Living with Loss
A powerful essay by Roslyn Dee on five years of grieving
When writer Roslyn Dee’s husband died five years ago, she was left tortured to the point of physical illness. Here — in a beautiful and honest essay that will resonate with anyone who has experienced loss — she describes her progression from those early days of numb disbelief, through anger and despair to a final place of hope, as she learned that letting go of her grief didn’t have to mean letting go of Gerry too
My mirror twin, my next of kin
I’d know you in my sleep
And who but you would take me in A thousand kisses deep?
— Leonard Cohen
It’s just before 4.30am and I’m climbing the stairs. Step after step after step until finally, eight floors up, I stand and look out over the city. Is it day or is it night? Lights are still lit down below, but the Pigeon House chimneys are clearly visible while Howth is a distant shape, like a sleeping child under the duvet of a cloud-laden sky. I stand there, alone and numb, for at least 20 minutes. I know this not because I remember any of it. Not the climb, not the view, not the weather. I know this only because the photos I took that morning on the stairwell on the top floor of the hospital also tell me the time: first blurry image taken at 4.27am, final one at 4.47am.
As that final photo clicks into my iPhone, my husband has been gone from the world for 37 minutes. Gerry. Dead. How can that possibly be? I remember asking myself that question over and over again on that morning of devastation — June 22, 2015.
Five years later, and although I can accept the reality now and have adjusted to the absence of his presence, I still find myself wondering, how it can be? How can
Gerry — my husband, lover, playmate, workmate, champion, counsellor, dream-weaver, nonsense-buster, North Star — not be here any more?
I retain certain flashes of memory from that June daybreak. One has never left me.
I’m standing in the hospital’s small family room with those close to me, getting ready to go home. To leave Gerry behind. Suddenly, a terrible sound rents the air. Loud and guttural, like an animal in pain. What is it? I look up and see my son and my stepson rushing towards me. I am bewildered for a moment. Then I realise that the animal is me.
It’s the first visceral sign of the grief that is about to engulf me, the grief that I think will never let me go. Nor I it. It’s there at every turn, waking or sleeping, working or relaxing, at home and abroad. I run from it — Venice, Crete, Bologna and Madrid, all in the first 12 months — and yet I always bring it with me, like carry-on baggage. I can’t let it go. For to try to let it go is to let Gerry go, and how could I possibly do that? Almost three years after his death a close friend gently says to me on the phone one evening: “Are you afraid you’ll be forsaking him?” That old-fashioned word hits home, the song from the western High Noon fills my head, and I start to cry. No, I won’t forsake you, oh my darling...
From death to funeral I am a whirlwind of activity. Undertaker, humanist celebrant, coffin, flowers, wording for the death notice, clothes for the coffin, choice of readings, music, and people for the cremation service — I sort them all. You must be exhausted, my loved-ones tell me. I’m grand, I say. I want it to be right for Gerry. I want it to be perfect. And it is.
I write what I’m going to say on that June 25 afternoon while propped up in bed at 4am on the morning of the funeral. (Christmas Day, I had realised with a heavy heart when the funeral date was decided, would always be a six-month anniversary of Gerry’s funeral.)
Later, I help carry my beloved husband into Mount Jerome to the strains of Casta Diva from Norma, his favourite opera. As the Kinks sing Thank You for the Days, the gathered crowds drift forward to the basket of stones that have been gathered by my son from Greystones beach, each person placing one gently on Gerry’s coffin. And as the curtains close and my son grasps my hand so tightly that my ring digs into my flesh, the sound of Frank Sinatra’s voice fills the Victorian chapel. I’ll be loving you... always... Not for just an hour, not for just a day, not for just a year, but... always...
Our song. Our word. Always.
