Archive: December 2020

Time is slowly drifting by. It’s 12 weeks since we married. Nine weeks since Steve died. Seven weeks since his beautiful funeral. The days come and go, shorter and shorter, darker and darker, until Monday’s shortest day, the Winter Solstice. Yule, the ancient festival marking the victory of light over darkness, the end of the cycle of death and decay and the beginning of a new cycle of growth.

I spent some time on Monday creating a Solstice mandala on Steve’s grave. I was there at midday on the shortest day of the worst year of my life. Nobody else was visiting the burial ground, the rain had been so persistent that even though I was there during a brief few hours without rain, every gust of wind sent a shower of raindrops down from the branches above. My only companions were a pair of deer tentatively browsing among the undergrowth. The only sounds were the pattering of falling droplets and some occasional birds sounding alarms or singing in the distance. It was good thinking time, as I let the pattern emerge, picking berries and fir cones and leaves from my bag full of foraged natural beauty that I’d been collecting over the previous week.

As I worked, I let my thoughts drift. I don’t have any yardstick to measure where I am or how I’m doing. People ask me how I’m doing a lot. And I usually take a moment to try and work it out. Mostly I think I’m ok. And occasionally I’m very, very not ok. As I laid handfuls of holly berries on the moss covering Steve’s grave, I thought back to Friday last week, the last time I was not ok.

I had volunteered to donate plasma after my positive test when Steve was diagnosed with Covid 19 at the end of September. A nice lady had eventually phoned me at the beginning of December and asked all of the screening questions, eventually telling me I was suitable to be tested for antibody levels to see if I had sufficient to become a donor. The appointment had to be delayed while I went into a second bout of isolation after my grandson brought Covid home from a supply teacher, and shared it with his mum and siblings, but the appointment was set for the 18^th.

I hadn’t really thought through how I would feel until I was driving to the blood donor centre in Edgeware. It was the first time I’ve driven anywhere that I hadn’t been to before since Steve died, and I was aware that this made me feel a bit nervous. When I found the centre, I parked the car and walked in and then was suddenly hit by a wave of emotion that I found hard to push down.

It was the first time I had set foot in a hospital since he died. Before he was taken to the hospital where he would battle against Covid, I had accompanied him to every single appointment at every single hospital, from the day he was first investigated for cancer. Every single one. Even when I wasn’t allowed to go in with him to see the GP or consultant, I went as far as I was allowed, and then waited, in a corridor or in the car. And now suddenly I was in a hospital again, on my own. I found that I was shaking.

I managed to compose myself behind my mask and sat in a corner trembling slightly, waiting to be called. A lovely Irish nurse came and got me, and took me into a room and started sorting out the pin prick test and the phials for blood, chatting away as she did. And then she asked me if I knew how I’d contracted Covid. I told her that we thought that Steve had contracted it at a hospital appointment and then passed it to me and some other close family members. Of course, she asked if we were all ok. I hesitated a moment, and then I told her. She looked at me in horror, and started to cry, and to hold my hand and thank me and bless me and told me how brave I was to have offered to donate plasma after losing him. And I cried too and couldn’t stop. The two of us just sat in this little room while I cried with a kind stranger, a nurse who was in the front line of contracting Covid every single day. It was the first time I had had to identify myself, to define my new self in the light of what has happened, to tell my story to someone who had no idea. And it was really, really tough.

It didn’t get any easier even when I had managed to stop crying and sniffing – lovely Maureen whispered to a colleague about ‘the lady over there’, and for the whole of the next forty minutes while I was in the centre, nurse after nurse quietly approached and came over and gently offered their condolences and their thanks. My head was scrambled at this. They were thanking me? These wonderful NHS staff who were putting their lives and their families’ lives on the line just by going to work every day while the virus rampaged through the community, they were taking the time to come to me and say how sorry they were for my loss.

It was too much kindness, if there can be such a thing, and I sat back in the special chair with hot tears just rolling down my cheeks into my mask, probably rendering it completely useless. There was nothing I could do to stop the waves of deep, deep sadness.

