SUDDEN DEATH
My life as a widow began on 30 December when my beloved husband Alaric died of a heart attack.
To paraphrase Susan Sontag, I gained citizenship of a new land, a kingdom not of the sick but of the bereaved.
Alaric had been ill for a long time and was in and out of heart clinics and surgery and yet a heart attack is by its nature sudden, unexpected, shocking.
We had been together on and off for all of my adult life. We were the Harry-Met-Sally of our time in a way. I certainly remember saying, as Sally does “promise me i’ll never have to be out there again”.
At Golders Green Crematorium in Central London he arrived in a Daimler, with flowers I had chosen with our youngest son, a gardener.
He recounted the story of how Alaric had sent me a set of tete-a-tete bulbs just before Christmas as a present and one sole early tiny daffodil actually did poke through the day he died.
Maybe I should say one “soul” daffodil: everything becomes a surreal sign with sudden death.
The writer Joan Didion recounts the death of her husband in The Year of Magical Thinking, noticing how in the slow motion moments around the death itself the ordinary becomes hyper real. Like her husband, the paramedics sliced the sleeve of his arm to reach his body.
Like her husband, mine died on 30 December.
Like her husband “there was nothing I did not discuss” with mine.
Curiously i’m normal and functional - although sudden sadness bubbles up from a great distance like a bubble rising from the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
I am told that the narrative about grief - 5 sequential stages - is wrong. It comes and goes and yes it is perfectly possible to function.
Perhaps the strength of love and our children and my work give me that. Time will tell.
I can read and write, cook and sleep and cry and stop to feel the rising void bubble when it comes.
Change is something I can do. Even unwelcome change.
My new citizenship involves an unfamiliar language. I wobble about as I remember to call myself “widow” and not “wife”.
But I feel curiously strong. We discussed everything including death. I think I knew I would survive him.
And I have. And I will.
Dear Julia, it's Peggy here, Jane's co-author/illustrator of "...Asparagus Society". I too am a new citizen in this strange and fascinating land. My beloved husband of 60+ years, David, died 9 months ago. We had plenty of time to talk about death after he was diagnosed with a terminal lung illness three years ago. All through that time I dreaded life without him and couldn't imagine how I'd be able to bear it. But, like you, I DO bear it - this indescribable loss of what seems like part of my own body. Every day I continue to grow around the loss, encompass it, absorb it, and weave it into my SELF. I feel strangely strong and courageous with no idea how that's possible. Losing my 'art partner' and dearest friend, Jane, came next. Her passing leaves me feeling so alone, feeling that nobody KNOWS me anymore...it's just me now and I can do this. Yet I find myself talking in my head to David and to Jane with boundless love and gratitude. I do believe that everything, including us, is made of energy. Energy continually changes form but never ceases to exist. At age 82, I'm comforted to be thinking about that more and more because, of course, I'm preparing for my own journey over the rainbow to whatever awaits. I send you my deep sympathy for your loss of Alaric and love and light as you go forward.
Julia, this is so luminous and moving - and so very ‘essence of you’ to be able to convey the devastation so eloquently. I am thinking, having read your words twice, oh what a joy to have had such a partnership in life. ‘There was nothing I did not discuss’ with Alaric. Love doesn’t get better than that, surely? It’s beautiful and something to aspire to - I am so very sorry that he is gone way too soon. My deepest condolences to you and the family xx