Best song the Guillemots ever did; pretty good for a largely annoying hipster band, as it captured the mood of the UK after 7/7 and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. At the time I was working at a small startup where I could listen to 6usic all day and this came up loads of times in late 2005/early 2006. That was also around the time Sandra and I bought our house and before her health problems had gotten the worst of her. In retrospect one of the happier times of our lives and this fits that so well: uplifting melody, bitter sweet lyrics, a simple recipe deftly executed.
Sandra
Two years ago today
Eight months
So last night I came home completely stressed out, you know, with that feeling in the back of your throat as if you’d been screaming all day, heart racing so fast I thought I’d get a heart attack. At first I thought it was just a side effect of having had a busy week at work, what with everybody else on holiday, but it hadn’t been that busy or stressfull. It was only when I looked at the calendar this morning that realised what was really behind it: today it’s been eight months since Sandra died.
It’s funny. In everyday life, at work, I can hide my grief so well I largely forget it myself, but it only takes one small thing to get it back. For some reason the local supermarket has been a reliable trigger: one moment you’re looking at the frozen peas, the other caught in an ineffable melancholy. At home everything reminds me of her of course so that’s no refuge either. But it doesn’t really matter where I am; Sandra is inside of me and her memory comes back at any unguarded moment. This is not necessarily a sad thing, but the grief is still stronger than the joy of the memory.
What’s still haunting me is the anxiety of the last two years, the constant worry about whether the worst will happen and how. Now that the worst has happened, the anxiety is still there, only slowly disappearing, like land rebounding after an ice age.
So what I notice is that I still haven’t gotten some of my sharpness, my drive back, still am wondering what to do with the rest of my life now that she is gone. Which sounds like something out of a romantic, sombre pop ballad, but in real life isn’t very good to find yourself in.
Quoted for Truth: Nicolas Freeling, Criminal Conversation
Nicolas Freeling’s hero, inspector Van der Valk of the Amsterdam recherche, meets up with a woman who might have been blackmailed and gives a short description:
She was a solid, well-constructed woman, not fat at all but all curves, with the very fine-textured, pearly skin that goes so well with dark chestnut hair. Small good teeth, quite rare in Holland, where the women have excellent teeth looking like a well-polished row of marble gravestones.
From 1965, but as Sandra often noticed, Dutch women, especially young Dutch women, do tend to have huge perfect white teeth, though her comparison was more to do with horses than marble gravestones. A very Dutch mouth that.
I love Nicolas Freeling’s mysteries, another writer Sandra turned me on to, as he has a knack for getting Dutch people right: his Holland is one that’s still a ways behind the modern world, though getting there, a Holland gone some time I was born, but one I still recognised if only from period fiction.
The long dark teatime of the soul
Half a year. Six months. Twentysix weeks. It feels like forever; it also feels like yesterday that Sandra died. It’s just not something I can get used to: it still feels like she should be there, she’s just gone out of the room for a bit. Every day I want to call her on my lunch break, every time when I watch a tv show or listen to a radio programme we used to follow together I want to ask her what she thinks about it, every time I read a book that I think she would like, I want to tell her she shouldn’t read it, as she hated having books recommended to her.
The weekends are the worst; during the week work can be busy enough that I don’t really think about her, but in the weekends there’s too much time and space for the memories and grief to come back. It’s not so much that I spent my weekends staring and sighing, more that literally everything in the house and garden reminds me of Sand. Worse, even the local supermarket makes me think of her as I try to remember her advice on cooking and such. Pathetic, I know.
What I also miss is the structure in my life, a goal. Living alone after having spent the better part of a decade living together with somebody you love deeply is so different from just living on your own. When you’re a couple you live for each other as much as for yourself, at least if you it properly, but now what do I have: my job? My hobbies? The cats? All very nice, for sure, but it doesn’t fill my life like Sandra did. And that’s what I miss the most, having somebody there who makes you feel like what Ella sings about and who you can do the same to.