Adam is a
Journalist.
From
The Telegraph, 7 Jan 2012.
Adam Edwards: Life as a widower
Since 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 exactly what to reply except “thank you’’. But after a few drinks, the stiffness disappeared. Nat was toasted and praised, her wit was celebrated and any foibles that she may have had were long forgotten.
As I crept back into social life, I was frequently given the advice “don’t do anything for a year’’, which I had no intention of doing, and then asked the contradictory question: “Are you going to move back to London?’’
The latter was not, I think, meant rudely but rather it was a genuine inquiry. In the countryside, a single man is socially acceptable, even desirable at the occasional party, while a single woman, particularly a widow, is deemed an outcast. A host of attractive solo women have told me how lucky I am to be in my new role and how unfortunate they are. The reason for their wretched situation, they say, is that it is married women who run the social life in the shires and that they, as single women, pose a threat to the husbands.
I am not sure that this is necessarily true, but the question about moving to London was usually followed up with the advice that I would be “mad’’ to do so as there were so many divorcées on the prowl. So far I have not been overwhelmed by rural crumpet but perhaps, because I am so out of practice, I am missing the signals.
My friend Ricki, a single man who has been playing the field in Gloucestershire for several years, tells me that I should have an affair with a married woman to “gain some credibility” in the county - but not more than one, otherwise I will be shunned as a cad. In fact, it is only in London where I can claim so far to have been “hit on’’. And there I notice that the difference between the life of a callow bachelor in the early Eighties and an ageing widower in 2012 is that the matter of sex and whether or not it is available is brought up by the woman within the first few minutes of meeting her. In my new world, it is the women that are the aggressors. One ageing divorcée I met recently looked me up and down like a teenager ogling a stripper and commented: “nice bum’’.
It is good to know my bottom is still the subject of approval after the fattening years of domestic bliss, but it is no substitute for my wife’s shapely behind beside me. She was there to prompt me when I forgot names, as a recipient of my moans when I had to sit next to the bore and to drive me home when I had a schooner or two too much to drink. In the country one works as a pair; every social event, with the exception of a Saturday drink at the pub, is based around couples, and to be single is to be a stray.
There are other interesting sides to widowhood. Nat, a woman for whom politics and sport held little of interest, controlled the television remote. Since her death I have not watched a single soap opera, hospital drama or reality show. Instead I now subscribe to Sky Sports and have invested in the complete boxed sets of The West Wing. I have got rid of the dull family car, which was a four-wheel temple to health and safety, and replaced it with a two-door sporty number. And I have bought an iPod. There is no room on it for the crooning of the Rat Pack, of the Sinatras, Dean Martins and Sammy Davis Jnrs that my wife was so insistent on playing. Instead I have loaded it up with classic Sixties rock - in particular Pink Floyd, a group that had been banned in my house for a quarter of a century. Nat had only two requests before her death - the first was that the words “I’ve been to a marvellous party” should be on her headstone, and the second that Midnight Train to Georgia by Gladys Knight and the Pips should be played at her funeral. I have left that song off the iPod as I cannot listen to it without blubbing.
Meanwhile, I no longer worry about budgeting for a family and I have changed supermarkets from Tesco and its Stalinist Club Card for the more sophisticated climes of Waitrose. My marriage was a gourmet war between my preference for red meat and my wife’s fondness for white meat, with a pasta dish as the frequent compromise. Now I pick and choose the finest grub the supermarket deli has to offer (a slice of rare beef for one, for example, is no more expensive than spag bol for three), I give the vegetable section a miss and I do not have to stand like a dunce in the cosmetics department while Nat flirts with a decision. Furthermore, there are no more squabbles over the Chinese takeaway menu - I’ll never have to eat lemon chicken again.
Other small things have come as a pleasant surprise. Nat insisted on cut flowers in the house - something about which I thought I cared little - and could not go shopping without bunching herself. After her death, I missed the flowers and the house is now never without them. My complaints about knick-knacks cluttering up the place were also misplaced. They are, I now realise, what make a home, although I’m not sure about the ghastly Russian cup and saucer that is, according to Nat, a very valuable heirloom that I dropped 10 years ago and which ever since has sat in shattered pieces on the drawing room mantelpiece waiting to be fixed.
Perhaps the hardest thing about my new life is to resolve it with the old, to get on with life without guilt, to do things without always wondering if Nat would approve. Dr Samuel Johnson, in a letter to a friend about the state of widowhood, wrote: “The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless, till it is driven into a new channel.’’
As the black clouds of despondency skid over me less frequently, a new channel is slowly emerging. But I know that it will take more time; probably much more time than I thought, as it is a racing certainty that Nat will continue to haunt me until I mend that damn Russian cup and saucer.
d. 6 May 2011, Cirencester, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom 
. Katya EDWARDS
: Address
: Location
: City/Town
: County/Shire
: State/Province
: Country
: Not Set