We’re now
in that strange time when no-one quite knows what day it is and what to do with
it.
I’ve
looked at my Facebook archives and they’ve only come up with posts on how many
gallons of goose stew I’ve made (this year 13 portions).
Once upon
a time I was always down home in Wales between Christmas and whenever I had
to get back for work. This was the time
of frosty walks down the river, provided it wasn’t in flood, or the lane wasn’t
waist deep in snow. Playing Scrabble,
staying up late listening to family stories and lying in bed until
lunchtime. Dad would light the fire in
the front room so his offspring and their partners had space to get away from
each other, or watch something different on the black and white portable in
there.
The front
room had originally been Grampa and Grandma’s room, and let onto their bedroom
and scullery. Grandma died a decade
after Grampa. Dad knocked the bedroom
and scullery together, replaced the old Belfast sink with a wash-hand basin,
and renamed the new bedroom the East Wing.
It was very handy if all of us went home.
To be
honest I was never keen on New Year, it seemed such a fuss for changing a
calendar. All the
looking back just seemed to reveal wasted chances and the clean new diary was
more of a challenge than an opportunity
Mum, being
a notionally half Scottish Geordie, insisted on ‘seeing the New Year in’ and
would push Dad out of the back door with a lump of coal, slice of cake and
bottle of whisky to do the first foot.
When I
got together with my first husband Phil, I came back North to see the New Year
in with him. We saw seven New Years in together. We saw in his last New Year
in Wales, blithely toasting the success of the removal of the tumour from his
intestines, and health and happiness in 1992.
He only
made it as far as the day after my birthday in September.
I took
his ashes home at Christmas and scattered them on the old Roman Road as he’d
wished.
Just me, Dad and Bigbrother.
Don’t ask
me why I didn’t want Mum or any female family members there, I just didn’t.
New Year’s
Eve 1992 was the darkest I’ve ever seen.
Three
months after being bereaved the full reality that he had gone and was never
coming back fell on me. This was a
different pain to the torment of watching him die, and those weeks of huge
overwhelming tidal waves of grief. Some people
start thinking (and worse, saying) that "by now you should be getting used to
the idea, getting over it, pulling yourself together.” They don’t realise the “yourself” you were
went with him, and now you’re having to build a new yourself out of the rubble.
I wrote
in my journal “I’ve met a lot
of widows this holidays. Such a feeling
of fellowship. They
all say ‘Nobody knows how it feels until if happens to you’ and they’re
right. We have an old wives wisdom about
us. We’ve seen death and when he comes
for us we’ll welcome him because it’s only in death that we’ll be with the one
dearest to us. Even if what is after
death is only oblivion at least it will be a shared oblivion.”
I couldn’t endure an evening watching some gruesome twee Scottish Hogmanay programme.
I couldn’t
bear inflicting my misery on my parents and siblings.
I went
into the front room, turned out the light, sat where Granma’s chair used to be
and stared into the fire.
I remembered
how, as a child, she’d taught me to see castles and magical landscapes in the
glowing coals.
I
wondered how she had been on those ten New Year’s Eves after Grampa had gone;
and felt her close to me, wanting to wrap me Welsh-style inside her shawl like
she used to when I was a tiny child.
So with
all this going through my head …
and the knowledge
that so many people are facing their first New Year’s Eve without someone
they love …
you’ll
understand why blogs have been a little thin on the ground recently.
I promise tomorrow’s will be much more fun.
