The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

by Laura Pearson

It’s funny, I don’t mind him going out, don’t mind my own company, but I like him coming back, too. I like hearing his stories. The house feels different when he’s not in it, as if all our furniture and belongings settle and wait, like a breath held.

Sometimes it feels like the world is unimaginably big, and other times it feels like you could hold it in your hand.

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 didn’t love him, at first, but I grew to. Not passionate love, not the kind of love people talk about dying for, more a love built brick by brick. A love made of appreciation, and shared grief, and kindness. He was a good man. Such a good man.

I remember Arthur saying that God wasn’t in churches, that that wasn’t where you found him. God was in the flowers and the snow, the tiny robins in the garden and those tigers we’d see prowling around on David Attenborough documentaries.

Why do we wait until people are dead to talk about how we felt?

‘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.’

It’s a different world, the one she’s growing up in. The one she’ll inherit. She’s got options I didn’t even know to want. 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.

Are women’s expectations typically this low? A few dates and a ring? She hasn’t said anything about passion or undying love. She hasn’t said anything about feeling dizzy and sick and like she couldn’t possibly live without him.

How much time have I wasted, over the years, caring about the thoughts of people I don’t know and never will?

It’s just, men like him, they think we’re all here for their entertainment, don’t they? And they don’t like it if we’re not interested in them. In men, I mean. They feel like it’s some kind of personal attack.’

The air in the room is heavy with the weight of our regrets.

‘We don’t always have to know what the next step is. Sometimes we have to wait a bit for inspiration to strike. Don’t lose hope.’

There’s so much I want to tell her. Not to waste a second of that precious youth. To hold her family close while she has them. To go after love like it’s a war and she’s losing. But what would I have said, if someone had told me those things when I was her age? I try to picture it, me walking around town aimlessly with Dot, some old woman coming up to us to impart her wisdom. We would have laughed and walked away, thought nothing more of it. Because the young think they know it all already, don’t they? They don’t know how they’ll feel later. How lonely and wistful. That’s the trick of it.

there are other cures for loneliness than reinstating the person or people who were there before.

I was so sure it was too late to change, but I was wrong. It’s only too late when you’re dead and buried.

You should try everything. You won’t regret it. It’s so different from the way I’ve lived my life. But I’m starting to think it’s right.

Moving on. It’s a thing people talk about these days. Next person, next love. I don’t know where they find the strength for it, the courage.

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.

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 could have asked her a hundred things. To stay, to kiss me again, to be my everything for all time, but she was pretending that we hadn’t just set our lives on fire, and I was hurt.

‘Oh, I loved him. There are so many different kinds of love. I couldn’t love him the way he loved me, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t love there, between us.’

You can’t live in the past, I tell myself, but you can visit. And you can bring bits of it into the present, when you need them. All this time, I’ve thought of every year since Dot left as wasted, but perhaps it isn’t as bleak as all that. There have been pockets of happiness, there has been laughter and a certain kind of love. Raging bliss isn’t the only thing that’s real.

‘I think we’re all grieving for something. Our childhoods or a relationship or a dream.’

We all have something that’s broken us, I suppose. Nobody gets away unscathed.