Dear Bel,
My husband and I had a wonderful life for more than 50 years. It was joyful, blissful, raunchy, exciting, comforting and so many other wonderful things.
But our happy love life was because of the amazing life we shared. He loved me as much as I loved him.
We told each other this every day, we kissed and cuddled frequently for no reason other than fun and enjoyment. We considered each other in everything we did and we cared for and looked after each other.
He died a few months ago and, apart from all the expected emotional pain and devastation, I am left yearning for his touch. His cuddles were sublime and now there is nothing, absolutely nothing. My body is aching for him and my heart is broken.
So I am sad that fit, healthy couples do not have this in their relationship but I am also angry, because all it would take to get it back would be a little bit of effort, a bit of consideration, kindness and love, on both sides if necessary.
Any advice you could offer on surviving the loss of the only man I ever loved would be a great relief. The pain is visceral, raw and never ending and I don’t know how to be in the world without him. Please ensure that I remain anonymous.
My family do not know how much I am suffering and I want to keep it that way.
JANE
Dear Bel,
I have written in before and appreciate your fair and good advice. This will look as if I’m feeling sorry for myself, which I guess is true!
I am now 76, live on my own and feel lost, just as I did before I met my husband, when I was 32 and wondering what to do with my life. He was everything to me – husband and friend. We were together for 32 years.
My health problems now cause me anxiety and my confidence has gone out of the window. I don’t see myself as old so accepting it is very difficult. I love being in company but finding the motivation to go out is a challenge.
I understand why in the medieval times women of a certain age went into convents! Any advice?
MARGARET
Of course, these are not the first letters I have had from widows but I thought it was time to face, once again, a subject for which there are no ‘answers’.
So, Jane and Margaret (pseudonyms, of course), I’ll introduce you first to Mrs EW (real initials) whose long letter on the same subject would have filled this entire column.
She tells me the story of her whole life with her Dennis since they met as children, the wonderful times and the strains. Then describes his illness and death (two and a half years ago) after their 60 years together and says: ‘I know I am the luckiest woman to have had a wonderful husband and I am grateful but I miss him so much. I am no longer an “us”. So I don’t know who I am.’
You both understand the poignancy of her last two sentences. And her
question to me is yours too: ‘How can I get some relief from all this anxiety? Is it possible to move on? I feel so stuck in this whirlpool of grief and don’t know what to do.’
Regular readers know that the subject of bereavement often comes up here, and I make no apology for that, because (young or old) it is arguably the greatest trauma most of us will ever have to face.
The other day my husband and I met with a lawyer and signed our new wills. Naturally we’ve had to discuss what will happen to the one left alone, although the topic feels almost unbearable. I can’t imagine life without my Robin and of course he feels the same. Yet we must all face that reality.
Here three valued readers, three widows, form a chorus as powerful as any in Greek drama, to remind everybody about the miracle of long love – which leads, sadly but inevitably, to that ‘whirlpool of grief’ Mrs EW describes so vividly. I’m grateful to them.
What’s to be done? I know those days when it’s hard to put one foot in front of the other but somehow you do go on.
That road to the end of life can even be eased – just a little – by knowing the person you miss is always there, within you. That’s why you find the private, ongoing conversations essential.
But, Margaret, we can all complain about the travails of getting old, so beware of an inner voice from your late husband saying, ‘Dear, I’d have liked that chance.’ Older than you, I suggest we just have to ‘keep on buggering on’, as Churchill once suggested. Even when the body protests. Even when you want to retreat from the world. Spring is ahead – so look upwards.
To the three of you I’d whisper that your husbands taught you the most precious lesson anyone can learn: how to love.
Remembering that gift, you might even possibly feel some relief that your dear men were spared the terrible agony of surviving your deaths.
So now all there is to do is continue carrying that flaming torch that lights the world – and giving thanks that its light remains.
I wish you all strength in bearing that burden, as pain eases (as pain will) and you live for as long as fate decrees – looking at the spring flowers, listening to birdsong, doing all the things you once shared – and living each minute for the sake of your beloved dead.
I can’t stop fretting about my parents
Dear Bel,
I’m a 34-year-old man and I’m lucky to have both parents, still relatively young in their early 60s.
