They say that when someone you love dies, time eventually heals the pain, and eases the aching in your heart… My experience is different. After two years, I miss them more, not less… Surely, that’s a logical response? I pride myself in my logic, despite being an emotional, sensitive person, I like to employ logic whenever I can… Surely, the longer you’re without someone, the more you miss them? The first few week, I was exhausted, and I missed them, but I’d just spent so much time in their company, it was bearable… As life went on – something I still can’t comprehend… How CAN life just “go on” as if nothing has happened, when everything has happened? – I missed them more… Who was I going to talk things over with? Who was going to steady me, when I had my crazy ideas (like moving to France?!) if my Father couldn’t? When we went to Oxford for my 50th birthday, I couldn’t tell my parents about the Champagne on ice in the room, on our arrival… I couldn’t tell them about the weekend in Looe… I couldn’t tell my Mother that we’d got a puppy, just like the dog she had when she was young… I couldn’t tell them I’d resigned, that we’d sold our house, that we were moving to France… So much has happened in those two years. It’s been such an adventure…it still IS an adventure, since we’re moving again, we think; this time to Italy… So no… In my experience time does NOT heal. Time makes you miss them more…
Time also has allowed me to really think about my – their – experiences. I am changed and actually, I prefer the person I am now, to the one I was before I had experienced death. And yes, it was hard losing both of my parents at once, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Their love story was magical… Like a fairytale, but with a VERY healthy dose of realism. I always thought, after my failed marriage, that I couldn’t compete with them, and their love for each other. I believed I would never find such love myself. And then that happened; cancer killed them, with perfect timing. A romantic ending to their love story, which leaves me with the belief that I have to do SOMETHING to make my own story as interesting, as magical as theirs is… I feel inadequate; what can match their story?
Here I am, two years later, in France and planning a move to Italy. It genuinely feels as if they died one year ago… That it has been one year since I buried my parents. New Year’s Eve is such a good time for reflection, for planning. I can’t help thinking back to previous New Year’s Eves… The one just after my first husband told me he was gay was pretty memorable… I think it was 1997 but it may have been 1996… I’ve got a photograph of us both, just before we went out for dinner, smarty dressed and standing against our new fireplace..smiling against the odds, I’d thought… However, the photograph is hideous! The false smiles look sinister, our faces are pale… I look back at the person I was back then, and remember the fear I felt… I knew the next few months were going to be difficult. I knew I had to tell my parents my husband was gay. I knew I had to find a solution… To work out how we could separate when our working lives were intertwined…
I clearly remember New Year’s Eve 2011… I was to meet my new boyfriend (now husband)’s friends… We had spent Christmas at my house in Umbria, and the flight got us back to the UK at around 10pm… We had time to drive to his house, VERY quickly change, then walk to the local where they were waiting to meet us… I was far more nervous than I let on… It was cold and I was shivering, but he didn’t realise i was also shivering because of my nerves. We crossed the main road to the pub and I took a deep breath… I wanted to hesitate at the door, but made myself march inside and greet them, introduce myself…
Both those people – the “me” married to a gay man, the “me” meeting her boyfriends friends on New Year’s Eve, are lost to me now… The first one was nervous, quite shy, living in a world where being married to a gay man – even being gay – was not openly discussed. It was a life without mobile phones, for most people at least… A life where the Internet was still a rarity in homes, at least in those of the people I knew. I was living in Yorkshire, was self-employed, making a living out of creativity and feigned confidence. My ambitions were small and the circles I moved in smaller… My experiences of life were sheltered and harked back to the unsophisticated 1970s and 1980s of my youth. The second one, the second “me” in these to snapshot New Year’s Eves was a completely different person. No longer self-employed, but still creativity loomed large in my life. I was a teacher, and my teaching experiences and the schools I’d worked in, had changed me, and widened my horizons and life experiences… In those 15 years between these two different versions of me, I’d made a point of no longer having a routine at Christmas… I spent it differently each year, and with different people, but my parents had always been a huge part of it. Once I bought the house in Umbria, though, Christmas to me meant Italy, and it brought a quiet beauty to the usual frenetic holiday… So why am I now in France?!
New Year’s Eve 2014, a friend’s email in reply to the one I sent to her, describing the beauty of the funeral :
“It truly sounds as if it was a God created day. You are much loved, as were they. I am so glad people were able to sing and celebrate for you loved parents, as well as feeling the pain of having to say good bye to them. Days, hours and moments must go through such highs and lows as you are grateful for their goodness (and the goodness of today), but then also know the loss. I am glad the sky was blue and the snow was on the ground. What could have been more beautiful than that? Between the roses you brought and the snow God brought, it sounds a perfect moment for them. I’m sure they would have been proud to have been blessed with so much.”
“Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.”