When they had drawn enough blood, I left and drove home slowly, aware that I probably wasn’t in the best head space to be on the road and came home and just sobbed. The kindness of strangers was overwhelming, it had unlocked a dam that had obviously been building inside me for days and weeks.

I let myself think over this as the mandala reached completion. The pressure of living in grief, during the resurgence of the virus, listening to constant dreadful news, worrying about the new Tier 4 (in which I and all my children are now living) the cancelling of Christmas, the lorries causing Kent to come to a standstill, the borders closing against the UK, the approaching Brexit deadline with the very real possibility of no deal, the queues, the food shortages – as I write this, on the 22^nd, everything is chaotic and broken. Nothing is normal, for anyone. Nothing will ever be normal again. Now even the faint feelings of hope – of the vaccine on the horizon, of my having antibodies that might help keep me and my family safe as we face the winter months ahead –  has evaporated with news of the virus mutating and the questions about whether this new strain will be even deadlier than the first. Life feels precarious and dark and lonely and fearful.

And yet

In the kindness that tipped me into tears last week, there was a reminder that everything cannot stay dark and fear-filled forever. We are all bruised and numb and afraid, scarred by the experience of living through a pandemic. Ten months of fear and worry is etched into our national identity. Sometimes it explodes out in anger and denial, in refusal to comply with rules, to wear a mask and to stay apart from others, in belief in conspiracy theories and nanotechnology and 5G masts and all sorts. Other times, in other people, it is absorbed into the DNA, the thoughts, the anxiety, the strain. The isolation and loneliness. Many of us are bereaved and grieving while trying to cope with the unbearable pressure of everything having changed. And amidst all of this, there are kind people everywhere, behind the masks that we now have to wear.

There is such symbolism in those words. Behind the masks. Behind the masks there is compassion and caring and kindness and love. It takes just a second to see it when you need it.

As I stood and looked down at Steve’s grave and the beautiful pattern that had emerged from my bags of berries and leaves, something shifted. The tears came again, and I walked crying through the silent dripping trees and found the labyrinth. I had helped create it when I worked at the burial ground, and after Steve’s funeral we had walked it with the children and dog, drinking champagne and etching a memory of that day in all our minds.

I entered the mouth of the labyrinth, and walked carefully on the slippery mud, carrying a stone in my hand, thinking my sad thoughts – as we have taught the children. It takes a while to walk the meandering pathways, and your thoughts settle as you make your way to the centre, back and forth in a walking meditation.

When I reached the centre, I spent a few minutes on my own. A robin sang somewhere nearby, but otherwise all was still and silent. A memory drifted up into my mind. It was so clear. I remembered seeing Steve walking up the path to find me there, working in the labyrinth, on the morning of his father’s funeral in 2010. I could see him walking towards me smiling, with his strong stride, smart in his suit and black tie and beautiful black overcoat. It was a lovely memory, and I found myself unexpectedly smiling at the thought, at him smiling at me right there. For the first time, I was feeling a memory that wasn’t accompanied by the prickling feeling of sadness, the weight of loss that has come every time I try to think back to happy times.

I looked down at the little tree stump in the centre of the labyrinth, the destination that you walk to thinking your sad thoughts, where you leave the stone and all your sad thoughts behind and walk out again lighter and stronger. A jumble of stones and coins left by others who had walked to the centre littered the damp wood, with saturated leaves and twigs. It looked uncared for and purposeless, so I rearranged everything into a pattern that I liked, and then traced my way back out of the labyrinth and walked back to the car.

The clouds above me didn’t break, but something inside me was content. Some order had been returned. There are patterns everywhere. There is light after darkness, always.

One of the things that has surprised me the most over the last months is receiving the most wonderful, supportive messages and beautiful words from people who I hadn’t expected to hear from. Some are people that I hardly know, others who I have had a light relationship or friendship with, some who I have almost lost touch with, some who I have never met and only know virtually through online connections. Over and again, at moments when I have been feeling tearful and lonely, a message has arrived from someone or a phone call has come, completely out of the blue, and broken the spell of isolation by reminding me how connected we all are, even to those we don’t hold close to us.

