Five Years

Anniversaries, can be either side of the coin, a blessing or a curse, but whichever way you choose to look at them, you can’t really avoid them.

Fast or slow, the same dates will come around each year, and the distance between the present you and that past you will have increased some more, whether you want it to or not; or even if you realise it or not.

After any given event, good or bad, the first anniversary is one year, a twelve month cycle completed. It’s special because everything is only unique once, and from then onwards you’re in repeat mode.

Elaine died just after Christmas and our wedding anniversary, five years ago. I remember the end of that first year only too well. Going back to the Hospice, walking on the beach, visiting her grave and getting soaked to the skin as it teamed with rain. I wondered then whether I would be repeating the process the following year.

But life had changed for me by the following Christmas time. Marilyn had come far more fully into my world. I felt no need to call back to the hospice, and I knew full well anyway that even if I did, I wouldn’t be finding Elaine there.

Two years isn’t such an important anniversary as one year. The event itself is still just as significant, but somehow the timescale is not. Likewise, three and four years tend to be viewed the same. The next important milestone is five years.

Maybe it’s due to our counting/thinking in tens, because the next significant date is ten years, then twenty, then oddly enough twenty-five years, after which it’s thirty, and on upwards in tens from there. I don’t think I’ll be having to worry too much about that though, I’ll be bloody lucky to see the twenty-five mark!

And you know what? It’s at this point in writing this post, started on Boxing Day ’25 that I was forced by circumstances, not just to stop writing, but to sit and seriously evaluate just where I am in life, now that I have lived five full years without Elaine by my side. Because it’s at this point I developed Covid, and for a while became rather ill.

Covid itself seems like a real throwback now. The endless summer of 2020, sunshine and blue skies, a strange hush over the landscape around our home, and Elaine and I together nigh-on constantly. Looking back, it’s almost as if fate had contrived things, so we got that extra time with each other. As if it knew full well what was heading our way, with the parting, long feared between us, now on the horizon.

Both of us avoided getting ill via Covid, at that time, (shame Elaine couldn’t avoid the cancer too), and as the various vaccinations were churned out yearly, I had them readily, as I have a history of chest problems (asthma and mild COPD).
I had my annual flu jab last October, but was not offered the latest Covid one, as they were only being given to people over seventy five who were deemed ‘at risk’. So, for the first time in several years, I went unprotected from Covid19, or whatever code it goes under now.

Marilyn had had Covid back in 2021, and was rough for a couple of weeks, saying it was like having a very bad cold along with a persistent cough and constant feelings of sickness and tiredness; this time things were a bit different.

We seem to have picked up the ‘bug’ on Christmas Day when we went for dinner with Mar’s son Simon and his family. Simon had started feeling unwell the previous evening, and as Christmas Day progressed he felt worse and went off to bed late afternoon. We both felt ok the following (Boxing) day, but by the day after (Saturday) we both were feeling under the weather with sore throats and tight chests.

The change over the next 48 hours was swift and dramatic.

Mar’ wasn’t as bad as me, maybe because she’s had it before, but I felt appallingly ill. My chest and throat were full of broken glass, each cough was agony. When I did cough it produced thick mucus and blood, and triggered violent nosebleeds. I would sit next to the woodstove with two tee shirts and two jumpers on, plus hat and scarf, yet I’d be shivering with cold, and the sweat on my back trickled down like melting frost on a windshield.

I didn’t eat, and had to force myself to take fluids, especially after the diarrhoea struck with a vengeance (I lost well over half a stone in weight in just over a week) bouts of violent shaking and dreadful night sweats just about rounded things off, but worst of all was the fatigue.

I was robbed of most of my ability to function as a human being. Thinking was about the only thing that I could do, other than trying to sleep. I knew by now, that I wasn’t going to be able to complete this post for the week of 5th January as I had wanted to, it was just going to have to wait, but did that really matter?
It was about now too that I began thinking, “Where am I actually going with this post, what do I really want to say?”

When I’ve written before, I’ve always had a reasonable idea of where it was heading, but the more I considered it, I knew with this one I just wasn’t sure.

