What’s coming for you won’t pass you by.
This stark pronouncement was staring at me when I opened up an old, otherwise blank document this morning. I don’t know when I wrote it, or why, or why it was still there, waiting for me, like an accusation. Or perhaps a validation.
According to John, his Scottish grandfather used to say this.
If he were here (John, not Grandpa Lyon), he’d look all portentous and insist it was an omen. Of course, if he was here, I wouldn’t be writing this.
The night I returned home after being told that John would die, likely in the next 48 hours, the taxi journey was a series of sharp knife wounds. It seemed each corner I passed, each shop window, held a memory. I knew, with absolute certainty, that I could not stay in Cuenca without John.
In my life, I have been pretty consistent in following my gut instinct. I knew, at 15, that John was it for me.
We were married for nearly fifty years.
I knew at 21, pregnant with our second child, that we needed to get out of Toronto. We literally nailed the door of our slum apartment shut and took off for Ottawa with our three year old son and everything we could pack into a beaten up VW Beetle.
Because we moved in with his Aunt Frances for a short while and met their next door neighbours, John fell into his legal career as a trademark agent and then lawyer. At 22, I started in the direct-to-management path with the federal public service. I knew at 29 that the meteoric rise almost guaranteed to me there was not for me. I quit, having no idea what I was going to do. But then I went to law school and it was wonderful.
I knew at 46 that the lucrative, prestigious partnership in one of the top law firms in Canada was not for me. We both quit, moved to an old stone house on a hundred acres in the country and started Oak Meadows Pet Resort, knowing nothing about the dog and cat boarding business.
We were so very happy in that life. I knew in 2015, that we needed to retire and move abroad and live whatever was left of our lives in colour and not black and white.
It took John almost four years to agree with me. Which shocked me, because for nearly fifty years, he was a big believer in my gut. He followed my seemingly crazy ideas with absolute faith that it would turn out right. And it always had. But this new divergence in our desires was okay. One of the big reasons we had survived everything that fifty years of marriage brings, was our mutual willingness to encourage and support each other in doing whatever we individually needed to do to be right within ourselves, regardless of convention. I left him to it and for nearly four years, I indeed lived in colour, traveling all over the world. I came back to visit him, he came abroad to visit me, and the rest of the time, we spent on Skype. We sent each other a lot of presents and other mail. That’s something from me at the bottom of the screen.
John finally got himself over whatever was blocking him and we came to Cuenca to start living our dream life, together again.
All our worldly possessions and John, headed to Cuenca.
Then seven months later, just about the time John was talking about going to Spain when we had exhausted the possibilities here, he collapsed. I had heard him coming down the street after his Spanish lesson, cheerfully greeting our neighbours.
When he came through the door, he announced to me that he felt like Jimmy Stewart in “It’s A Wonderful Life.”
Then forty-eight hours later, he was dead and I was left in the ashes. And for the first time in my life, I ignored my gut.
C.S. Lewis said that no one told him that grief felt so much like fear. Without acknowledging it to myself then, I know now that I was terrified.
That is the only explanation I have for why I followed the conventional wisdom. Why I spent nearly six years fighting the feeling that I needed to go. Why I repeatedly left and came back only to again suppress the increasingly urgent feeling that despite all objective indicators, my life here was fundamentally wrong. Fear must have been why, for probably the only time in my life, I clung to reason over passion, to practicality over risk, to intellect over instinct.
I was the perfect widow. I didn’t make any big decisions in the aftermath of loss. I went out and made friends; good friends. I started swimming three times a week. I went to the symphony, I went to the opera, I went to rock and blues performances. I engaged in new activities – mosaics ferchrissakes, and even, yes, literally basketweaving. And I am the least crafty person on the planet.
“My pursuits…essentially performed the function of marking time.”
I took day trips and trips back to Canada and trips abroad. Every time I came back, I felt like I was returning to a graveyard.
I moved five times. Well, six if you count the three days or so I spent in the apartment on the river I was convinced was where I was supposed to be.