It’s as if this enormous loss that I am experiencing has opened up channels of communication that I never knew were there before I woke up in this new existence. And somehow, I find myself feeling immensely close to a handful of people who have been there, just checking in, asking how I’m doing, reminding me that they’re thinking of me. Sending me a poem, a suggestion of a book to read, a link to a YouTube piece of beautiful music, a parcel, a gift, some flowers. Dropping me a message or an email with thoughtful, generous words of encouragement and kindness that lift my mood from the ebbing and flowing of sadness that underpins every day.

It’s beyond special, this instinctive reaching out that has been happening. It has come from people on the periphery of my life, but I think, without exception, all of the people who have been checking in regularly are people whose hearts have been broken, people who see a reflection of their own pain as they contemplate me and my grief. There’s a recognition that I am now one of them, one of the people who know the depths of sadness, deeper than anyone can describe or explain. Maybe each of these unexpected kindred souls are paying forward a kindness, a connection that they felt when they were at their bleakest and lowest. Maybe there is just a natural big-hearted impulse that comes over people who have learned to live with their pain and who want to help salve the pain that others are feeling.

To all of you, I want to say thank you. It means so much. It’s like having a soft touch on my hand, an arm put around my shoulders, a warm hug. There’s something about receiving such gentle reminders that I am being thought of that buoys my spirits. When the centre of gravity in your life has suddenly vanished, and you feel adrift and alone, knowing that people are sending you their thoughts and their kind wishes is like feeling a lifeline to the shore, it’s a new way of feeling your way back to safety and to solid ground.

Looking at the messages on my phone, there are some extraordinary, intimate conversations that have evolved between me and some of these lovely thoughtful people over the weeks since Steve was taken to hospital for the last days of his life. There’s a freedom in answering honestly about how I am truly feeling in response to someone asking me if I’m ok, and there are truths and raw emotions shared in the space that is opened up by someone pressing ‘send’ when they risked intruding or bothering me at a terrible time. To any of you who have worried that you might have intruded – you didn’t. You helped keep me steady.

I think what I’m trying to convey in this post is that, even if you think you might be being pushy or intrusive or over familiar with someone who is going through the worst of times, if your instinct is to reach out to them, do it. Your message might light up their phone at exactly the time they need to hear what you have written. Your words might be exactly what they need to straighten their back and keep going when they feel like curling into a ball and crying. Just knowing that you are thinking of them may be enough. It is for me.

I am beyond grateful to all of you who have taken the time to check in. Along with my close family and dearest friends, who have been constantly there and who have carried me through this, I have a new cohort of companions who I feel alongside me. They are the ones who keep gently calling my name, through their texts or their messages, the ones who keep reminding me I am not completely lost.  Thank you. You know who you are.

Almost two months have passed. Seven weeks since Steve died. Seven weeks of rolling waves of emotions, of reflection and remembering, interspersed among the detritus of the life that was before. One of the things that resonates strongly with me as I walk every day is just how much grief I have been immersed in, for so long.

We grieved together, for the future that would now not be, from the moment Steve was diagnosed, in June 2018. He had been having tests and investigations after he had finally given in to my nagging at him to go and have a PSA test done earlier that year. Bill Turnbull and Stephen Fry had both publicised the need for men of similar ages to be tested, and I had kept on at Steve to get a test booked. His GP was reluctant initially, but after insisting, the test was done and came back at too high a level. (With a strange synchronicity, Bill Turnbull is the presenter on the radio as I write this piece about how he inadvertently played a part in our story. I will always be grateful for his bravery in going public about his cancer – if he had not done so, Steve would undoubtedly have died much earlier than he did).

