The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

by Laura Pearson

I’m more about looking back, especially now there’s so much back and so little forward left. What’s wrong with spending your last few years in quiet contemplation? It’s too late to change the world, isn’t it?

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’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.

When you’re young, and one of you is ill, you know it’s likely nothing serious. But at this age, every symptom wields the power to terrify.

Sometimes I cry, both for the loss of him and for the loss of all those years. For the life I didn’t live. All the lives I didn’t live. We only get to choose one, after all. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I just stare at the wall, or at the empty space in the bed beside me.

So many people I loved

↓↓↓

have gone. My little corner of the world is emptying out. I have to wonder why I’m still here.

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 s...

wake up in the morning these days and I have to do an assessment of my whole body, try to work out what hurts and how much and whether it was hurting the day before. And then it takes me ten minutes to get up and going.

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

I think we all have secrets, and things we’re ashamed of, and things we exaggerate because they show us in a better light.

It’s such a huge disruption, having kids in the house, but it’s like nothing else. It’s all stories and dancing, painting and running about. Nothing’s out of bounds.’

I remember when my body moved easily like that. When nothing was too difficult, physically. When my heart was open and uncracked.

It’s for life, family. It’s forever.

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.

Because here I am now, an old woman, a widow, and what have I got to show for my life?

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.

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.

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.

I might learn something. And that’s a privilege, at my age. To change something, or learn something. To keep growing.