‘Always’, the word we wrote on cards and in book inscriptions to each other. Always, the song we danced to together over the years, on our own in our living-room, listening to the voice of Sinatra or Leonard Cohen giving life to the Irving Berlin song. ‘Always’, as we had engraved inside our wedding rings, the one I still wear on the finger he slipped it on to 20 years ago while the other one — his — lies close to my heart on a chain around my
“We had lived for 20 years in the shelter of each other, a two-piece jigsaw happily superglued together. I felt lost and panic stricken and like I was living in a dream”
neck. Never absent from there, night or day, since the lovely night nurse handed it to me in a white envelope an hour after Gerry’s death. On it went around my neck. And there it will stay. Always.
I went to Venice — like a second home to us for many years — four days after the funeral. Alone. It was the best thing I could have done. Was I desolate? Yes. But I had a sense of him there in this place that we both loved. I could see him on every corner; strolling alongside every canal, his camera slung round his shoulder, a cigar between his fingers. Those three days in Venice confirmed that what we had talked about was the right thing to do — when the time was right for me, I would bring Gerry’s ashes to Venice.
And so I came home and started to face into the hours and days and weeks and years ahead without him. A different, devastating kind of always. And inside myself, in the core of my being, I fell apart. It was just too much to face. We had lived for 20 years in the shelter of each other, a two-piece jigsaw happily superglued together. I felt lost and panic-stricken and like I was living in a dream. Any minute now I’d wake up and Gerry would be there, quietly reading in his chair by the window, off out on a photographic assignment, or cooking something superb in the kitchen. “Glass of wine, sweetheart?” he’d call across to me as he stirred and tasted and finessed that night’s dinner.
Grief is overwhelming and unpredictable. And individual. I didn’t get that at first. I thought it was the same for everyone. When I happened to discover while I was reading her book, A Widow’s Story, that Joyce Carol Oates had remarried one year after the death of her first husband of 47 years, I just thought, oh, for God’s sake, and tossed the half-read book into the corner. I know now that that was what was best for her. That everyone deals differently with love and the awful foreverness of loss. (Still — a year?)
When a journalist friend who had experienced loss himself and who should have known better asked me less than a year after Gerry’s death if I had “been with anyone yet”, I genuinely didn’t understand at first. Then I was shocked; speechless. “Your problem,” he said, believing that he was being kind, “is that you are still sleeping with Gerry every night.”
People meant well. I know that now; even people who got it completely wrong. “He’s in a better place,” a friend with strong faith texted me one day. I threw my phone across the room. How could he be in any place that was better than here with me?
“I know how you feel,” an acquaintance told me, knowingly. “My uncle died last year. It’s dreadful.”
“Your uncle?” I had to stop myself from shrieking at her.
I don’t know how I stopped that response because, largely, grief stripped away my tolerance filter. I wasn’t angry with Gerry for leaving me, but I was tortured by his loss. My fuse became shorter and shorter as the months progressed. Never great at the suffering of fools, I now sent people packing. I was difficult. I know that. People tip-toed around me, waiting for the next bomb to go off.
And I am forever grateful to those who really cared about me, those who understood me — particularly my son, my sister and brother-in-law, and my ‘forsaken’ friend — for cutting me so much slack. And other good friends too for all the phone calls and the dinners. The problem was, though, I didn’t want any of them. The only person I wanted I couldn’t have. Ever again.
I struggled through every hour of every day that first summer. In September I went back to work. I functioned. And then I went home — and found myself perpetually taken aback that Gerry still wasn’t there. Meanwhile I couldn’t bear to look at Gerry’s car still parked outside our apartment building. Yet the day I stood there, watching as it was driven away, I thought my heart would break in two.
I couldn’t read fiction. I’d start a book, lose concentration after a few pages, and toss it aside. A week later I’d start another one. And another. And another. I didn’t read a book again until February 2016. (Carol by Patricia Highsmith — ‘the book that brought me back’
I’ve written on the flyleaf.)
I paddled around the edges of ‘grief ’ books but found myself unable to dive into their depths. Just not for me. I took only one thing from any of them and it is was this: “No one ever told me,” wrote CS Lewis in A Grief
Observed, “that grief felt so like fear.” How true that was — the butterflies in the stomach, the fast heartbeat, the nausea, the restlessness.
