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RETIREMENT & LIFESTYLE PLANNING | |
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When your husband dies you have to work out what you are going to do with yourself. How you are going to live this life that has suddenly drastically changed its shape?
If, like me, you have been with him for quite a long time, you will realise that you have spent 35 years being good at being married, and are suddenly being asked - really in a split second, for death however expected is always a sudden shocking thing - to be good at not being married. It’s likely to seem a huge and terrifying task. You are lucky if you have got a job, because at least you can go on doing it - that much structure remains in your life. I found myself thinking at one point: isn’t it lucky I am only 58, with a job I love doing, imagine if I was 80, how would I cope.
It is evident from this that being widowed doesn’t sharpen the wits. Fortunately it didn’t take me long to realise that if I were 80 I would have had another 20-odd years with my husband and that could only be a good thing.
But still, there was the job that I am lucky enough to love doing; I got that bit right. It was, still is, writing, and that’s what I did with myself. I sat and wrote, vaguely at first, whatever came into my head – I know this is a creative writing class exercise but I’d never bothered with that kind of thing before – and eventually I realised that everything I did and read and saw and thought was turning into short stories. I regarded these as unpublishable, not because I thought nobody would be interested in them but because I imagined they were just for me. Then I realised that they were becoming a novel and, of course, I published it. (Never believe a writer who says she does not care about being published; writing is a conversation, it needs a reader, even if only one person, but of course we all want as many as possible). My book was called The Fog Garden and first came out in March 2001.
The novel is not about me - it is about a woman called Clare who is very like me, has had some of my adventures and a lot of my thoughts and who knows the things I know. Julie McCrossin on Life Matters asked me why I hadn’t written a memoir and I was surprised how horrified I was. That’s because I am a novelist, I turn what I apprehend into fiction. Even this vast event was not something I wanted to write as an autobiography. I never will be able to write such a book; I’ve already used up most of my life and a lot more besides in my fiction. What’s more, I like being able to make things up whenever I want. My imagination doesn’t want to stick to the facts; it’s interested in the truth.
People said, don’t worry, grief will pass, you’ll forget, you’ll recover. I found myself refusing this idea completely. I did not want to forget.
Clare isn’t me, and I am not the person who all through the strange, tightly strung days of 1999 wrote The Fog Garden. I look back at that person with a kind of wonder, and even perhaps a certain envy. The experience of grief at that time was immensely exciting. It was full of surprises, not the least being how erotic it was - that’s one of the things the novel is about. I had a sense of living at a special level of experience, not joy, or bliss, but heightened like them, and like them, addictive. Everything I looked at seemed highly wrought, poignant, full of meaning.
People said, don’t worry, grief will pass, you’ll forget, you’ll recover. I found myself refusing this idea completely. I did not want to forget. This grief was mine, it was a powerful emotion, exciting and energising, I had earned it, and I was not going to let it go. I still feel like that, but of course, things have changed. I am calmer, I am very good at living on my own, at being independent and making my own decisions, at the same time as I enjoy old and new companions. That rather breathless nervous edgy energy has gone, too, and I am growing plumper again. The two-year anniversary of my husband’s death was the worst time, for then – for a little while – I was depressed. I thought, well, this is it, and very dreary it seemed.
But, life goes on, and burying a husband is one of the accepted contracts it offers. We expect to bury our parents, and the hardest thing is when life breaks this pact, and we as parents end up burying our children; that is the saddest of all to bear. But when we marry and stay married this is what we undertake, and if we got married with the words of the old ceremony we were warned: in sickness and in health, so long as you both shall live. A marriage is accepting that one of you will die before the other.
It’s hard. Grief has two faces. One is selfish: how I miss this person. Thinking, Oh, I must tell G. that, oh he will find that so interesting … what was it exactly we did the year we went to … who was that person who … who said that funny thing about … I still do this, still begin a conversation in my head, and realise with a pang that there is no one to respond, that all those things are lost, lost. Trivial things, that matter to no one, except they were our lives. There is self-pity in this too, I hate having to do various things on my own, I wish he were here, I miss him …
The other face of grief is sadness at what the loved one is missing. Big things, children’s fates, your own successes (I think he would have liked The Fog Garden, which so strangely could not have existed had he been here to read it) and small, these perhaps the most poignant. I was driving down the street in the no longer new car that he hardly had time to enjoy, with Fauré’s requiem - a favourite of his - belting out on the CD player, into a spectacular sunset. How he would have loved this. And the thought that he is not here to take pleasure in these things with me hurts my heart, and it pleases me to know that my beloved grief is not lost to me.
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Your Life, Your Retirement. PO Box 1150N Armadale North Victoria 3143 Australia
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Email: publisher@yourlifechoices.com.auIS PUBLISHED BY
Copyright Retirement Publishing Pty Ltd 2001 -- ISSN 1031-6620 ACN 088 049 218
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