We were in Newcastle when the phone call came – I was attending a conference and Steve had come too, back to his place of birth. He had spent the day out and about with our friend Colin, while I sat through the boring presentations, and then the hospital called him and asked him to attend an appointment the next day in Oxford.

We drove home immediately, and the next day I went with him to the urology clinic where we were told he had aggressive prostate cancer. He had had no symptoms at all. If he hadn’t had that PSA test, we wouldn’t have known. But now he was presented with a choice, hormone treatment or surgery. Neither guaranteed a cure. We were now talking about a future living with cancer and discussing options which were the least-worse treatment. Everything changed that day. Our future was re-written.

We met with both the oncologist and the surgeon, and after considering all the implications, decided on surgery. From that moment, grief walked into our lives and took up residence. I didn’t recognise it then though. There was too much new information to take in, too many questions and worries and concerns, so the silent presence of a new feeling, a new sense of fear and dread just slipped below my radar. But looking back, that was when we both felt that cold sense of change.

So much was taken away from us – yet as I write those words, I am conscious of how lucky we were to have had it in the first place. The immensely close physical relationship that we had always had moved effortlessly into a new way of being, but there was sorrow for us both at the change that was imposed by the surgery, and the sepsis that followed, and then the discovery of escaped cancer cells in the lymph nodes. Despite Steve’s hopes of avoiding hormone treatment and its associated loss of all libido, his post-op PSA test showed that the cancer was already outside of the prostate and spread into his lymph nodes. The operation had been too late. In order to live, he had no choice other than to accede to testosterone annihilation by injection.

For a man like Steve, making the conscious decision to become ‘neutered’ must have been horrendous. He knew what hormone treatment entailed. He knew that he was acceding to the loss of his virility, his manliness – the very essence of his identity. That must have been a secret, aching grief that he carried alone.

The side effects were awful, but he dealt with them. Things that in retrospect seemed minor, like losing the hair on his chest and his arms confirming the massive changes that were taking place in his body in the effort to starve the cancer cells from their fuel – things like that irritated him, the hot flashes were debilitating, the increasing fatigue and muscle aches were burdensome, but the loss of intimacy between us was such a huge thing.

We didn’t ever really talk deeply about how he felt in this new, eunuch existence, I didn’t want to add to the burden he was carrying by digging into how he truly felt and making him talk about it, but I know this was the heaviest of weights for him to bear. For me, the sadness at the end of that part of our life was far outweighed by the need to have him still with me, and from everything I had read about his cancer, I knew how perilous his time was.

Fast forward through 2019, embedded hormone treatment and weeks and weeks of daily radiotherapy and further surgery and more problems – all the while, the grief for what we had planned for our future shadowed us. Neither of us were foolish enough to believe he would outrun the cancer cells that had spread in microscopic malevolence around his body, and when either of us heard the well-meaning phrase ‘Oh prostate cancer is the best kind of cancer to have, you don’t die from it, you die with it,’ we both reacted in the same furious way. Steve had a seriously aggressive type of cancer, and for him to have lived as long as he did is testament to the brilliant care that he received from his multi-disciplinary medical team at The Churchill Hospital. It happened to be found in his prostate. It was therefore labelled prostate cancer. Take it from me, prostate cancer is not the best kind of cancer to have.

At the beginning of this year, with news filtering from China of a new and deadly virus, and a sense of the winds of change gathering, we began talking about giving up the flat he rented and that we loved in Banbury and moving back to my house in Denham. We were paying out for two properties, and financially and practically it made sense.  We decided that Steve could stay in our caravan in Banbury for three nights a week while he worked in the area, and we could save £1k a month by moving back to the house, so we gave notice and started packing. It was the end of three happy years in the most beautiful flat in a Georgian manor house, and yet more loss of what was. And the week after we finally moved in, the country was put into lockdown.

There’s too much to say about the huge collective grief for what used to be that has washed over the world with the spread of Covid. I can’t even begin to find the words, grasping as I am from this strange new place where I find myself. But there was definitely a visceral impact on us, as on so many others, of the loss of freedom and security and safety that came with the virus. The loss of normality. The loss of hope. Layer upon layer of loss and grief just kept piling up, magnified by the fear all around as this invisible killer virus silently tore through humanity.

