The Inbetween Time

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.