I argued with myself. I was a failure as a human being because I couldn’t content myself with the abundance I have.
It wasn’t like a change of scenery was going to bring John back, was it? I was doing the right things and eventually that was bound to pay off, right? It takes time. Everyone knows that. Everyone says that. There was no better alternative. Mostly, eventually, I tried to accept that I was going to spend however many years I had left to endure, being a broken, bleeding shell, but one who could perform ‘normal and happy, nothing to see here’ on demand. The inevitable conclusion was that since that was the best I could expect, I might as well do it in economic comfort.
I know, I know. Depression right? I’m not totally un-selfaware. Get the drugs, get the therapy. Been there and done that. Twenty-five years ago when I was clinically depressed and got the drugs and therapy, I was very grateful for them. They helped incredibly.
But they have not helped now. Not when I have suffered a cataclysmic loss. Not when I have an irremediable sucking chest wound.
I have reached the conclusion that I am reacting perfectly reasonably to this loss. I have had an incredibly privileged life and I am very grateful for it. But I will never have that again. There is a German word, because of course there is. The Germans have a word for everything.
“Sehnsucht”.
It means an intense, hopeless, painful, eternal yearning for something lost, that can never be recovered.
Why can we not just acknowledge that for some people, in some circumstances, there is no remedy. The suffering is a rational result of incredible pain and loss.
I finally get Miss Havisham.
It can’t be ‘fixed’. It just is.
Trying to force myself into denying reality or continuing to live my life according to some external rules that don’t work for me, is simply adding to the pain.
It occurred to me that I was where John was in 2015, when an inchoate fear prevented him from joining me on my adventures abroad, except from time to time for short periods. I realised I have spent nearly six years, resisting the same arguments I made to him during the years he was stuck. Irony is a bitch.
Other times in my life when I have spiraled down so far I couldn’t see any light or even contemplate the possibility of light, a voice in my head has always surfaced to say, dammit, “I shall not die but live.” That voice has struggled for years to be heard, but I’ve gotten there.
I am done with this slow death. I shall not die, but live.
What was coming for me has not passed me by, and won’t. I am done with trying to be a sensible and conventional widow. I’m done waiting for conventional actions to somehow improve my emotional devastation.
I may be equally miserable with the decision I have taken, but as Jane Eyre concluded: ”…now I felt that it was not enough; I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon. I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus: that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space: “Then,” I cried, half desperate, “grant me at least a new servitude!”
I don’t need or want a Mr. Rochester at the end of my flight to a new servitude. But I hope that by at least changing the circumstances of my misery, I can find some distraction, rekindle some spark of intellectual curiosity, some passion for living, however fleeting it is. I am at least certain that whatever my choice brings, it can’t be worse than the grey fog I have been living in.
So.
I have given up my apartment. I have sent my art to Canada. I have sold or given away, all of my possessions except what will fit in a medium sized suitcase. Tomorrow I leave Cuenca for Ireland, where I start four months of housesitting there, and in Scotland and England. In April I go to France to join my eldest son and his family on their vacation. Then Canada, for I have no idea how long. Then? I don’t know. Having forced myself to stay still for a year, I have now given myself permission to be homeless for a year.
I want no roots, no plans beyond perhaps five or six months out. I am not returning to Canada to live. I am not planning to ‘live’ anywhere for the foreseeable future.
Having taken this decision ““I felt a faint and faraway echo of something like pleasure, as though some long-lost, once-loved visitor was knocking on a door that no longer opened.”.
I will almost certainly return to Cuenca at some point, but not to live. In fact as soon as I took this decision – or more honestly, gave myself permission to raise the bars on the cage I put myself into and did what I knew for the last nearly six years, I needed to do – I have fallen more in love with Cuenca than ever.
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Of course, I know I still have hostages to fortune – my family, my friends. But for myself, I have accepted that I have nothing left to lose. I’m off to see what owning nothing, owing nothing and having next to nothing, looks like.
“What matters it what went before or after?
Now with myself, I will begin and end.”