I’ll start with a little anecdote to give you a taster of the tiny readjustments I am having to make in my new life as a 'widow.'
It was bottle bank time at Cold Comfort Cottage.
It has been bottle bank time for months.
Like many other jobs that involve muscle, going to the bottle bank used to be one of Jonathan’s jobs.
It was, therefore, as a novice ‘bottle-banker’ that I found myself having to delve, reluctantly, into the dark, spidery spaces where the bottles are discretely placed (or slung).
The bottles were duly stuffed into bags and carted out to the car – the smart, leased car that was courtesy of the wonderful Motobility scheme.
It took only about a hundred yards of my driving for the bottles to manage to wiggle themselves free of their bags, slip off the back seats, tinkle over, and start dribbling, drunkenly, on the carpet.
What larks, my friends, as I pulled in the car to the nearest parking space, fielded in the rogue bottles, and mopped the wine from the carpet that was, almost, pristine.
Sadly, the car was returned yesterday. Not being the Rich Widow, this was always on the cards. Our Hero’s silver chariot was taken off to some auction, to be sold to someone (for very little, I suspect) who will have no idea of the drama in which the car played no small part.
Perhaps the new owner will be transported by the faint aroma of old wine.
I have to say I felt pathetically bereft as the car was driven away.
Ah! If lumps of metal had souls …
But, as I was dabbing up the wine spillage, with my bottom protruding out of the passenger’s door, I had a minor epiphany and finally understood something about this whole business of ‘dignity’.
We worry about it a lot, don’t we?
Dignity.
All that stuff our bodies do which we would rather never reveal.
We worry about our own dignity: we worry about the dignity of those we love.
About twenty years ago, seeking some comforting words after my mother died, I mournfully complained to an uncle, who happened to be a psychiatrist, that my mother had ‘lost all dignity’ in her last days.
‘There is no dignity in death,’ he replied shortly.
You can, perhaps, imagine my indignation at the time. It seemed very cold comfort indeed, and not what I was looking for.
Twenty years later, I think I can understand what he meant.
‘Dignity’ is nothing to do with death. ‘Dignity’ is shallow and trivial. We are more than the sum of our bodily parts, our bodily functions; or malfunctions. We are much more than this and, therefore, 'dignity' is really only to do with surfaces.
So, in the wee small hours, if you worry about this trivial thing that is your dignity, or your partner’s dignity, or your child’s dignity - remember that it matters not a jot.
Perhaps you are all ahead of me here; I hope so.
But I did worry, like a protective parent, about Jonathan’s dignity when I was projecting forward in my imagination to the probable outcome of his illness.
In the end, it mattered not at all.
We were both somewhere much more profound than that superficial place that we call ‘dignity.’
