The “Memory” is basically about enjoying the fact that Nigel was taking his annual leave, and we would’ve spent it at home. We seldom went away on holiday, except maybe for a weekend to visit family. Mostly, Nigel just preferred to stay home, what Americans nicknamed a “staycation”, because he just wanted to relax and decompress from his intense, stressful job. The furbabies and I loved having him home.
Nigel and I spent nearly all of our spare time together, and he started working from home (like me) more and more as the years passed. We both loved having the other one around, and no, for Nigel it wasn’t just so I could make him cups of tea! At least, I don’t think it was…
What was so great about the “staycation” thing is that we’d go out for lunch, maybe wander around the shops a bit, or maybe go for drive. Or, we might just watch a movie at home. Just nice, relaxing stuff done together.
People think that mourning the death of a spouse is about missing them being around, but that’s only one part of it. It’s also about losing the shared way of life, the day-to-day ordinariness, our shared past, and everything that could’ve been our future, together. Mourning the death of a spouse is an enormous thing precisely because it’s so enormous.
Little memories, like the one FB served up today, are, by themselves, just nice, sweet memories of good times. But they’re also a piece of the puzzle that is our life, a puzzle that now has too many missing pieces to ever be completed in a way that even remotely resembles the picture on the metaphorical box, the image we had of what our lives were going to look like.
But we all change our lives all the time, don’t we? When I was a little boy, I was sure I was going to be a preacher like my dad and his dad, then some years later I was going to be an archeologist, then, a few years later still, a politician—all of which is hilarious to me now. Instead, I constantly revised my path to take advantage of opportunities, to achieve goals, and then to build a life with Nigel in a different country located far away and in the two opposite hemispheres from everything I’d ever known. That wasn’t merely the biggest decision I’ve ever made, though, it was also the direct and logical result of literally everything that happened in my life leading up to the point at which I made my choice. The pieces of the puzzle of my life, it turned out, connected seamlessly with Nigel’s own puzzle.
These days, I’m in a state of flux, once again revising my path to take advantage of opportunities, to achieve goals, and to again build a life, one without Nigel. I make lots of mistakes, I frustrate or disappoint myself all the time, and sometimes I even make myself angry at myself—exactly like I did all those years ago.
My original path led me to the best life, better than I could possibly have imagined. Maybe that’ll happen again, maybe it won’t, but as I work to assemble the new puzzle, I keep finding pieces from the old one, and it turns out that they all fit into this new one. I don’t know what this puzzle’s going to look like because the metaphorical box has no picture—and I now realise, it never did.
Funny the things a thirteen year old memory can spark, like seeing the entire puzzle, and not just the areas where nothing seems to fit. This piece did fit, though, and that’s how puzzles are completed: One piece at a time.
Those staycations were truly awesome, though.
This is a revised and expanded version of something I posted to my personal Facebook on April 16.
2 comments:
In the greater sense, it's ALL a puzzle, I think. Reading my diaries from 50 years ago, as banal as some of them are, I see how things then impact me even now, define me even now.
Absolutely. One thing leads to another, and all that.
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