15 Dec 2016
I am not physically homeless. I am lucky. I have a roof over my head and can afford heating and lighting. The streets around me are not being shelled or bombed.
Emotionally, though? I have no home any more. I never realised until now how much that sense of security depended on your presence. I can't find any peace in this house, but neither is it to be found in my parents' house or a friend's house or the hotel room I retreated to desperately at one point, or anywhere else.
I can't stand to be in this house yet can't stay long away from it. In it, I am surrounded by objects which seem mundane but all have some kind of resonance and can bring on the tears with no notice. I asked my mother to put some of the more painful reminders out of sight, but there are too many for them all to go into hiding.
I can go into your study now, but I flit into your bedroom only when necessary. Thriftily, I turned off the radiator when I came home for the last time from the hospice, even though we no longer need to have the house up to 24 degrees because you have lost all your body fat. It is chilly in there now, and oddly dank, has what you would call an 'old man' smell like a charity shop. I have retrieved the community alarm so I can return it, but I can't touch anything else. I can't imagine being able to launder the bedclothes, or your dressing-gown, or your hoodie. So much of this year was lived out in that small room, it is stacked to the ceiling with painful memories. I wonder about climbing into your bed and whether that would make me feel closer to you or just finish me off entirely. I daren't risk it.
Upstairs is a little easier, since I can't actually remember the last time you climbed the stairs. It's a while ago. I'm glad that I took a couple of surreptitious photos of you sitting in the bed reading but I feel bad that I can't remember exactly when that stopped happening. In some ways, that symbolised the end of normal life, long before the end of actual life. The day you were no longer able to come upstairs and cuddle with me in the evening, no longer able to pop down to the kitchen when I demanded toast or whisky or whatever the hell my demanding selfish pre-carer self wanted.
I used to whine at you back when life was normal because you never went out except to go to work and I didn't get time in the house to myself. I even sent you to the cinema on Sunday evenings to watch the horror and sci-fi flicks I never wanted to see, just so I could lie on the sofa undisturbed. Craving solitude, you say? Well, the universe is having a good old belly laugh at that one now.
I am going to have to make another home for myself, by myself, with myself, and I don't even know where to start.
