Photo courtesy of Penboutique.com

Once she was living in the reality of her transformed relationship with her deceased husband, Patricia’s awareness and appreciation of what she had hitherto referred to as only a ‘physical’ world, expanded like a delicate flower-bud opening in the bright morning sun. She began to see people, and living things around her, literally, in a new light: a many-coloured luminescence, an intimate, alive, embracing relationship of hues, and shades, and tones was flowing and pulsating around her and in her. Life became a continuum. There was no cutting off point between what she saw, what she thought and what she felt. She felt herself as a part of all Nature, and Nature felt a part of all of her.

“Natura Naturans,” she would whisper to herself, whenever the memory of a barbecue in the garden some years before, with their friends the Lamberts, and their godson Santiago and his passionate theories about biology, floated up.

In this new situation, which at first seemed like a continual state of musing, Patricia discovered that she needed to revisit the very foundations of her beliefs about reality. While she could, with certainty, still see the physical silhouette in space of a person, an animal, a plant or an object, reality had now blurred those lines. What she perceived outwardly and what she conceived inwardly, about living things and people, had somehow merged.

Time, too, had taken on another character. At first, she perceived time as slowing down. She felt a calming effect from the new reality she was in. But with more familiarity of this new state of existence, her perceptions became more active, more like a participation in a world, free from spatial and temporal dimensions, but filled with living ideas.

This change in Patricia went largely unnoticed amongst her family and friends. The most they could discern was a softening in her behaviour and a mellowing of her mood.

When Beverley had, by chance, met the family doctor again in the supermarket one Saturday morning, he had his own way of summing up the situation in his cool, categoric manner:

“It sounds like your mother is settling down and accepting the new circumstances,” was how he had put it.

But Patricia had not ‘settled down’ into the matter-of-fact state of isolated widowhood the doctor’s superficial attitude supposed. She knew that there was something still to be resolved. Something was still holding her back from full reality, from a complete understanding of this new sense of togetherness she felt with all around her. The words, she had so often pondered over, ever since her earliest encounters with the church as a child, were recurring in her mind:

“I believe in All that is Seen, and Unseen”, she reflected. And her belief began slowly to turn into conviction.

+ + +

Soon, winter, and the heaviness of its darkness, were returning. Autumn was taking back the life that had been given in the branches of the trees in the garden, drawing down to earth the greens and emeralds of the trees’ leaves, and surrendering their emerging silhouettes to the browns and oranges of late October.

Patricia knew full well that Halloween was approaching, and with it the first anniversary of George’s passing away. She woke early one morning, before daybreak, with a feeling she could only describe to herself as a pressure on her chest, an emotion in her heart, pushing her to get out of bed. She turned over, and over again, and finally succumbed to her feelings.

She made her way straight to the study, and sat down at the desk. She pulled out a sheet of fine writing paper and her favourite fountain pen from the drawer. With the words “La Hulpe, 29 October 2023” in the top right corner of the page, she began:

“Dear George,

I’m still not 100% sure what it is that has motivated me right now and pen this letter to you. It’s certainly not been a letter I felt I could just sit down and write. But I guess I’m hoping that putting something down on paper will help me gather the thoughts and feelings I have towards you, my dearest George.

You know I would give the world to have chance to sit down with you, like we would on a weekend morning, to share a quiet cup of tea in bed together, mulling over any old issue of the day.

But you know, and I know, that it’s all different now.

We may not be apart, but not to be able to touch your skin, feel the tenor of your voice and see that glint in your eye when you speak, well, that’s what I miss most of all.

Putting it that way seems so trivial, but that’s what’s changed. I know you are where you are, and we are doing fine, and you know my thoughts and I know yours. But those thoughts and feelings are so hard to grasp, so hard to hold on to. Imagining where you are right now and what you are doing is such a struggle”.

Patricia felt a sting in her eyes, as the tears welled up and a droplet trickled down her cheek. She knew, if she was honest with herself, that the most upsetting thing, was the realisation that it was she who was holding herself back from being able to see that George was really still there, and that they were still together.

She sat, contemplating the sleek black barrel of her Mont Blanc pen.

Moments passed.

At times, even just the thought of George, made her feel he knew already what it is she was going to say. What gnawed at her was that such thoughts felt so much like she was talking to herself all the time.

Flinching, a thought raced through her mind, once again, that she had lost herself to the crazy idea that George was somehow still there. She took in a deep breath, steadied herself, and returned to the words that were emerging in black ink in front of her.

“I find my inner babble is constant. Unless I slow down and things go really quiet inside, I can’t tell where my thoughts are coming from”.

She paused once more, her lips parted by the tender anxiousness that was passing through her whole body.

“But, and here’s the funny thing, the other day walking round Genval Lake, I had an uncanny feeling, that so many of the questions I keep asking myself are inspired by you. And then, when I listen as hard as I can for some kind of response, I feel more and more sure that the answers are coming to me out of my very own soul.”

The effort to write the letter was bringing fatigue back into Patricia’s mind and body. As she repeatedly yawned, her eyes kept screwing up shut, which, each time, brought a fresh upsurge of tears to wash away her melancholia and draw her back to her bed.

“When I get like this, my dear George…..”

Patricia put her pen down, unable to continue. She lifted herself from the chair and walked slowly back to the bedroom.

“George,” she said gently, as she drew up the sheets. Nestling her head down, she kissed the pillow and, falling into a drowse, she whispered:

“Something tells me. My darling. You know what I want to say.”