A year ago today i was on my way home from a weekend away with my daughter in Dublin. I did not know that my still loved ex Jon had died. His sister-in-law had sent me an email on the 19th but she had sent it in the evening and we'd left in the morning. I am thankful for this because it meant i was able to enjoy the trip in blissful ignorance. 
I thought about Jon a lot that weekend tho', i think he would have loved Dublin. The pubs and bars i guess if was drinking, but I didn't know him as a drinker except in the later years by email. If we'd gone together as lovers we'd have had a different break because our relationship wasn't about drink, it wasn't what we did together, we'd have gone wandering, exploring the ups and downs, the arts and culture, found places that were out of the way, and made love, because that's what we did together. 
But after getting home, and seeing my son for about an hour before he left town i opened my emails. I was hoping there might be one from him but it was not to be. He had been dead for a good week and a half, dates were not given until much later. My blog is full of my grief then, it is different now. But it goes on. The missing, the sadness, special dates are difficult. I'm guessing anyone who has lost someone they love will say this, it's something i was dimly aware of before but not aware in the way i am now. 
A year on i have had time to run through the time we spent together, to apply discernment to chuck out the trash and make safe the good, the worth-keeping. i often feel him close by, and whether or not that is mad i don't know but i feel like he is with me, watching the birds out of my kitchen window, arms around me, walking with me, gardening with me. Maybe I am just re-tracing cherished memories, who knows. Often when I'm feeling blue I'll open a book and a note in his hand will fall out or a photograph or something we picked up together will turn up or i'll hear his voice in my head just saying my name. I imagine he is with other people who loved him too. 
Last night i opened a draw to put a belt away and there at the top was a postcard he had sent me, words up, i'm not sure when he sent it but the image was of a garden we visited on our first holiday together. I know that I loved Jon and I believe he loved me but our relationship was essentially just us two so it's comforting to find messages from the past that verify my experience, they are proof against those who make me feel that our relationship was a throwaway affair. Maybe it was but when i find a message like this I remember how i did feel loved by him and how even when things went wrong i still loved him because i knew him as the man behind the mask, a man who shone with love.

I know i wasn't the first to love Jon. And probably not the last. I know i was not the first because when we were together i found a book with a book plate proudly declaring the book belonged to the library of him and his ex-wife. I remember thinking someone else has thought like me, hoped for a future with this man, it was at a time when he and I were at our best so it did not worry me but made me sympathetic to his ex-wife, the mother of his daughter. I had been through relationship break ups and knew the hurt of betrayal and disappointment. Maybe i should have been less sympathetic and  made fewer excuses for her, but what was was, really it took Jon's death for me to understand his family and to know that my desire to be included/not socially excluded was never going to be met.
I wanted to blog because a year is a long time. And this has been a long year. Grief is a new country for me. I think that it comes in many shades of black initially and maybe for some it is always black and i've been lucky because through the cracks in the black i can see mimosa yellow in bloom, the green of a fig tree, the pale pink of an almond blossom, berry stained fingers, blue seas, goldfinches and so much more. But, still, now i have met death i am way more afraid of him/it than i was before. The desolation is much greater than i imagined, the despair cuts more deeply, erases hope more fully, and the pain and loneliness are much harder to bear than imagination allows. 
So there, so one year on. I grieve still, but my stare is not so blank i think. And in my grief I can now remember Jon as the best of himself. I know he wasn't all good. I know he messed me about. And I can't say for sure that he loved me only what i felt. But I know that i loved him and i feel immensely grateful for the time that we shared, particularly the time that felt like paradise. 

post script ... I remember the proposal ... i think i laughed ... what we had was enough already