Sandra – Page 8 – Wis[s]e Words

What she said

Published on February 26, 2012Leave a comment

He died around midnight, just a couple days after his 33rd birthday and three years, almost to the day, after his diagnosis. In all, we were together 15 years. I have very few regrets about the time I spent with Scott.

That was the point when I lost it for a while. Until then I could read Betsy Megan’s incredible article on what it feels like losing your spouse (found via Metafilter) dispassionately, but that little paragraph, the matter of fact way in which she writes about his death and the conclusion just hit home. That was exactly what it feels like. All else being equal, I’d rather would’ve liked to be able to spent more time with Sandra, but the time we did have together was worth it. Just because we’ve reached terminus doesn’t make the journey worthless.

Hector and Sophie asleep on the sofa

I’d been thinking a lot about Sandra this week anyway, having been home sick from Wednesday, bringing thrown back inside my own head, sleeping a lot, not being able to concentrate much when awake, thinking about Sandra. Work and the distractions of various entertainments normally keep too much hurt at bay, but without them I had nowhere to hide. The cats weren’t much of a help either, as you can see, though it has been nice sleeping in a bed with them at night.

We decided to get married. Initially we had intended to wait until after we both finished engineering school, but I have never been too fond of weddings and it seemed to suit him well enough not to bother for the first 12 years we were together. It was no lack of commitment; we bought a house together and loved each other very much. Marrying him was part a practical decision—so that I could speak for him if he couldn’t, and so that inheritance sorts of things would be easier to sort out. But at this point, it was also to have some good news to tell people, to offset the bad news, as it were.

Sandra being congratulated by the wedding registrar

Again, this was more or less why we gotten married as well, two years ago when Sandra was scheduled for yet another very intense operation, to make sure that all the legal niceties were tied off just in case and as a sign of our love for each other. (Big thumbs up for the Amsterdam civil service btw for making that possible so quickly btw.) I still wear my wedding ring daily, as a reminder and symbol of our love. In my head I’m still married.

Beyond that, it is hard not to feel perhaps even selfish. Of course I miss him for himself, his sense of humor, and all the things I fell in love with him for. But I seem somehow to feel his loss most keenly for all the things he did for me that I can’t or don’t like doing: creating and maintaining an amazing home network that’s now gradually deteriorating in ways I don’t understand; cooking every other time we ran out of leftovers; doing nearly all the shopping (I dislike shopping); tackling the monthly bills; snuggling when I was feeling down; pushing me to keep trying; and even just telling me, gently, when I was being foolish. (It’s an ongoing quandary for me in social settings, too: explain to someone I just met that I’m a widow, which alarms and flusters people and is not a good introduction to the funny story I intend to tell, or go on referring to “my husband” in the past tense and just don’t mention why?)

This, so very much. I miss Sandra for her cooking and gardening, her erudition, for being able to talk with her about politics or books in ways I could do with nobody else, almost as much as for herself. But then those sort of things are also what makes somebody your partner, aren’t they?

And that dillemma of how to refer to Sandra, boy do I recognise it. Refering to her as my wife gives the wrong expectation and you don’t want to cause other people potential for embarassement, but to call her my late wife, or deceased wife, or to myself as a widower seems both a bit dramatic/attention seeking and often irrelevant in the context. Not to mention a bit heavy to lay on people.

I had originally planned to talk about this article about most common cooking/baking mistakes and what Sandra had taught me about cooking (first rule: clean as you go), but that’ll have to wait until another Sunday…

Three months on — it still hurts

Published on February 7, 20121 Comment

Sandra would’ve loved this weather. Not the cold so much, as her kidney troubles and other health problems leaving her vulnerable to colder temperatures just like my more proportioned build left me cursing milder weather. Besides which, she always was nesh, stemming from a childhood when winters were routinely bitter cold and central heating non-existing. But despite this, she’d still rather have cold, crisp, clear winter days like today was, then the endless grey and wet misery that’s the usual Dutch winter, when the country draws into itself from November to long into April if you’re unlucky. She had been spoiled with winters in Plymouth, Devon and Cornwall’s relatively southern latitude and gentle caress of the Gulf Stream ensuring almost sub-tropical winters. I remember being there with her in November one year, still walking around in t-shirt when I had had to wear a wintercoat and gloves in Amsterdam the day before…

She’s beyond such cares now of course, today making it exactly three months since she died. Sometimes I wonder if the prospect of another long, grey Dutch winter didn’t help her make the decision not to fight on anymore. I can’t blame her if true, but I do miss her. Especially when something like the video below happens. Four months ago I would’ve rung her to share its awwness, or shown it to her on Youtube the next day, now there’s nobody to share it with, well, expect all y’all:

Adorable, isn’t it? The kitten that is, not Kenny Dalgliesh.

Apple crumble

Published on January 29, 20123 Comments

Yesterday my parents had come over for the day and I thought it would be nice to make some apple crumble, having been inspired by this guy. Unlike Vuijlsteke though I hadn’t had the sense to take pictures, so you’ll have to take my word for it that it went alright for something that I had never done before, thanks in no small part to this very simple to follow recipe. This is the sort of thing Sandra used to do before she got too ill, so it was only natural that I started to think of her again.