We made the best of it, and we were together day and night, so it was a precious time, looking back, but it was also the time when Steve’s health began to deteriorate and his PSA levels to rise relentlessly as the cancer took hold in his bones. Our time together was punctuated by hospital appointments as the spread of Steve’s cancer mirrored the spread of Covid throughout the country. In June, his lovely gentle oncologist told him that time was running out, and that he now had months not years left to live. That was the only time that I saw him crumble. He had hoped so much for several more years of life. My heart ached as I held him. The shadow of grief was now sitting foursquare in our faces, grinning and counting the days.

And those days between June and October were saturated with loss for him. The loss of strength, of energy, of steadiness. The loss of ease and comfort, and the sapping weariness of living with increasing pain. The loss of dignity. The loss of his sense of himself as he looked at his strong, muscular legs now wasting into thin, unsteady limbs. The loss of the little freedom he still had. And finally, with the onset of Covid, the loss of the most basic of things, the ability to breathe without help. I watched helplessly as he was taken away from me by the cancer and the coronavirus, clinging on to him, supporting him, holding him up, caring for him, loving him as hard as I could until eventually, I could do no more for him and had call for help for him. And then, I had to let him go with the paramedics. I knew that day, the moment I picked up the phone to ring 111 that I was doing something irrevocable. I knew that they would take him away. And I knew that he would never come home.

That morning, when the ambulance drove away, it was as if something inside me came apart and the years of not recognising that I was grieving just poured out in an incoherent, sobbing mess. The physical pain was too much to bear. The shadow of grief had formed into a tangible beast that enveloped and consumed me. Anticipatory grief became reality, and it was the worst experience I have ever had. I felt ripped apart, physically in pain in my heart, broken and helpless and hopeless and bereft. Unknown to me, I was also sick with Covid, my test would come back the next day confirming it. It was, I think, the worst day of my life.

I had lived with so much unacknowledged stress and anxiety, and I had done everything I could to keep him safe, and I had failed. It is a heavy weight to carry. But just as Steve faced his mortality unflinchingly and without fear, I cannot run away from facing a life that is now carved by loss and grief. There are layers and layers of it, each of different depths and textures, and I must gradually uncover them and examine them in order to not let them confine me or define me.

At the moment, I am wrapped in the most visible, outer layer of grieving for the loss of my man, who died so bravely and so gracefully in my arms. In time, I will be able to go beneath this visible grief of widowhood and begin to unpick the fabric of the grief that I lived with for so long without realising. This is, I understand, part of the work that I have to do in order to become the person I will be without him.

In amongst all the swirling newness of life without Steve, there is also an extraordinary amount of stuff that sits silently waiting to be attended to. The stuff that he accumulated in his life.

Mostly, it’s his clothes. Clothes are hard. Clothes are memories, of where they were bought and where they were worn and things that were done while wearing them. Clothes feature in precious photographs, linking the garment in your hands to the moment the camera captured, however long ago. Clothes absorb something of the wearer, they carry a lingering scent. Steve’s clothes carry the scent of him. I can’t smell anything at all with my post-Covid sense loss, but I know that his scent is still there. I long to smell it again. But I’ve started packing away his clothes very gradually for donating to a charity shop. I find it’s taking me far longer than I thought it would.

Some things are easy. Some things are associated with his cancer, and I don’t want them around to remind me. Pyjamas and slippers bought for hospital stays went straight into one of the first charity shop bags. All of the other things that were connected to his increasing pain and indignity went into the bin the day after he died, I needed to get rid of them, they affronted me with their existence and the fact he had needed them, and I bundled them up and out in a kind of controlled fury.

