“I Was Widowed In My 40s”
It’s been four years since my husband Ben died, and being a widow is complicated. I chose to be married, but I didn’t choose to be unmarried. Twenty-one years ago, I married the love of my life. He selected the date – 20.02.2000 – because he loved it when the numbers lined up. And he so looked forward to our 20th wedding anniversary for the same reason, which would have been last year. How I regret that we never got to 20 years.
I remember that it was a beautiful day. We had been spending some of our summer holidays at our beach house, our happy place. It was my final day off before I had to return to work and so I told my husband that it was his last opportunity to go paragliding if he wanted to land on the beach and have me drive to pick him up. He was an experienced paraglider, but he was quite ambivalent that day – it meant that he had to drag himself away from the Lorne Sea Baths, which he loved. But he went anyway. And then the wind picked up, and threw him quite heavily on top of a cliff.
When I got the call, I thought he’d be injured. My daughter asked if he was going to die and I said, “No, no, no – he’s landed badly, that’s all.” We thought he was going to be fine. I later found out from the coroner’s report that he only needed two more seconds for his parachute to reinflate. He was two seconds too short, that’s all it was.
I handled it badly when I had to tell the kids – I have beat myself up over that. I just didn’t know how to tell them so I said, “Dad died”. It was so uncouth and inelegant but back then, I had no other words. At the funeral, one of the funeral directors said, “This is going to become real today. If you need to scream or throw yourself onto the grave, you have to do whatever you want to do.” I said, “Are you crazy? I’ve got three kids who are watching me and I’m not going to leave them with that image.”
People understand the horror of what I went through on the day that Ben died, but they don’t really comprehend what happens afterwards. Grief is a shroud and it encapsulates everything. For a year, I couldn’t taste anything, colours were muted, I didn’t know what the weather was like because every day felt cold.
The grief journey is a complicated one. It doesn’t end at any specific destination, but rather ebbs and flows, triggered by thousands of moments and memories. Sometimes I am unravelled by surprise – defrosting Ben’s last batch of bolognese sauce a few months after he died, or disconnecting his Apple ID, only to watch the slideshow of our lives roll past on his laptop.
Many days I’m carrying around a heavy sack of pain and grief. On good days, it’s a stone that sits inside my chest. I can feel happiness and joy – I can laugh and love – but through it all there’s grief. It doesn’t get easier. You just get used to it, and transformed by it. I am often not strong and I am often not OK. It comforts me to talk to Ben aloud, hearing his voice in my head: teasing me, encouraging me, advising me.
“For a year, I couldn’t taste anything, colours were muted, I didn’t know what the weather was like because every day felt cold. ”
I let myself free-fall into grief for a whole year and there was some relief in giving in to the numbing routine of kids, work, bills, lawyers, repeat. “How much longer do I have to do this?” I would ask my psychologist. “How many more days do I have to drag myself through until it’s over?” But of course I had to keep going. There were three very important reasons, our children, and they all needed me more than ever. But even as I admired our children’s resilience, I resented it, too. The kids kept asking if I was excited about the next holiday or the school musical – all the things that would previously enthral me. For a whole year, the answer was no.
What I hadn’t taken into account was how much they needed their mother to be happy and engaged with life. For a time, I expect it felt to them that they had lost both of their parents. So I had to make a choice – re-enter life with confidence or accept defeat. If I took the latter option, it would change the course of my children’s lives. And so we escaped the first anniversary of the accident by fleeing to the wide plains of the African Serengeti. There I pledged to move on. Together, the kids and I promised each other we would leave fear behind. We would remember Ben with joy and love and laughter, and I would find a way to embrace life again.
There are times we find comfort. A friend of mine who has always said he has a spiritual connection with the other world, came over one day; the way he talks about his experiences with ghosts has amused all of us for years. But he came to my house shortly after Ben died and told me he could feel Ben’s presence. He pointed to a particular book on the shelf which happened to be a diary that Ben had kept on a trip to Indonesia. I pulled the book off the shelf, but it fell to the floor, and opened to a page that had said, “Matt and I share room 32.” Matt was his best friend and he had died a decade before Ben. It was very much a message of comfort. You want to see signs.
I think I’ve done a pretty good job of sticking with the plan I made with the kids. And the kids did a great job of honouring his memory with positivity and hope. My twin daughters founded a not-for-profit, Parachute, that provides micro-grants to kids who suffer trauma. After Ben died, they worried about how their lives would change due to the absence of our family’s main breadwinner – would their music lessons and sporting club memberships continue, for instance? When those things weren’t altered, they recognised that they were luckier than other kids who did lose the things that made them feel normal and connected. It always strikes me how thrilled they are every time they provide an experience for a child who wouldn’t otherwise have it, and how little self-pity they have for themselves.
I’ve found love again. I wasn’t ready, and neither was he; I don’t think we ever would have been. Neither of us were looking for love. We were professional friends who would catch up for coffee every six months or so, and it was completely platonic. There was the shock of it: why am I seeing him differently all of a sudden? How can this be happening? There was the shared experience of each of us losing our spouses, and that created a bond of understanding of what the other person was feeling.
I’ve realised you can fall in love and still be in love with the person that you married. It’s a relationship in a bubble with each other, and with our spouses. Ben will always be a part of me – I can never fall out of love with him or let go of the past. He is inscribed across two decades. You never move on, the loss just changes its shape. There will be more years, more love and more adventures and memories to come.
Interview with Lahra Carey by Rachelle Unreich
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