To move on, or not to move on, that is the question … which reminds me of Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’
So, do I move on or not move on? Four years since my husband passed away, I think it is time. It’s not easy to return home to an empty house with no one to greet me. I hear the house echoing from its very silence. Worst of all, there is nobody who knows whether I arrived home safely late at night or not. My husband got into the habit of calling me three times a day every day since we fell in love after our first date - he would have known where I was at any given time. So many years together; so many memories. Losing my husband changed my life drastically as he was my best friend.
But, something inside of me told me that maybe I could survive, that I could manage. Even though the last four years have felt like an endless amount of time for me since his passing. There have been moments when I felt quite ‘normal’ (even though I don’t like this word, I can’t think of a better one) and it surprised me to discover that slowly but surely, larger parts of my days are spent feeling reasonably human once again. I suppose that while I was in the grips of grief, time’s force continued to pull it away from me and the resilience of my heart that has loved so much, eventually prevailed.
Although It took courage, I went to a symphony concert alone recently and even attended a series of lectures solo. Now, I have to pluck up the courage to enter a coffee shop without a companion and maybe even slip into a cinema in the dark to catch a movie that I really want to see instead of missing the best ones due to the fact that either my friends have seen it, or we can’t find a time that suits us both.
