31/05/2021
In two days’, it will have been six months since my amazing husband walked out of the door and never came back. We had been together for just under three years, married for just under a year and a half. Lockdown meant that we lived several years worth of marriage in just a few months, but his loss is devastating.
How I have managed to get from the point where he died, to the point I’m at now, I do not know.
Initially every day was a slog. I would operate bent over, the weight of my grief, such an incredibly heavy weight, was pulling me down. Sometimes I wouldn’t leave my bedroom for the whole day. I stopped eating, desperately trying to end my own life so I could be with him. But slowly I realised that I couldn’t do that to my parents or my daughter (she’s 22) or my friends. I was going to have to learn to live with my grief, in some way, shape, or form.
I’m a very creative person. I have been making patchwork quilts for years (There’s an album full of all my previous quilts. If you like a quilt, take a look). Shortly after my husband’s death, I decided to make a quilt in his honour. This was a painful experience. Every time I worked on it; it would remind me that he had died. I wanted to show him what I was doing, but this just reminded me that I would never share anything with him again. That quilt took a long time to make. It’s still not finished.
I made another patchwork quilt. I worked on previous quilts, (I have about eight unfinished quilts on the go). I made cushion covers. But quilting was giving me too much time to think. I didn’t want time to think. I needed to be completely absorbed in my task. I tried weaving. Bought a small round loom, built myself a larger rectangle loom. I like weaving, but again, it can give me too much time to think. I needed another focus. An absorbing focus.
About three weeks before he had the massive heart attack that would result in his death, Danny and I had moved into a new house, the first we had owned together. It was in an area that I didn’t know. I had yet to meet my neighbours (I still haven’t met most of them), and I was far removed from any support network I might have drawn on. My family live in Fife and Ayrshire (I’m in Rutherglen, outside of Glasgow), and because of lockdown, they weren’t allowed to travel and see me. Of my closest friends, only three lived in Glasgow. The rest are spread across Scotland and England. Facetime became my only contact with them, and phone calls were my only access to my family. It was tough, but my evenings were filled with online chats. Simultaneously watching television or a movie over Facetime with a friend became a thing for nearly every evening of the week. It was the daytime I needed to struggle through. Furlough meant that I was only working for two days a week, leaving five days to be filled in between. How I was going to fill that time, became my next challenge.
I tried to be creative with fabric and wool, but as I said, they weren’t absorbing enough attention for enough time.
I tried writing. I’m an academic. Writing is what I do (or am supposed to do, I haven’t looked at my PHD in months). But writing seemed to always draw me back to my grief. It was the only thing I could think about.
I tried researching things I could do to honour Danny, but these things required thought processes that I simply couldn’t manage. My brain was like mush and decisions were really hard.
I planned a podcast about the practical side of death, so we can help others through this minefield, and support people to make preparations for their own death. However, this takes research and is hardly a distraction.
I reorganised some of the house, tried to take ownership. But this is a project house. Only one room has been decorated and upgraded (my daughter’s bedroom), the rest needed a lot of work. And a lot of decisions.
Obviously, Danny and I had made plans before we moved in. But I am a strong believer in living in a space and learning to understand that space and how you live in it, before you make any huge decisions. I am also a big believer in changing your mind, especially when it comes to interior design. Try something, and if it isn’t going to work the way you want it to, and you’ve really thought about it and exhausted your options, then recognise the limitations and work within them. There really is absolutely no point in flogging a dead horse. But if you are absolutely determined, then I guess it is all down to finance, and how much you are willing to pay. There is also great strength in recognising your own personal limitations. I wouldn’t mess with my electrics, no matter how many YouTube videos I watched. I did try to change some taps, most unsuccessfully (thank goodness for tiled floors) and so now I know that I need more training before I’m willing to undertake any plumbing. I also don’t drive, so big hardware stores that offer all sorts of solutions to a myriad of problems, are unavailable to me.
But apart from plumbing and electrics, I am willing to turn my hand to just about anything. And because my finances are tight (I have just lost half the household income), this is a good thing. If I had to pay someone to come in and do everything that I wanted, then I would get nothing done. Also, DIY is one of the few things that absorbs enough of my attention that the grief doesn’t destroy me although, when I finish something, the grief can be overwhelming. I just want to show Danny what I’ve done. I want to share it with him. I was supposed to share it with him. Not do it on my own.
Anyway, I decided to do the house in two stages with each stage taking five years. This is not to say that I have to spread my first stage over a five-year period. It’s just a recognition of the limitations of my finances, and how my use of the house might change. The first stage will be filled with my bringing the house up to a standard that ensures that it’s watertight and safe, and that it looks nice and is comfortable, but also so it doesn’t increase the value too much. We bought the house with help of a government loan which I need to pay back if I sell, or pay back so that I own a greater proportion of the house. However, I don’t just pay back what we borrowed, I pay back a percentage. So, we borrowed 23% of what we paid for the house. If we had paid £100,000, then we would have borrowed £23000. If I sold the house for £100000, then I would pay back £23000. However, if I sell the house for £200000 (unlikely), then I will have to pay back £46000. So, it makes sense to keep the value of the house low, so I can pay the government back a lower amount, before I start doing structural work that increases the value.
The second stage will involve work that I cannot perform; re-wiring, walls coming down, walls going up. The second stage is making the house ready to sell, if that is what I choose to do. I may end up just living in it. I’m also giving myself five years to complete this stage, so doing up the house will take around ten years. Oooft. I’m hoping by the end of the first stage, which I will mostly do myself, I will have learnt to live with my grief.
DIY is my therapy.
