Karen’s unexpected and unwelcome kiss on the beach was no love bite, yet her lips left a mark as deep as if she’d been written into my sad story by Bram Stoker. Fittingly, his inspiration for Dracula came only a few miles up the coast while he was visiting Whitby. Karen’s sincere seaside snog was too soon after Helen’s death by any judgment. She was upset, “Sorry, but it seemed the perfect moment.”
I assured her that she’d done nothing wrong in assuming I was single through divorce not death – people do.
Afterwards, we’d chatted until 2am, animated like survivors of an unexpected crisis. It was innocent, with much laughing, many nightcaps, no kissing.
Karen confessed that for the first time since her divorce, she’d thought of taking a bed (not beach!) buddy. She was “out of practice and clumsy” but had gone for it because it felt like time out and she liked me.
I saw that my rejection of her puckered-up pass was so unconsidered it was nothing to do with my recent bereavement and everything to do with more than 20 years of fidelity. I’d acted as a married man.
Yet I’m no longer married. So when the shock subsided, I sat opposite Karen thinking how fantastic it would be to share a bed with this kind, sexy woman. I’d escape the widower script, maybe for one night only, hidden away from the rest of my life with its bedtime loneliness and never-ending bleeding logistics. These thoughts were academic as when Karen discovered I was a recent widower, her gaze became concerned, not carnal. Has a bloke ever plunged into the friend zone faster, I wonder?
But how soon is it “normal” for a bereaved person’s libido to wake up? Bluntly, how is it possible that a few months after his beloved wife’s death a husband would have no guilt about wanting to shag someone?
I don’t know a widower or widow to compare timelines with and premature fornication is not the sort of topic you can dance into easily, even online.
Bereaved sexual re-awakening seems almost taboo, with at least one brilliant exception. A supportive colleague passed me Lucie Brownlee’s Life After You, “Not because it’s about bereavement. I thought how many touch points you have with her – the north-east, Yorkshire and a frank view of the world,” she’d lied. Her intention was clear; she hoped Brownlee’s experience would teach me something.
I recommend this raw and brilliantly uninhibited story, including how she took comfort in a fuck-buddy friendship with her plumber. That the reader ends up liking her more for it is a tonic to my spinning head. I’m guessing that as friends and family haven’t disowned Brownlee, there’s hope for me. Critically, her Carry On Plumber dalliance took place in the first year after her husband’s death.
I worry, though, that while I’m technically single, to many of the people in my life and Millie’s and Matt’s lives, I’m still married to Helen. So I’ll tread carefully for their sakes. For my own, I find my lack of guilt at what Karen and I could have got up to upsetting and surprising, but not inexplicable.
I loved Helen so much and would gladly have swapped places with her. There were no issues or unfinished business between us and while I scream out for more years together, we had something so special in the best of times and an even more profound love in cancer’s worst of them.
This helped me to embrace what may be the hardest lesson in bereavement – that you cannot love someone who is gone exactly as you did when they were alive. The contrast between the two states is too stark. I’ve understood this crappy truth quicker then many, perhaps primed by my dad’s death when I was four. So, no sex but also no guilt that there might have been … or could be soon. Bravado, perhaps, but I’m made bold and more open by Brownlee’s honesty about her libido. You take help where you can through the layered complexities of this bastard bereavement.
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