There’s Captain von Trapp, the equestrian jacketed widower with seven children who Maria the yodelling nun falls for in the Sound of Music; in Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca it’s wealthy widower Maxim de Winter who sweeps our unnamed heroine off her feet. Any common or garden Mills and Boon widower will be handsome and slightly aloof - finding love again will heal his heart.
I may have sent mixed messages. When I said I "liked biking", I meant a toodle around the harbour, but he meant actual bike races, and so our first active date was a gruelling 60km fundraising "fun ride", mostly uphill, where he spent most of the six hours it took me to finish it sprinting off then circling back to check I hadn’t fallen into a ravine.
The universe had conspired for us to meet, he said. What utter bullshit, I said. But then all the rainbows started. So many rainbows. Over Pūrākaunui estuary, next to my car, everywhere I went ... every time we were together, a rainbow. It was hard not to see them as a heavenly thumbs up, smiling on our new relationship.
It’s been 10 months now.
We have made space for his grief. Grief doesn’t end, just because you start seeing someone else three years later. You have to navigate it, include it, it’s always there. Losing your wife to an aggressive form of melanoma after 31 years of marriage and two wonderful sons - there is always going to be a "we", someone missing from everything you do - and so we’re all in this together: she, he, and me. He has chosen, not a life in mourning, but living life to the fullest, sharing the love she left behind, choosing to speak her name often and honour her memory.
His friends were happy to see him smiling again, but that was just Facebook. Real life is when the kids have lost their mother and you can’t fix it, real life is the tears of the parent who feels alienated from their children, because without the yin to their yang they seem to be always trying to do the right thing, and feeling like they are failing.
We decided to do Christmas on the Gold Coast so he could spend it with his sons and their aunty and uncle. His wife’s parents would also be there, so we knew it was going to be difficult. They were grieving the loss of their daughter and had already said they couldn’t and wouldn’t accept that he was seeing someone. As far as they were concerned, I didn’t exist. This is not your beautiful wife. I was intolerable, uninvited. I spent Christmas Eve, Christmas morning and any time he went over to the house, alone. Well not alone, dog sitting a Scottish deerhound called Mack and a Cavoodle called Rocket. Naturally I over-fed them, as anyone would.
I felt like mad Bertha in the attic, an invisible woman, only with two faithful, four-legged followers.
It became a darkly comic, ridiculous situation where, like the man and woman on a weather house, when they were out, I was allowed in, but if they were coming back, I had to leave. It made me feel like I’d done something embarrassingly tacky. A "funeral meats furnish forth the wedding feast", kind of feeling.
I can’t tell you how many times I cried about it. But not as many times as they had all cried over losing her.
Of course, I totally understood. They felt it was being disloyal to the memory of their daughter if they were to meet me.
I wanted to tell them about the rainbows, but I never got the chance.
