13 Jun 2016

The Widower

I met him going to the post office. A comment about the weather and I was about to carry on, but he blurted out"my wife just died" and I couldn't walk away.

He said he'd been to his allotment, some miles away. I knew the village he mentioned. He had photos in his boot of the village in years past, and we looked at them, there on the pavement with the baby kicking at the buggy, watching us. He hadn't wanted to live in the city. He liked it at the village, but there were no shops and his wife liked shopping so they moved here. And she died.

He asked me once, twice, many times if the people where I lived, barely a street away, talked. And they do, but I know what he meant. People don't often move into this area because they are tied by blood or friendship. They move because it's cheap and central. They keep themselves to themselves. They don't say hello to the old guy next door.

It had been his birthday three days before. He was 74, but said he felt older. He asked me to look in his living room, so I did. A shrine to the wife he loves so much. I asked when she died, expecting him to say last month, last week, but no, last year and still he lives in this gulf of emptiness.
He seemed to plead for forgiveness. He apologised for his shrine, he apologised for keeping me talking, he apologised for his house. I don't know when he'd last had a conversation. When he wakes up, he calls to her, wondering where she is. He told me about his old home, he showed me a picture of him with his wife twenty odd years ago, him unrecognisably bearded and her, beaming. She came from Hebden Bridge. I didn't ask how they met. I didn't have time.

A few days after his wife died, he had fallen on the back step and cried for help for six hours, but nobody came. He finally crawled into the house and called an ambulance to his broken leg. Nobody talks to him. Nobody's a neighbour. They were neighbourly in the village. He knew everyone there. He grew up there. He worked there. His house there caught fire once, when his brother was in bed. He went to church there every week, to the yard where his mum and his dad, his brother were buried. I asked him if he went to the church behind his house. No. Too strange. A betrayal of who he was.
He didn't sleep and when he asked the doctor if it was normal, the doctor said yes. He didn't eat. He had once, and the photo he showed me bore this out, but he had lost five stone since he lost her.
He told me he was going out again. He didn't stay in long. He had come home to get his washing in and now he was going out again. I had to go. He gave me two apples and said goodbye.

A thirty minute window. And I saw his life, his terrible grief for his wife. The love he had for her twisted into sorrow. His fear of hurting himself again and being unable to help himself; of dying on the back step, unnoticed by the whole city. His children, far away, not visiting. Going out to avoid the absence of her. His car was a little living room by the driver's seat, while his living room was a mausoleum. Afraid to be shunned by strangers but desperate to tell someone about her. Lonely, living in a hated, anonymous street because she wanted to go shopping, with a chunk taken from him. Wanting to move, but unable to leave the memory of her.

And what else could I do but listen?

There must be thousands of men like him - women too - aching for a chat, terrified of scaring people away. What else can you do but listen?

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