Adam is a
Journalist.
From
The Telegraph, 7 Jan 2012.
Adam Edwards: Life as a widowerSince the death of his wife, Adam Edwards has come to realise that a widower’s existence doesn’t have to be miserable.
It was late last spring when my half-Russian wife Natasha died at the age of 54, after a long and debilitating illness. After a quarter of a century of marriage, I was on my own. It was not a role for which I was prepared. It was not just the grief, for which nobody can prepare, but also the readjustment to living. I was like a motorcycle that had suddenly lost its sidecar; wobbling along without a companion to help me around the corners.
The last time I was driving solo I was living in a top-floor, one-bedroom Notting Hill Gate apartment that was so small that no matter where I was in the flat, I could reach the corded landline after just one ring. It was a bird perch; a “sock’’, as Martin Amis famously described such soulless bachelor pads, for sleeping, smooching and refuelling. Suddenly, at the age of 60, I was in a sock once more, only this time it is a modest-sized country house, a building that I had never before thought of as mine but rather as a family home owned mostly by the bank and, until this year, consisting of wife, dog, child and a ship’s container of white goods.
Since Nat’s death, the place has subtly begun to revert to a rural version of my old bachelor flat. The dog, Zeb, a Jack Russell of uncertain pedigree, had to go if I was to build any sort of social life. He was, anyway, my wife’s tail-wagging mutt who would come to her call but not to mine and would welcome her by wriggling around on the carpet like a woolly worm. He would greet me, on the other hand, with complete indifference, which was unbecoming in a dependent animal who, in human years, was 57 years old. Nat’s death left him bereft, and a wonderful neighbour adopted him.
My daughter Katya had left for the fleshpots of London shortly before the bereavement, and as for the white goods, I view them now as I always had, with antipathy. I dare not change the washing machine dials that are still on the setting last used by my wife, the swanky American fridge is now so over-capacitated that I have taken to using the fridge section as a wine cellar and the freezer as an ice bucket, while the cost of cooking a baked potato in the cream-coloured four-door electric Aga, which neither heats the water nor the central heating, could save the euro. The cooker was once the mother lode that fed my wife, daughter and myself. Now it only has me to service and its primary role is to cook a spud once a week. It would be cheaper to dine out at El Bulli.
I moped about in those early months of widowhood. As a freelance journalist, it was easy to skive. I watched daytime television for the first time in my life, increased my intake of cigarettes and spent a lot of time clearing cupboards. The Polish “daily’’ said, somewhat undiplomatically, that the house needed a complete spring clean and the drone of her hoover was a tolling bell that drove me to the local wine bar, although not necessarily to drink (the doctor recently told me that my liver was “good... for Gloucestershire’’).
By midsummer, nihilism had replaced grief and it took a rocket from my daughter, who has become something of a de facto wife, to pull me out of my self-pity. Quite soon after that, I began to realise that a widower’s life is not all gloom and domestic doom; quite the reverse, in fact.
In the early autumn, invitations started to arrive. At first they tended to be for Sunday lunch - a feast in the Cotswolds that is as momentous as the Last Supper. Sometimes there was an awkward moment because nobody knew quite what to say other than, “I’m so sorry to hear your news.” And I, in turn, never knew ex
d. 6 May 2011, Cirencester, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom 
. Katya EDWARDS
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