Putting the pieces back together

I've made collages at New Year for as long as I can remember. I can't recall how or when the tradition started but I've always loved sitting with my pile of magazines cutting out words and pictures, slowly building up a picture of how I would like the year to look. I prefer it to setting New Year's resolutions that I know I'll break. You can't break a vague montage of pretty pictures and inspiring phrases.

Last year, for the first time in many years, it wasn't the resolutions that got broken though, but my New Year tradition. As I sat down to make a collage, my courage failed me. I was too shattered by grief to contemplate a future and the memory of making collages with my love the year before was too painful to bear. It's not often that you fall in love with a man who thinks that making collages is a fine way to spend New Year's Eve. Not often either that you meet a man who carries logs and an axe up a hill to build you your own personal bonfire in the darkness of winter. I lost that man in 2016 and with him I lost my hope and my way. At the end of the worst year of my life, there were no words or images that could make my future feel hopeful. At that point, everything felt broken. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, too sad to look back and too scared to look into an empty future without him. I didn't want to stay in a place of unbearable pain but neither did I want to move further away from the precious time I spent with him. So, instead of making collages, I did what came naturally to me during that awful year - I sat and put my pain into words, clinging to my keyboard as if it were a life raft keeping me afloat. I held on and rode the waves of grief into a new year.

Now, as I approach another new year, I'm still riding those waves. They're smaller and further apart these days but I can still be floored by them unexpectedly and the truth is that in many ways 2017 has felt even harder than 2016. If 2016 was spent wallowing in a pit of despair, 2017 was spent grappling to climb out of it, trying to navigate my way in a new world with no faith in my map or my compass, no hope that some guardian angel is working for my greater good. It has been hard work battling anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress - the cousins of grief. It has been hard work trying to build a new future. Sometimes still, I feel like I'm back at the beginning. At the two year anniversary of my mother's death in December I was spilling over with tears at the slightest provocation, besieged by crippling anxiety, floundering in the darkness again. Facing Christmas was hard and facing New Year's Eve has been almost as bad. Sometimes things feel so difficult that I wonder if I've made any progress at all. And then I read my blog and look through my photos remembering all of the things that I've done during 2017 and realise how far I've come. At the end of 2016, I couldn't face the future. I couldn't imagine loving again or writing fiction again. I couldn't imagine wanting to live and thrive. Yet, here I am at the beginning of 2018 with new projects on the go and things that I want to carry over from one year to the next: a new boyfriend, a new house, a new novel. I have places that I want to go and things I want to do. Most of all, I have hope.

I've come so far that this year I decided to get out my magazines again and to reinstate the collaging tradition. The collaging tradition is mine. I don't want to lose it. It was painful at first but gradually I found my groove as I remembered the joy of cutting and sticking my new vision together with the pot of glue that Paul left behind. And as I sat here tonight, surrounded by fragments of images and broken phrases, it struck me that the making of a collage is an appropriate metaphor for the process of rebuilding that takes place following a major loss, or losses. Some things you take with you from the past but other pieces just don't fit anymore and in some ways, it feels like starting from scratch, building up from the corners and gradually moving towards a whole. My new life is a work in progress but this year I feel optimistic that 2018 will be better than the previous two years. Last year couldn't be a good year, containing as it did, the anniversary of Paul's death and the loss of his mum. And even though I started a new relationship last year, it hasn't been the saviour that I might have hoped for. New love triggered whole new layers of grief and guilt and fear that I wasn't prepared for. I didn't expect to fall in love so quickly. I didn't expect it to be so terrifying. I wasn't ready for it at all. This year there is less to dread and much more to look forward to. This year I have at least some idea where I'm going. With inevitable sadness, this year I have accepted that I can't move forward without, in some ways, leaving Paul behind. My love for Paul and the tragedy of his loss will always be a part of me like the glue holding the torn pieces together but gradually a new picture is emerging. I owe it to him to make it beautiful and I will.

The cost of loss

Taken whilst planning my writing walk with Paul two weeks before his death 

I've just done my tax return. You wouldn't expect a tax return to be a trigger for grief but it was. Being a hapless artist, I'm not finely attuned to financial cycles but I realised today that I lost my love right at the end of the last tax year, so as I trawled
through all of the papers that I'd stuffed in boxes (mostly unopened envelopes), trying to remember what I'd earned and when, I had a trip down the fiscal memory lane of my first year of agonising grief.

