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There will always be tough years in a marriage this long. It’s guaranteed. The best you can hope is you have someone who cares enough to weather them with you.
I’ve always loved that about reading. Being able to experience a different time or place, but mostly getting a chance to experience being a different person altogether.
‘We really put all our eggs in one basket, Arthur, didn’t we? And I’m not sure it was the right one.’
We always think this, just hopefully not when it’s too late. Hopefully there’s always time to do something about it, to change your mind, to wonder and note if it’s the wrong basket. And make a change. Spread your eggs out, allow for multiple baskets, multiple chances, multiple opportunities to love and be loved.
‘It was spring of 1961, showers on and off all day. But in between, brilliant sunshine. There was a wonderful rainbow.’ ‘A bit like marriage, then,’ he says.
It strikes me that luck is a relative thing, that it’s not something you can pin down and be sure of. That it can be something you have and then lose. Or the other way around.
‘When you’re young and you’re a woman,’ I say, ‘everyone’s interested in you. In what you look like and what you’ve got to say. And then there’s a point in your life, around fifty or so, when it all stops and you become invisible. And it’s stupid, really, because by then you have much more interesting things to contribute to the conversation, but no one wants to hear them. I’ve come to terms with it, it happened to me a long time ago, but since my husband died, some days I don’t speak to anyone, and I feel like no one can see me, and I think I wanted to test that.’
An education, a career. And it should be easier, shouldn’t it, but I’m not sure it is. Perhaps there’s no easy way through that transition to adulthood, no matter when you live it.
How much time have I wasted, over the years, caring about the thoughts of people I don’t know and never will?
Because the death of the person you spent your whole life with is one thing, but the death of the person you didn’t? Sometimes, that’s the real tragedy.
Is it enough? If I don’t have long left, have I done and said enough?
The price of living a long life, I think, is the sheer weight of the losses you have to suffer. You carry each loved one you lose, and they stack up, and it becomes unbearable. I tick them off in my mind. Brother, father, mother, husband, and my friend, my love.
‘I think we’re all grieving for something. Our childhoods or a relationship or a dream.’
There was never much time for big skies and thoughts that tumbled from one thing to another, unhindered.
We all have something that’s broken us, I suppose. Nobody gets away unscathed.
And that’s a privilege, at my age. To change something, or learn something. To keep growing.
It isn’t possible, to erase the lives we’ve lived. We only have today, and whatever future we’re granted.