Not that she’s much out of my thoughts anyway, her absence running like a subconscious thread through my day to day life. I’ll be doing stuff, looking around me and in some way be reminded of her again. With cooking especially, because she put so much of her heart and soul in it, took so much pleasure in it. She was a much better cook than I ever was. Whereas I would depend on premixed sauces and stuff she’d make meals from scratch and quicker than I could open a package. Cooking ran in her family, her father having been a cook in the army if I remember correctly, having also worked as a chef afterwards. He taught her the tricks of the trade, of how a professional kitchen works and she kep using these for the rest of her life.

She was an excellent baker, with apple crumble being one of her staples, together with bread pudding, banoffie pie and brownies, both the regular and the enhanced kind. It’s not recommended by the way to eat one of those, decide nothing is happening and then eat three more. That was an interesting evening, even if I spent most of it staring at my own hands. Groovy.

But also did classic Georgia barbeque (having lived and worked there in the eighties, telling stories of stopping at a roadside shack after work and picking up barbeque and some melon, not to mention having an R. C. “coler” and moon pie for lunch. Then there were the Sunday roasts, the Christmas dinners, the… Sandra put a lot of love in her food and she showed her love through food, through getting you to eat right and eat well. I try to keep some of that alive by taking the time sometimes to look at food as more than just something to keep the body going, by not going for the cheap prepackaged snacks but make my own.

Kraken — Wendy Williams

Published on January 17, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of Kraken

Kraken
Wendy Williams
223 pages including index
published in 2011

This was a bittersweet pleasure to read. As an homage to Sandra I wanted to read some of her favourite books and writers this year and Weny Williams’ Kraken was one of the last books she was really enthusiastic about. I had gotten it for her as part of an Amazon order in June of last year, when it still looked she was going to beat her illness and to cheer her up in hospital. Once she had read, she was keen on me to read it too to see what I thought, but I never made the time to do so, having so much else to read. It’s something I regret now, as I would’ve liked to discuss this with her, but at the same time it is nice as well to be able to read a book that reminds me so much of her. Sandra loved squids, octopuses and every kind of cephalopods; they were her favourite animals and any book on them that was any good had her favour.

And Kraken is quite good. At some twohundred pages without the index it’s not an indepth treatment of Cephalopoda, but it is a good look at what makes these creatures so fascinating. The cephalopods are invertebrates, part of the molluscs, with octopussies and squid traditionally seen as evil devil beasts that as soon drown a sailor as look at them. Yet the more we learn about them, the more fascinating they’ve become. It’s quite clear that many of them are incredibly smart, well adapted to their surroundings and with some amazing abilities — most possess chromatophores, coloured pigment cells under conscious muscular control which they can use to camouflage themselves or even “speak” with. They’re curious, they’re playful and in short, they remind us a little bit of ourselves.

Sandra’s books

Published on January 8, 20123 Comments

The last couple of months, both before and after Sandra’s death, I’ve been busy putting her book collection into Librarything, both because I was doing that anyway for my own books and as a memorial to her tastes in reading. As you can see from the relative sizes of our collections (and not everything has been catalogued yet) she was always much more picky in which books she bought, much more discriminating. She didn’t buy books she could get from the library, nor was hesitant to recycle books once she read them if she didn’t feel it worthwhile to keep them. Whereas I’ve always had a tendency to hoard, Sandra always argued that if she felt the need to reread some cheap thriller or detective novel, it would be easy enough to buy it again and besides we’re running out of shelf space already.

What she kept therefore were books she knew she would want to reread, that she knew she would not be able to get easily and were important enough in their own right as well as to her personally. While she didn’t mind recycling modern detective novels e.g., she did collect classic Golden Age writers like Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, Patricia Wentworth, Gladys Mitchell and especially Margery Allignham. These were books that she reread often enough and had enough sentimental worth to her to keep. She also had a thing for classic literature and argued that any library should have at least some Dickens or Thackeray in them.

When we merged our libraries there was remarkable little overlap: she read science fiction and fantasy, which with comics collections make up the majority of my books, but felt no need to collect them, whereas I had only a few detective books. She was also much more interested in pure quill horror than I was, with Peter Straub and Stephen King amongst the modern writers being particular favourites, but where her preferences mostly lay with the Victorian/Edwardian and pre-war writers (Benson, M. R. James, Lovecraft, Le Fanu, that lot). She also collected classic humour writers, again with the emphasis on those eras (Benson again, the Mitford sisters, Waughg, classic New Yorker writers like Thurber or Edmund Wilson). She liked social history, if it was abour regular people, especially women and their lives and not too dry and again, especially if it was about 19th century or prewar Britain. There are the science and natural history books, geology especially (Fortey) and oceanology (sucker for squid), the country and travel classics (bit of Bryson, Eric Newby), the cook and gardening books (she was keen and gifted in both departments and thank god my father is the same in the latter or i would’ve no hope of keeping up the garden), also quite a few of those glossy historical thrillers that have been all the rage the past decade, a few other miscellaneous bits and bobs. It’s a collection that’s grown organically, that you can’t really fit into a specific pattern, but which does clearly shows the mind of its curator and her intentions. In many ways it’s a much more interesting collection of books than my own.

Sandra was never shy about sharing her books with me, always recommending new ones for me and through her I discovered a lot of authors: Thackeray, Trollope, Ngaoi Marsh, Richard Fortey, Dawkings, Jessica Mitford, though quite a few I resisted (Dickens for example, perhaps her favourite author). I’ve been thinking of doing a year of Dickens — one each month — in her honour but was worried it would be too limiting and doing some more entry work this afternoon gave me the idea to instead just take any book each month from her collection, starting with Kraken by Wendy Williams this month.