Meanwhile, no one told me that grief makes you ill — physically. Eye problems, stomach issues, throat infections, recurring back pain, worrying heart symptoms, I had them all over the first two years. And from the cardiologist I learned that something I always imagined was an old wives’ tale was, in fact, a medical reality. Takotsubo — broken heart syndrome. Who knew?
Gerry Sandford, my husband, died from lung cancer. Thirteen months from diagnosis to death. Was he a smoker? Yes. More than 40 Camel a day when we became a couple in 1995. A year later he quit cigarettes but replaced them with small cigars. He loved smoking but more and more he wanted to stop. And he finally did — two weeks before his 60th birthday in October 2012. But it was too late. The damage was done. And then in May 2014, despite no symptoms but with an earlier scan for a separate issue showing a shadow on his lung, a biopsy was done and the grim diagnosis was handed down.
Devastated as we both were, Gerry faced it head on and his sense of humour remained intact. “Will I lose my hair?” he asked Professor John Crown at our first consultation when the chemotherapy programme was being outlined. Pointing to his signature moustache,
Gerry continued, “Because I was born with this, you know!” (He didn’t lose his hair, and the moustache remained intact to the very end.)
Not once in the 13 months that were left of his life did I ever witness one moment of self-pity. He was deeply contemplative on occasion (as he was in normal times), but never self-pitying. He just got on with things. He carried on taking photographs, we travelled, and he continued to repair to Dann’s at Greystones harbour to shoot the breeze with his friends and have a couple of glasses of wine.
The last Christmas of his life we spent in our beloved Venice. In February 2015, when things were looking good, we went to Nice and in March we went to London for the day so that Gerry could meet his baby grandson.
Then came May and his final hospitalisation with an infection on Saturday, 16. He never came home. The end-of-days had begun.
Grief, especially early-days grief, plays terrible tricks on you. You’re drifting through your day, just about holding things together and suddenly — wham! — you’re right back in the chasm of darkness. The first time I drove back from a visit to my mother in the North (my father had died six weeks after Gerry), as I rounded that bend after Dublin Airport and hit the M50 I felt my stomach lurch and my heart flip over. “I’m on the M50,” I would have ordinarily been ringing to tell him if I’d been north alone, letting him know that I was just about half an hour from home. To realise that I couldn’t do that ever again was simply too much.
So too, bizarre as it seems, was changing the sheet on our bed. Discovering a tiny mark on Gerry’s side a week after his death, I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t remove something that was physically ‘of ’ him. I feel strange admitting this now but I didn’t change that sheet for more than two months after I became a widow.
A widow. I couldn’t (still can’t) get my head around that. I know that’s the reality but, to me, I’m still Gerry’s wife. Although I can’t see or touch him any more, Gerry is still my husband.
On the first anniversary of his death I went to Venice. Gerry’s ashes were there by then, scattered in a side canal near the Accademia Bridge on a cold day the previous
“I have begun to see too that I can have a life again. That I do have a life again. A different life, because I am now a different person”
December — our wedding anniversary. I was blessed to have the support of so many others that day — family and friends who loved Gerry and who flew from all over the place to stand by me for the final farewell. Ashes scattered and Harold Pinter’s poem It is Here read by one of Gerry’s dearest friends, I tossed my husband’s black trilby on to the water. He was a great man for the hats.
From there we repaired to Caffe Florian on St Mark’s Square, to a pre-booked, beautiful, frescoed room for coffee. “Did you see the ashes when they hit the water?” my good friend asked me. I didn’t know what she meant. “They formed the shape of a heart,” she said.
I glanced at her with a withering, I’m-not-an-eejit expression on my face. “Look,” she said. The no-denyingit photographic evidence almost took my breath away. And also, in the midst of my despair, made me smile.
That small photo now hangs in a frame beside my bed — a symbol of comfort, of love, and of the promise of something I have never believed in — that maybe, just maybe, there is something beyond the watery depths of a Venetian canal.
