If I could tell you

I've been reading "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion (which I bought second-hand for 5 dollars). It describes her experience in the year after her husband of forty years died at the dinner table of a heart attack, at the same time as her only daughter was in a coma in intensive care. The sense of unreality that she had, the secret 'magical thinking' that he might somehow come back again, isn't something that I've experienced. The closest I can recall is the shock of the first diagnosis, when for a couple of days we wondered if we might wake up and find that it had gone away. However the later part of her grief is familiar.

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.

Now that four months have passed since Jen's death, the life of others goes on, and looks more or less the same. It is the same few people as before Jen's death who will ring me to see what's happening. Superficially of course my life goes on too, but in a different world where the colour has been drained out, where the landscape is flat and grey.

Joan Didion also discusses her sense of wanting to talk to her husband. Some people do report brief hallucinations, if that's the word, that the dead person is there or has spoken to them. That's not my experience so far. Of course there are words I'd like to say. I thought of Auden's poem, "If I could tell you" which now has a different resonance for me. To quote a stanza:

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

I did blog earlier about last words. I've thought since about other things I wanted to say. One of them was simply goodbye, the kind of farewell that you give to someone you won't see for a very long time, the moment when you run back and give them one last hug and whisper something in their ear. Since the exact timing of death is usually unexpected, even when you have advanced cancer, that kind of goodbye is probably rare. I'll have to be content with the goodbyes that stretched over the ten months from Jen's diagnosis until her death.

There are also moments when I want Jen's advice but can't have it. Sometimes I think "What would Jen do?", especially when I recognise the situation as one that she would have handled better than I would. This usually yields a concrete answer, in the sense that I can easily remember previous situations. Not of course that I can always put it into practice, for sometimes (say with the boys) Jen could carry off a certain approach because of her relationship to them.

Perhaps it's delusive to think that I can anticipate what advice Jen could give me - after all, in life people are constantly surprising, even after one has known them for decades. However a few weeks back I sat in the chair out in the kitchen garden to think of Jen and wonder what she'd say. Her response would of course come out of her intimate knowledge of my weaknesses and strengths, and her desire to protect those closest to her. In this situation I could imagine her voice saying, in a fairly firm tone: "You need to look after yourself". That was enough to help me choose my course of action.