The day after the day after

 I was talking to a friend about the potential death of her husband, and was giving her advice on what it’s like, so I’m sharing my experiences here. 

The very first feeling was horrified wonderment. Jill was alive one moment, and gone the next. Alive, dead. On, off. It’s that brutal and shocking. You can’t think. Everything stops, and you end up stunned as a barrage of negative emotions hits you one after another; horror, fear, terror, confusion, disbelief, overwhelming grief. I couldn’t feel my body at all; I was sitting by the fire, terribly cold from shock and I didn’t notice that my jeans had started smouldering. That mental numbness lasts for weeks. It’s not it’s all terribly sad, because it is, it’s just so hard. Everything has to be thought through; I remember I once stood in front of a door because I couldn’t work out how to open it. 

But at the same time, you have to be on your mental A game. You have to sign official things, deal with the paperwork, talk to funeral directors, you have to tell people as well. But your brain is still overwhelmed. Just as you come up for air another wave batters you down. You get tripped up by the simplest of things; do you stay on the same side of the bed, to wake up with a sickening shock to realise she’s not there and why, or do you change sides and wake up confused. Luckily people are terrified of the bereaved, so they get you in, sort out papers, get rid of you pronto!

Then the serious paperwork starts. Life insurances, certificates, informing authorities. It’s an endless round of screaming “my wife has died!” into an uncaring world. Then there’s the whole money side. As in “where the eff is it coming from?” I didn’t know what would happen to our joint credit card, the mortgage, insurances and so on. I knew nothing about the finance side, Jill always did that. And because we chose not to talk about it, I didn’t know where anything was, or what I should have been looking for. Thank god my brother dealt with all of that for me, I was incapable. I would sit for hours, just trying to learn how to think again. 

But I have got ahead of myself. There’s the funeral. All the decisions to be made about that. Songs, readings and so on. I wrote Jill’s eulogy but I wasn’t capable of giving it myself. It’s the one time in my life when I haven’t been able to stand up in front of an audience. It was a bitterly cold morning. I looked out of the window and saw the hearse drive up the road and turn around. My brother and two sisters in law and myself drove behind. I was fixated on the hearse, with Jill in it. The utter screaming agony of knowing this would be our last journey. I sobbed all the way there, wishing the car would never stop, and Jill and I could drive on into eternity. 

It was a brutal funeral. I have little direct recollection of it, but it was hard. There were very few people who weren’t in tears. Then I had to go out first! I should have let them all go out first, and leave me for a few more seconds. Then you have to thank people for coming, and they are all in tears which makes you try and comfort them, insane though that sounds. Then there’s the wake. I was lost; this was Jill’s territory, and she always led the way, found us people to talk to, and how to have a good time. I felt hopeless and powerless. I just wanted it all over, but was so aware that this was the last day Jill and I shared the world. 

In all honesty I am absolutely astonished that I didn’t commit suicide. I was totally broken into thousands of pieces. It felt like my drive shaft had sheered in two. (I dont actually know what one of those is, but it sounds impressive.) I think at the time, it just didn’t occur to me; it came later I think, but by then I had some brain available. Again looking back I am astonished at my ability to just keep going. And of course, I had to work. I often use the same stories and jokes and examples when I teach and it was only when I’d be half way through one I’d realise it had some link to Jill. 

I remember I got angry. Not with Jill, but with people around us. Many had dropped us during Jill’s illness, and they could really have helped make her life easier. But they didn’t. They got the fuck out. I took great delight in hunting them down to supposedly tell them Jill had died, and they deserved to know. Then I just tore into them without any mercy at all. If I could have got away with killing them I may well have done so. Instead, I had to content myself with telling them what Jill said about them after she was snubbed, then telling them what I thought of them, finishing with telling them never ever to contact me again or they would rue the day. And none of them ever have, which is just as well, because I still have plenty of anger left in me. I’m not proud of it; I know I deliberately crafted my words for the deepest possible cuts. So not proud, but I don’t regret a single word I said. 

Jill’s ashes are in my bedroom. She, like me, loved Spitfires, so her ashes lie in a box covered in pictures of them. She would certainly approved of that. And my dogs ashes are there as well, and some teddy bears and trinkets. The whole ashes thing is ridiculous. You go and pick them up from the Funeral Director, and they come in an opaque brown coloured plastic sweet jar type affair. How do you get it home? What do you do with them? Everything from her ashes on down became sacred. Books she read, her clothes, crossword puzzle books she wrote in, all of her items. I’ve thrown away a few things, but not much. And I think I’m repeating myself at this point so will take myself to bed to dream of spitfires.