Sat feeling like shit one night and with a soaring temperature, I started thinking back over the past five years. It’s a long time, I’m wondering where it has all gone. Each Christmas, I know, has replenished inside of me the loss of Elaine; the season brings it all into focus once more, but can I change that, or is it something I have to live with each year?

As I have to live too, with the grief, because I know by now it’s never going fully away, and sometimes it will catch me out and soak me through, and other times it will wash over me and leave me dry. I’m no longer feeling the need to fight against it; maybe we’ve come to terms after all.

I began to consider also all the times I’ve spoken of moving forwards in life, but have I actually gotten far? My relationship with Marilyn is the most important to me since losing Elaine, but is it enough so stop me from sliding back, to live amongst the ghosts of the past, or have I never actually gotten free in the first place?
‘Gotten free’… the phrase implies the need to escape from something; is that really the case here?

“If you feel trapped yes, but are you?” The voice in my mind; neither myself nor Elaine, just words that present themselves… but I want to listen.

“You’re making the same mistake each year, Mark. Each Christmas you’re thinking as if she died just the previous year, but it’s five years, my friend, and it’s time to acknowledge the fact. This doesn’t mean that you haven’t moved forwards- read that which you’ve written previously- and you’ll see just how far you’ve actually come since January ’21.

“You tend towards slipping into the past at the end of each year, losing track of the time that actually has gone by. Look it in the face, Elaine has been gone for five years, and that will only increase. There’s no fault here, it’s just the way it is, tightening your grip on her each Christmas serves only to push other things in your life away from you; let her float free, she’ll never be far away, but you need space in your world, for that which is more relevant to you now.

“Remember the words you’ve read so many times “You fear the world too much” (A Christmas Carol-Dickens) and have more faith in your own abilities. You have fought this situation, this grief, this misery from the start, and the fact that you’re still standing after five years is testament to your own strength. You no longer have to hold on to stand upright, you can let go, and be secure in the knowledge that you cannot fall by releasing the past and allowing it to be the past, it will be beside you always; it can never be lost.

“It’s good to remember, and to know that you have so much worthwhile to remember, but memories are by definition the past, that which has been. By all means stay friends with the past, but understand that you cannot live in it without wasting the present trying to do so.

“There is time before you, keep moving into it with an open heart and spirit, and trust your intuition as to the paths you take. The only wrong way now lies behind you. You’ve come this far in five years, keep faith with yourself, and push on.”

Why does it take being sat here and feeling so bloody ill before I can ‘hear’ that? But then it occurs to me maybe that IS the reason I’m ill in the first place. Elaine’s belief in ‘no such thing as coincidence’ springs to mind.

Suddenly I’m very alone in the world, it’s just me and two cats. Physically I feel ill and vulnerable, and my thoughts stray back to anniversaries being a curse or a blessing, two sides of that same coin. Then another coin comes to mind, the one of life and death. For the first time I feel aware of just how thin the metal of that coin is. It’s a mere heartbeat between the two faces.

If this bastard Covid doesn’t do me in first, then I’ll be 68 years old next May. I’ve already had more time than a lot of people get, the ‘voice’ is right, I’ve come this far in the last five years, why not push on and see what happens in the next five? That’s if the metal hasn’t worn through before then.

Ps. When I began to feel better I did read through some of my earlier and previous posts. In doing so I was assured that I have been moving forwards since shortly after the time of Elaine’s passing. I know that in my words, I have trodden over the same ground many times, but I do believe that this has all been a part of the grieving, and a way to laying the ghost of survivors guilt, which I think is as corrosive as the grief itself, if not more so.

I see now too, just how fortunate I am, to have inherited the means (this blog) from Elaine, to enable me to have found a voice to call out into the darkness, and know that there have been ears to hear my words and thoughts and hopes. All of which has served to help me form some order out of the last five years, and realise now that it is not wrong to want to carry-on living, after a loss so great, that at first, you think that the only way to deal with it, is to die yourself.

Thank you all (past and present) for being those ears.