four year old son well - and he did. And because I thought if we had further children he would not favour them ahead of my first-born - and he didn't. And because I thought that he loved me - and he did. And added to all that, if I am to be brutally honest, I don't think anyone else had ever shown any inclination to marry me, had ever asked me, had ever admired and desired me as much as he did. His commitment to me was an intoxicating mix and I thought it was in my best interests to accept him whilst he still felt that way, before he had time to see sense and change his mind.
His family was appalled, particularly his poor mother, to witness her only child suddenly encumbered by a woman with a son born out of wedlock from London of all places. Understandably she found it difficult to be welcoming. The only point in my favour was my Roman Catholic background because she was a pious woman who never missed Sunday Mass. Her unmarried but definitely more worldly-wise sister was of a different opinion despite never having moved far from the confines of several South Island, New Zealand towns throughout her life and despite her even more devout nature compelling her to attend Mass on a daily basis if humanly possible. She maintained that only Good Girls had babies and added, somewhat shockingly, that Bad Girls got rid of them! She had already been won over by four year old Patrick, then at his most charming.
The general antipathy did not restrict itself to family and initially a few friends and colleagues were not over-enthusiastic about me either. There was a general feeling that he could have done better. One assertive Ward Sister (hospitals still had them back then) even went so far as to darkly hint that New Zealand doctors generally speaking reserved themselves for the nursing profession when making marriage choices. She made it sound as if he had somehow let the side down, that the nurses of New Zealand had been dealt a rather unnecessary blow. I found myself nervously almost commiserating with her at one stage for she was a formidable woman with a reputation for running her wards with a rod of iron.
Despite the teething problems and the reservations of friends and family, the many predictions of doom and gloom, we were married for forty-eight years. During that time we had momentous arguments, huge disagreements from time to time during which we hurled accusations and obscenities one to another but the magnificent thing about my greatly loved husband was that no matter what had been said or done in the heat of the moment he never, ever held on to grudges not for a single second.
On that Sunday morning three years ago when he died sadly he was completely alone and for me then the silence and the separation became stifling and stretched endlessly before me. I thought I would never again be able to breathe deeply. In the ensuing days and weeks I thankfully embraced Covid for abbreviating and truncating the ritual that follows death, preventing much of that which is customary and expected. I was incapable of doing the things that culture and society generally demand and so there was no funeral, no ceremony of any kind either then or since. And because I am aware that much of the usual procedures are for the living I wish it had not been so and that I could have done better.
For three years I have crammed the days and weeks with things I must do, people I must see, organisations I must join, books I must read and those I must write and I have waited for the pain to pass. Largely it remains like toothache, piercingly acute at times but mostly a dull throb in the background of a life filled with inconsequential activities.
I am inordinately comforted by the continuing sadness displayed by Patrick who remains desolate at losing his greatly loved stepfather. I am suffused with joy when people say how like her father Sinead is, how she seems to embody so many of those same qualities of kindness and concern for others. A little of the man I came to dearly love so obviously lives on in his daughter and reminds me why I never want to entirely rid myself of my own pain. It allows me to hold him close.
I told you it wasn't healthy didn't I?
