Sorry – this is a long one – again. Stick with me.
I was up on the ladders a few days ago: there were gutters to mend – intractable cast iron ones, the joints of which have terminally rusted.
The rain has been pouring down the outside of the walls of Cold Comfort Cottage for nearly two years – cancer rather eclipsed the minor matter of household maintenance.
Of course, in order to mend gutters, I had to enter the portals of a ‘man’ shop – an empire of screws and bolts and tools and all those tubes of sticky stuff which are designed to defeat those nasty leaks and oozing failings of the fabric of the ‘home’.
Trying hard to look confident as I negotiated the testosterone loaded atmosphere of the ‘man’ shop, I scooped up what I thought was required for gutter mending and left triumphantly, waving on several white vans before making my exit from the car park.
I then had to spend several frustrating hours, during which the sun had well and truly set, loading the required tube of black gunk into the skeleton/silicone/caulking gun. (I have been learning that there is a complex nomenclature involved here.)
It was therefore not until the following day that I wobbled up the ladder with my loaded ‘gun’ to fire the black gunk at the leaking joints.
What confidence I had - gloves on, gun in hand, the right stuff for the job – I would blast those dratted leaks into submission.
Hah!
The black stuff had other ideas. It oozed out with alarming speed and no amount of gentle persuasion with the palate knife would convince it into the joints.
I ended up with an extremely sticky black web between my gloves and little where it was needed.
The rain came. The leaks were not mended.
But as I scrubbed the black sticky gunk from my wrists, and from my jacket, I felt a mounting sense of irritation – an irritation with all those people who live near to us and who claimed that they ‘adored’ my husband – those people who were so conspicuously absent until the funeral, and who are, again, conspicuously absent.
Where were those people when we were digging ourselves out of the snow in order to get out for vital treatment? Some of them live not very far away and employ people with tractors; most of them have 4x4s.
Where were they when we were struggling to get out to the shops to try and find something else, anything else, that Jonathan might have been able to eat?
Did they even pick up the phone to ask how we were doing?
Did they offer to take The Hounds off our hands so that we could have a day on our own?
Did they ask whether they might have done anything to help around the house (like mend those blasted gutters)?
It is an old, old cliché, but you do learn a great deal about the people you ‘know’ at times like these. What you really need are people who offer practical help and just get on with it – not those who wish to put themselves at the centre of a ‘drama’ in which they are very minor players.
And you learn even more about the people you ‘know’ when you become widowed.
If life were a pack of cards, then our pack has suffered a change ‘rich and strange.’
Some of the ‘court cards’ – some of the couples particularly - have disappeared.
All has been reshuffled.
But new patterns are emerging – new configurations of the cards.
I now find that the husband of a colleague will come and mend the gutters. Another has fitted a new back door. And ex-colleague has spent a day clipping the gigantic hedges. A client of my husband’s drops by with bottles of wine and has offered a man with a digger to solve the plumbing problems, should such radical action be needed. There are friends who ring nearly every day.
Next weekend, weather permitting, I go to the island in the Hebrides where we met to plant a tree in Jonathan's memory. I will carry his ashes with me. There I will see friends who knew us both before we were married – who knew us before we became a ‘couple' and, therefore, make few judgements.
The pack has been reshuffled and I am learning that I will have to re-evaluate its configuration whilst I negotiate my way in this different life.
So although my widow’s hands still have stains of black, and the 'pack' has changed, I am not entirely despairing - not entirely.
