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Tag: meaning

Remembering Claire

Beautiful fading pebbles

Beautiful fading pebbles

As with so many of these posts I don’t really know where this one is going. I know there is something inside which needs saying, but I’m not sure exactly what it is or how to say it… So the only thing to do is to start and see where it goes.

As many of you may know Claire absolutely loved the ocean, it was her dream to live by the sea but she died three days after we found a new house just 15 min walk from the beach, she never got to live in it or realise her dream… She is so very nearly made it!

She was also a bit naughty whenever she went to the beach, she used to pick up a pebble, take it home, write on the date and location, then place the pebble in a ‘little shrine to the sea’ in our garden in Hertfordshire. She would very often sit by the shrine, looking at all the pebbles she had collected and remembering the happy times she had spent by the sea. I guess it was her way of anchoring those happy memories, all she had to do was look upon the pebbles and she was back at her favourite beaches around the UK.

When I moved I carefully picked up all of those pebbles and brought them down to Dorset. They’ve been in various places around the garden here but I’ve just built a little planter in the garden as an edible garden and those pebbles have found their way into it.

But those pebbles are beginning to fade.

The writing on them is now almost illegible.

Claire’s touch upon those pebbles is dissipating.

I have a terrible memory, I don’t remember visiting virtually any of the places where she picked up those pebbles… But I do remember her writing on them.

There’s something about the writing fading which seems beautiful. I was tempted to overwrite them to keep the places and dates on them, but that wouldn’t have been Claire’s writing, it would have been mine and so it seemed wrong.

The writing on the pebbles fading is beautiful and yet full of contradictions.

The writing fades but the memories don’t.

The writing fades but Claire’s touch on my life doesn’t.

The writing fades but Claire’s memory doesn’t.

Those beautiful fading pebbles have a meaning, but for now they are keeping it to themselves…

Fading pebbles

Memories of my wife

Remembering Claire

What does it mean?

What does it mean?

It’s so easy to attribute meaning to things isn’t it? The things we wear, the things we say and the things we do mean different things to different people and it’s often hard to separate out the truth from the fiction. Does it REALLY mean that!

I read an excellent blog post recently by another widower named Michael Adams where he talks about the meaning behind whether guys in our situation should wear a wedding ring or not. You see a wedding ring means I am married, and yet as Michael explains the truth is I’m not. However for me I feel like I still am and so I continue to wear my wedding ring. Wearing a ring means one thing to one person and another to someone else.

Another one of these ‘means’ problems has being moving through the grieving process. On the one hand I know it’s good to begin to rebuild my life but on the other hand it means I’m moving further away from Claire and the life that we had. But does it really mean that? Is it possible to rebuild and draw closer to her? Does rebuilding genuinely mean moving further away?

It’s so easy to link the two halves of a ‘means’ statement and act out as if X truly does mean Y, when in reality it is just a sentence we have used to describe something and there is no real relationship between X and Y.

Of course I can rebuild my life and it is in no way connected with how close I feel to Claire.

Of course, whether I choose to wear my wedding ring or not is in no way connected with moving further away from Claire.

I may wear my wedding ring for ever, or I may not. I’m at the stage now where I can choose to do what I want and be happy with it – and that ‘means’ whatever I want it to mean – or perhaps it means nothing at all!

Life as a Book

Life as a Book

“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”

Alfred D’Souza

I read those words yesterday and they hit home, they hit home pretty hard.

I enjoyed lunch yesterday with a good friend (thanks Emma) and we were talking about the ‘when/then’ game. When the kids have left home then it would be better. When I’ve moved house then I can relax. When/then.

pop_blank_book_coverClaire and I used to joke that we would write a book called “It’ll be better when…” and then make jokes about all of the times that we had used that expression or heard other people use it, perhaps that’s a project of the future, but thinking about it now really does make me stop and consider things.

What has opened up for me now is a completely new chapter in my life, I thought I knew where the story was going until I turned the page on 17 April and the great author in the sky decided to take the story in a different direction. I can see now that those early chapters were leading me in a direction and I had made up my own ending, I was pinning all of my hopes on chapters I was yet to read, life was going to begin in those chapters.

But as I sit here writing this down I can see the entire book, it’s closed so I’ve no idea where the story goes, but I can see that this IS my life. It doesn’t begin over the page, it began at the beginning of the book and I’m in it now, this is it, these obstacles ARE my life.

There is a lot to be said for writing the end of the book ourselves and creating our future as we go, and there is also a lot to be said for reading the words of the page that we are on, reading them slowly, reading them with meaning and most of all enjoying them.

I’ve no idea what is over the page, at the moment I have no idea what the next paragraph says, but I do know that for the time being at least, I’m going to read those words very slowly.

It means what I want it to mean and no more

It means what I want it to mean and no more

Today I feel disconnected – like there’s something important missing, the only way I can articulate it is to say I feel like I’ve had something amputated.

There’s a part of me missing and it is the strangest sensation.

I don’t really want to give the missing part of me a label as that will begin to lead how I feel,  that part is clearly Claire but beyond that I simply can’t articulate how I feel – and that’s the first time I’ve come across that problem.

I think it’s all tied up with the ‘erasing’ process. The other day my mobile rang and it was the home phone calling, so it popped up saying ‘Claire is calling you’ – that felt too weird so I had to delete her from my phone. Such a simple and actually meaningless task, yet I gave it meaning… OK – coaching mode kicking in now (I just spotted the complex equivalence trigger word in that sentence for any NLPers reading this), now I’m understanding it… I’m giving things meaning which don’t have any meaning except in my head.

  • Deleting Claire from my phone doesn’t mean anything, other than she’s not in my phone.
  • Putting widower on an official form doesn’t mean anything other than to tick a box for someone else.
  • Calling her ‘my late wife’ whilst on the phone to the pension companies doesn’t mean anything other than a label that they can understand.

When I start out writing these posts I genuinely have no idea where they are going, I just type and see what happens and often in the middle I get a little light bulb go on and I reach a new understanding.

I understand now what I was doing, and I’m not doing it any more. It means what I want it to mean and no more!