I enjoy a close relationship with them both and, though I moved out from the family home several years ago, see one or both most days (I actually work with one of them).
However, I cannot stop fretting and worrying about losing them. It’s exhausting.
Sometimes after I leave their house, I’m waiting anxiously for a text from them so I know they’re OK. There have been times when, if I haven’t heard from them for a day or two, I’ll ring them with a daft reason just to hear their voice.
I know it’s irrational – especially as they are both in good health – and I need to stop worrying but it is my biggest fear and knowing that it is both unavoidable and inevitable just makes it worse. Can you help?
ANTHONY
You clearly love your parents very much, and it sounds as if you actually need them perhaps more than the average young man of 34.
My instinct tells me you are probably single and that your most powerful relationship up until the present has been with the two people who brought you into this world. On the one hand, that is a wonderful thing. On the other, it would be sad if you were to let it spoil your life needlessly by preventing you from living in the present.
There is a ‘condition’ known as anticipatory grief, when a person is mourning the loss of a loved one before it has happened, perhaps because his/her subconscious is warning them to face up to the reality of death.
I happen to be one of those people who thinks about death a lot – and this isn’t just because of my years. From the age of 11 I’ve loved visiting churchyards, reading the gravestones, imagining what their lives were like and enjoying the gentle melancholy of mortality.
It’s a good thing to do, because life is short and realising that fact acts to intensify its sweetness, even when things aren’t going well. Reading a lot about death (for example, I’m currently enthralled by the brilliant book, My Father’s Wake, by filmmaker Kevin Toolis) helps me ready myself for it. Look at the quotation I’ve chosen for today and you’ll understand.
But obviously, there must be a limit to such a preoccupation, because if it takes over your life (as you seem to fear) it could be a symptom of something else – an underlying sense of insecurity or anxiety. I suggest you think hard about that and ask yourself whether you were a worrier as a child and what were the issues.
I imagine your beloved parents could be helpful in exploring that. I’m sure they would be concerned at the level of your anxiety over them. The only way to counter anticipatory grief is to focus on living in the present.
Be consciously mindful about this, so much so that you employ an old technique to remind you. Every time you find yourself fretting needlessly and thinking the worst, you pinch the back of your hand hard. It will hurt. That’s the first stage: the warning. Then you deliberately haul your mind to something entertaining that happened involving your parents, or how great they looked when you saw them, or something equally positive.
Do you have enough going on in your life? Enough friendships (of both sexes) and plenty of fun things to do with those friends?
Take a cool look at the balance of your life and, if you suspect you have too much time to fret, do something about it.
And talk to your lovely parents too. I hope they would shrug and tell you, ‘Yes, of course we’re going to die one day, and so are you, and so is everybody we know – but my God, kiddo, we’re going to have a fantastic time first.’
And finally… the poison of porn is everywhere
In Greek mythology Cassandra was a Trojan princess given the gift of prophecy but cursed so that nobody would ever believe her, no matter how dire – and true – her warnings.
Now I’m reading how Epstein used pornography to corrupt his young victims, how the disgusting husband of brave Gisele Pelicot was a user of the online poison, how children as young as ten can see violent porn on phones, how girls on dates are regularly subjected to vile acts learned online and how the statistics on child sexual abuse should shock any civilised nation.
Reading such filth and remembering how I publicly railed against porn from the late 70s – yes, I feel like Cassandra. And depressed.
In 2003 I gave an hour-long public lecture called Censorship And Taboo at Bath University. This is how it ended: ‘You might ask – why should this affect me, when it’s happening somewhere else…? Maybe because conscience is what distinguishes us from animals, and… our individual humanity is compromised if we do not feel “diminished” by the suffering of others. If enough people judged violence against women and children in pornography to be entirely unacceptable, then there might follow the political will to devise laws to make it much harder for the exploitation and degradation to continue.
‘The question is this: if those of us who challenge it are invariably mocked and vilified by the liberal-Left; and if the notion of self-censorship, or constraints, remains such a no-go area amongst the artistic establishment; and if the libertarians will always rush to the barricades to defend the right of pornographers to make money from debasement… then, tell me, what chance have the damaged and abused to be heard?’
There’s outrage over Epstein. But the poison is everywhere and few really care.
