The second year is harder than the first – that’s the received wisdom, and I can see why. In that first year, you’ve had to get through the sheer shock, to deal with the grim grind of bereavement admin, to make some of the vital decisions about what you do now, how you live now, and you’ve probably got to the point where you’re functioning, more or less. The first year is so bloody hard that one might be forgiven for thinking that surely, surely, it will get easier. Well… it gets different.

I wrote about this last year, how after that first anniversary, you’ve got a whole year of being without your person, a whole new set of memories, obviously marked and shaped by their absence, but new, at any rate, and maybe some of them are good memories in their own right (not just good, considering). But the price of that is the knowledge that this is now it. This is your life, and it’s not the one you thought it would be, let alone would ever have chosen, but you have to go on, and on. That is a whole new kind of hard.

And somewhere along the way, you may start to drift. When you’ve lost the person with whom you navigated life, the person who anchored you when you needed it, and with whom you looked ahead and planned and anticipated and hoped, it is perilously easy to drift.

You’re driftwood, floating underwater
Breaking into pieces, pieces, pieces
Just driftwood, hollow and of no use
Waterfalls will find you, bind you, grind you

‘Driftwood’, Travis

I hadn’t consciously thought about this, but it was part of the reason I took quite a bold step this last year, and booked myself on to a widows’ retreat. I’d seen a brief clip about Fire & Rain on Rev. Richard Coles’ TV programme, Good Grief, and felt that it might be something good, something healing. So in April, I headed up to Lower Largo, in Fife, and met up with five other widows, and with the organisers, at a beautiful house just by the beach. I was deeply apprehensive. What if we (the widows) didn’t get on – what if the one huge thing that we had in common wasn’t enough to overcome our differences? What if they didn’t like me, or I them? What if I couldn’t get on with the more spiritual side of the retreat, given my resilient absence of faith in anything beyond this physical world?

By bedtime on the first day, all that was gone. We’d shared our stories, we’d wept together (a lot) but we’d also laughed, and we’d given each other an insight into our lives, before and after, and into who we were, before and after. And we didn’t have to buy into any particular spiritual beliefs or practices, just to take what we found useful and nurturing, and to build it into our lives if it worked for us. For five days we talked a lot, wept a lot, laughed a fair bit, walked, sat on the terrace looking out at the sea, did relaxation and breathing exercises, did some creative stuff. Of course when I got back to my new reality I crashed quite badly. But not for too long.

I haven’t made dramatic changes since those five days with Fire & Rain, but it did shift something in me, and gave me ways to hold on, to navigate, to be anchored. We are all learning to be our own compass, as one of our group put it. All of us are doing so in different ways – we’re very different people – and the crucial thing is that we find our own way. One of the themes of the week was being honest about where we are and how we feel. Some people – people who’ve never been in our situation – may expect that by one year/two years/six years we’ll be ‘over it’, we’ll have moved on, and there’s an expectation that when you’re asked, you’ll say, I’m fine, thanks. None of us is ****** fine. None of us has moved on. None of us, ever, will be ‘over it’. How could we be, when the nature of our loss is that our lives were tangled up with them, when everything in our lives had and has something to do with them? We can’t untangle it all, nor would we want to – that rich tapestry is made up of their threads as well as ours.

I can’t imagine that I won’t in years to come still be having conversations in my head with him, still be talking about him – after all, even if I live to be 100 (not that I aspire to that), I will still have spent more years with him than without. His absence will still, I’m sure, make me sad, as I accumulate experiences (both the lovely ones and the heartbreaking ones) that I would/should have shared with him. But I am, and will be, OK. We don’t move on from our person, we move forward, taking them with us, but finding our own way, shaping our own futures, regaining our balance, finding our clarity. It will always be a crooked line, but we press on in the hope that we are getting, maybe, closer to fine.

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
We go to the doctor, we go to the mountains
We look to the children, we drink from the fountain
Yeah, we go to the Bible, we go through the workout
We read up on revival, we stand up for the lookout

There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
(The less I seek my source)
Closer I am to fine

‘Closer to Fine’, Indigo Girls

To Ute and Sarah, thank you for guiding us through the week, so gently and sensitively, and for giving us space and time and resources to go forward.

And to A, M, D, P and N, I will treasure those days in Lower Largo with you. Thank you for your honesty and courage, your friendship, your solidarity.

Thank you always and most of all to our children, who support and take care of me so very lovingly and who, of course, are dealing with their own grief and loss. And to all of those who have been part of our support network of family and friends over this last two years. You know who you are, I hope.

And thank you to M, for all the days.