Three years on. Hard to believe that they had passed so quickly; harder to believe that it was only three years ago, it felt longer. Time had become a slippery thing, a shape-shifting mist losing all meaning.
The night before she had said that she hoped to go up to the coast. She laid out things to take. It was intention rather than hope. She had believed that it was what she would want to do. As it turned out, what she wanted to do was stay home and practice tai chi. So she did that instead.
The morning arrived dull and grey, which was of no consequence, but as she wrote her pages she listened and heard the rain against the window, asking her whether she really wanted to go to the scatter site, or whether she simply felt she ought to. The latter. Then why? Is it not time now for other rituals?
Memory is not honoured on a given day in a given place. Memory is honoured in the everyday, the way he slips easily into conversations, the gifts and inherited things still loved and used. Memory is honoured in the music and the way he sometimes wanders through her dreams. It is honoured on the wall and in the feeding of the birds. In replacing the cat collar mistakenly removed from the wisteria. And in the asking of questions and listening for answers.
She realised that it wasn’t so much that she didn’t want to go and sit on the beach as that she no longer needed to. Some rituals serve the purpose of holding on. Different ones are required for letting go. She would go to the beach the next day, or over the weekend, sometime when the weather was better and it would be more fun.
She thought of the lines from the poem
Better by far you should forget and smile
than that you should remember and be sad
and knew that she would rather remember and smile, than forget or be sad. So she did that instead.
As the weather systems passed through, now clouding dark, now raining, now bright and cotton-wool scattered sky, and again the dullness sweeping back, she felt comforted by its very changeability.
In the quiet, she heard an echo from a cathedral: if you seek his memorial, look about you. The retreat was not a cathedral, but the words were no less true for all that. If he was still anywhere, it was here. If she believed in sacred spaces – and she did – then maybe this was also one of them.