Other clothes belong to the far distant past or were easy to make instant ‘keep or throw’ decisions on. His suits, from the days when he was working at the IAM, more than a decade ago – they might find a new owner who needs to dress smartly. A ridiculous number of ties. His work polo shirts, complete with company logo – I doubt anyone will want them, but you never know. I found I could be quite pragmatic about these clothes; they weren’t strongly associated with him, with us. Shoes were easy too. What would I do with his shoes? The only ones I have kept are the ones we bought together for him when we went shopping for our wedding, beautiful, blue suede, Hugo Boss boots.

So now I have nine bags full, ready to go to the charity shop. In amongst Steve’s suits and shirts and jeans are also clothes of mine, clothes that I won’t ever wear again but had been keeping ‘just in case’ – for a future that now isn’t going to happen. Evening dresses, and cocktail dresses and smart stuff that I might have one day worn to go somewhere with him. Clothes that are too big for me now after the strain of the last year – bought when we were ‘fat and happy’ and oblivious to what was coming. Beachwear and bikinis that I wouldn’t be comfortable wearing now, without his approving and protective presence saying, ‘Who cares? You are gorgeous’ when I wondered whether it was appropriate to be parading my almost 60-year-old body on the Portuguese beach we loved so much. High heels. He loved me in them. I’m not wearing them again, not now he’s gone.

And I’ve kept just a few of his clothes. Carefully selected because they are just so him – his beautiful Jaeger black cashmere coat. Some of his linen shirts, because I’ll wear them. The jeans and shirt he wore for our wedding. His black leather jacket that he was wearing in the photo on the front of the order of service for his funeral – the order of service that wasn’t an order of service at all, just the lyrics from the music he’d chosen. His dressing gown. His T-shirts. I hope that if my sense of smell ever comes back, I’ll be able to smell his scent again on his T-shirts. His Blue Knights waistcoat that he carefully pinned all kinds of pins to, including a little prostate cancer man pin. His biker jacket that I wore to ride pillion with Lucy on the motorcycle hearse, next to his coffin. Important clothes that carry embedded within them moments to treasure and memories to cherish.

As far as the rest of his stuff, I think it will take months to go through and re-home. He has more tools than anyone I’ve ever met, and that’s without the contents of the three garages he rented. With heroic effort from Steve’s son, the ‘stuff’ that he’d accumulated and stored in the garages has now been reduced to fill just one.

The house is full of his things, bits and pieces that caught his eye and that he bought from antique shops, things that belonged to his parents, books and albums, memorabilia from different eras in his life, framed photos and pictures. Everywhere. I can’t even begin to think what’s up in the loft, I just have memories of handing him bags and bags and boxes that he squirreled away up there when we moved back here.

Group photos from his police life, the life before we met, had been hung in pride of place in the living room. He wanted to feel he was at home here, in my old family home that we moved back in to together in March, just before the first lockdown was announced, and creating a ‘Steve’ corner meant a lot to him. After he died, they seemed somehow out of place. He didn’t need them to be there anymore. And I didn’t need to be looking at photos of the young Steve amongst all those long ago, unknown fellow officers. There was nothing in them that spoke to me. I took them down, before the funeral, and replaced them with a beautiful copper coil clock that we had been given as a wedding present by Lucy – the funeral director who looked after Steve when he died. That felt like the right thing to do.

All the guidance on bereavement and grief tells you not to make big decisions during these early weeks and months after a death has occurred. But I think, for me, I am ok to be deciding on what is surrounding me. I’m trusting my instincts as I work my way through the days, and I instinctively feel that making space is what I need – in order to feel him more closely.

If there isn’t a strong resonance with him – his memory, his energy – when I pick up a piece of clothing or a book or a picture, then I know I can let it go. I intuitively feel that if there is less of the unimportant stuff of his imposing itself on me, then the pieces that I choose to hold on to will be even more precious, more meaningful, more important to carry forward. That won’t be the same for everyone, but I feel like it’s right for me. And I feel like it’s the right time to do it now. Now the charity shops are opening here again, I’m starting to clear the space around me. And that feels like a good thing, in this strange new place I am in. I feel I can breathe a little more easily.