Anniversaries, birthdays, all days of significance in our lives together have been hard. The anticipation of them was worse. I went to Venice that first year where I was joined by my ‘heart-shaped-ashes’ friend. In 2017, anniversary number two found me there once again, this time with my sister. In 2018 I scattered white flowers on the Libyan Sea in Crete while 2019 found me in Croatia with my son. Always away... always running from the place where Gerry died and left me to try to live without him.
This year was different. This year, thanks to Covid-19 there was no escape. In truth, though, I might have stayed home anyway.
It’s been a long, slow climb out of the grief abyss. Five years, after all, is a quarter of the timespan that Gerry and I were together. There were times I really believed that the grief would swallow me up and I was happy enough to offer it no resistance. There were times too that if one more person referred to ‘moving on’, I felt that I would explode. The real bete noir, though, was ‘at least’. God, how I hated all those ‘at leasts’. I even wrote a poem of sorts. It’s on my laptop still, entitled Cold Comfort and dated October, 12, 2015.
At least you had twenty years of joy;
At least he saw his baby grandson
At least he never lost his hair;
At least you got to Venice one last time
At least he had no pain;
At least you had some time
At least his moustache stayed put;
At least nothing was left unsaid
At least you had no regrets;
At least you always carp-ed the diem...
Those are such comforts, they tell me; cold comforts, I say And around such devastating loss;
Cold comfort is no comfort at all
But for over a year now, I have felt less desolate, have even woken the odd day without Gerry being my first thought. Oh, I still speak to him every morning — out loud. And I still switch on the small light in ‘his’ room every evening as darkness falls. For four years I did that the minute I entered the apartment, still lumbered down with shopping or whatever. Now I do it more leisurely.
I have begun to see too that I can have a life again. That I do have a life again. A different life, because I am now a different person; I will never again be that head-overheels-in-love woman, ready for anything. Without Gerry beside me that has fundamentally changed. But I am content. And hopeful for the future.
I can have conversations where Gerry is no longer my reference point for every single topic under discussion. I can play the CD of the music from his funeral without hitting the wine first. I can take down Paul Durcan’s Life is
a Dream, the poetry book Gerry had beside his bed in hospital, and I can lift out of it the 2009-dated card he made for me, a card so full of words of love that when it fluttered out of that book by accident two years after Gerry’s death and I re-read it, I cried until I thought my heart would burst.
And I can look at photographs now and smile as I remember the good times — the wonderful times we had together. I am grateful, in other words, for the gift that I was given in the summer of 1995 when we first became a couple, me aged 38 and he 42.
Gerry’s talent as a newspaper designer and photographer, his humour, his ‘just do it’ attitude, his kindness, his social conscience, his big heart and his embracement of ‘the moment’ was so all-round lifeenhancing that when I first encountered him, despite the complications, the obstacles, the inevitable hurt to people I cared for, I knew that I would be incapable of walking away, of turning my back on a bond that offered all I could ever want. My heart’s desire. He mine, and, magically, and as if it was ever meant to be, I his. “Where were you?” he used to joke. “Where were you hiding all these years?”
Even as I write those words, I can hear his voice and it makes me smile.
Five years on, how did I get here, to a place where my devastating loss is now somewhat balanced by my happy memories, by an acceptance that means I am no longer waiting for my husband to walk back through the door? I’m not entirely sure how I arrived at this point. With a lot of support from family and friends, for definite. Not least Gerry’s ‘Three Amigos’ — his three loyal Greystones/ Dann’s friends who have taken me to their hearts with their families and are still minding me.
How else? By continuing to throw back the duvet every morning and put my feet on the floor. And by finally — last year — getting Dudley, my little dog, definitely something of a turning point.
Time heals, people tell you. It doesn’t. My loss today is as great as it was on that day in June five years ago. I miss Gerry and our love affair and our life together as much as ever. But the grief no longer defines me; it is no longer the only thing in my life.
For such a long time not only could I see no light at the end of the tunnel, I couldn’t even see that the tunnel had an end.
Now, five years on, I have emerged into the light. I’m happy to be here.
And I know for sure that it’s the only place that my darling husband would want me to be.