Over the past ten days or so, I have been attending an online Winter Writing Sanctuary hosted by the beautiful Beth Kempton. This is the second year I have brought the creative new year in within the sanctuary. For me, it’s a nice way to ease into the year ahead’s creative pursuits.
A few days into the course, the daily lesson centred around “building a space”. I thought I would share my short essay response to that lesson with you here-
Oh, where to begin! That’s a question I’ve asked myself many times over the past nine weeks since my husband passed away.
There are so many “spaces” in my life that need to be built or re-modelled. It’s a daunting prospect some days.
The whole dynamic of day-to-day life has shifted forever. Even though I’ve known for over three years that this shift was approaching, it still hit hard, bringing with it a veritable maelstrom of emotions that are still swirling around me.
The “space” that I feel I lost entirely in those early days of grief was my space in the world. I felt as though I didn’t know where I belonged anymore. Wearing this “Blue Peter” badge saying “widow”, I felt as though I had been cast into a void. I’ll be totally honest I still feel that way a lot of the time. I felt that I’d lost my very identity. Watching someone you love die changes a person forever. Who was I now? I’m still figuring that one out.
Friends would message in the first week or two after the funeral to say that they were thinking about the kids and I but were giving me “space” to get my head together. “Space” alone in my head was in fact the last thing that I needed! Left in my own mind, I kept mulling everything over and over, reliving every heartbreaking moment spent in the local hospice. I kept panicking about whether I was being strong enough for my kids. I was worrying about whether they are ok or not. I still am on that one. True they are both adults in their twenties, but their dad was the first person that they had ever lost. I fretted about whether I was really ok. Even on days where I felt more like myself for a few brief hours and felt I had my shit together, I’d panic that I wasn’t being honest with myself. It was in those early days that I really would have appreciated an invite to go for a coffee or a walk, but I accept that everyone else is busy with their lives too. The world keeps turning.
Then there’s the physical “space” around me. The house needs to change to become “my home” rather than “our home”. There are DIY projects that need to be organised that have gone ignored for years while we travelled the journey that was my husband’s illness. I wrote a list…well, three lists- big, medium and small DIY projects. Big projects need a professional. Medium ones need an extra pair of “handy” hands. Small ones I should be able to tackle alone or so the theory goes. Time will tell on that. It’s a lengthy list but in time I’ll get through it. First on the list is my leaking conservatory roof.
I’ll tell you a quick story. In the early days after my husband’s death, the house was transformed into a florist’s shop. The main issue with that was that most of my vases were lining the conservatory windowsills catching drips. The solution – all the bouquets of white flowers were put into those vases then placed back on the windowsill. Voila! Self-watering flowers that in actual fact lasted for weeks.
Other rooms in the house needed attention too. There were belongings to be packed away, thrown away or donated to charity. It was an emotional task … Maybe I’m nesting in a way, but I need to reclaim the physical “space” as my own, while not wiping out all of the past. It’s a delicate balance that needs to be struck.
I’m trying to look at my home for the past twenty years as though it were a new house and I’m just moving in. It’s hard, emotionally hard, but I accept that I need to go through the pain of these changes to heal from the loss.
I need to reclaim my creative “space” and my creative time. Working from home at the day job in the same space that I try to create my book babies in in the evenings is challenging. As time moved on from 2020’s Lockdown but I was still working from home full-time due largely to my husband’s illness, it became harder and harder to separate the two. Now that I’ve had a few weeks away from the day job, I’ve reclaimed the creative “space”. The creative fires are still small embers, but they are gradually burning brighter. I’m on the eve of returning to the day job as I write this, but I am also on the verge of relocating my “day job” space to the upstairs study. That “space” has been dominated by my late husband for the past few years. It was his “bat cave”. I still struggle to spend time in the room, but I know in my heart that I have to move beyond that. I’m slowly, piece by piece, endeavouring to make that “space” my own. The new curtains were a huge step forward. It’ll take time, lots of time, and there’s no rush but I will migrate upstairs for work and reserve my downstairs desk for creative purposes.
It’s a Leap Year. For a while I’ve said:
2023 was the year to be free.
2024 is the year to restore.
2025 will be the year to thrive.
So, the plan, the cunning plan, is to build these new “spaces” both internal and external over the coming year. It will be far from easy, but I will get there one small space at a time. I really don’t have any choice.
Coral McCallum 