I started, as I always do, by going back to last April (in this case April 2016) searching my bank statements for anything that looked like it might be income (not much), for anything that might be tax deductible (slightly more). Almost immediately I saw a payment to a funeral director. I struggled to remember what it was for. Paul's family paid for the funeral and I paid for the wake. Why did I pay a funeral director? And then I remembered the last minute realisation that, yes, I did want to put flowers on his coffin along with the ones chosen by the family, remembered phoning up in a fluster, arranging for a woodland wreath with red roses, the closest thing I could think of as a representation of my love. My gesture cost me £100. The bill for the catering came next.

Then there came the books. As a writer, I have the pleasure of logging every purchase from Waterstones as a tax deductible expense but when I looked at receipts today, I realised that all of my purchases during the last financial year were self-help books and grief memoirs. No fiction, no poetry, just books about death and recovery. The tax year ended with the payment for a memorial bench. Only the books were tax deductible.

I've been reflecting a little recently on the cost of loss. Two weeks ago I was invited to the parliamentary launch of the new Life Matters strategy. The strategy proposes a broad raft of measures to better support grieving families but it grew out of the government's recent changes to bereavement payments to widowed parents. Where, in the past, married parents who had lost a spouse were entitled to financial support for the duration of their dependents' childhoods (until they remarried), the support is now limited to the first eighteen months following the death of a spouse. I went to offer my support to an important cause, even though I felt that it wasn't really relevant to me. I'm not a widow and my children were not really affected by the death of my partner. The financial and emotional cost of grief is not the same for me, I thought.

Still, as I listened to Benjamin Brooks-Dutton talk about the total lack of support that he experienced when his wife was tragically killed leaving him to bring up his two year old son alone, I found myself reflecting on my own experience. I found myself remembering how I had found Paul's body in the middle of the night and how, the next morning (and the morning after that and the morning after that), I had got up and taken children to school. How, in shock, I had continued to cook tea, read stories, do the laundry. How no-one from any kind of support service ever called to see if I was ok. How I just carried on. I honestly don't know how I did it. But I do know that it cost. It cost me dearly.

I'm self-employed so I had to sign off my own requests for compassionate leave and I lost a lot of income. Today I found the contract for the creative writing walk that I was meant to lead along the industrial rivers of Sheffield, the walk that I couldn't lead because I'd scoped out the territory with Paul a few weeks before, talking about our future as we noted the landmarks on the canal. I wasn't strong enough to cope with it. In fact, I didn't take on any new work that year. I just maintained a couple of regular workshops and later added grief writing workshops to my repertoire. It was enough for me to handle. I also kept paying for an office that I wasn't using because I didn't have the energy to empty it.

Then came the other payments. I paid for help around the house. I paid for massages when my shoulders seized up with stress. I paid therapists for treatment for post traumatic stress disorder when I was having flashbacks to that awful night, when my anxiety was out of control. I paid the herbalist for her strongest calming herbs, paid the mindfulness teacher for a space on a mat every Tuesday night, paid for gym membership so that I could swim.

This year my outgoings have far outweighed my income. I hate to think what kind of state I would have been in if I hadn't inherited some money following my mother's recent death. As a result of her death in a hospice I became eligible for free bereavement counselling and it was worth its weight in gold. I don't know how I would have coped if I'd been like many bereaved people, placed on a waiting list for a maximum of six sessions, instead of the full year that I had. I don't know how I would have coped at all and I feel so very conscious of my privilege. I felt guilty spending so much money during that year (and this) but every time I've paid out for some element of self-care I have thought of the parents who left money to me and considered that this is what they would want me to be doing: looking after myself, helping myself to heal so that I can be the mother that my children need me to be. Because they were affected after all. They watched me sobbing uncontrollably and saw me struggling to cope. My grief took it's toll on them too.

Loss is expensive, emotionally and financially and there isn't enough recognition in our society of the toll it takes on productivity and mental health. I've been privy to many conversations amongst widowed people and I know how many of them, post-loss, have had to change their careers in order to better support their families. I also know how long grief takes to work through. It is two years now since I lost my mum, and twenty-one months since I lost Paul and I am still nowhere near functioning at the capacity that I was before. Today I couldn't recall who insured my house and could find no paper or email trail confirming the broker's identity. I couldn't tell the accountant how much interest I'd had on my bank accounts because I appear to have closed my old accounts and thrown all of those documents away. My paperwork is a mess. I could tell them how much I earned that year though. It was easy to work that out because it was just twenty per cent of what I earned the previous year. And I can tell them how much money I spent on self-help - a lot. And that only the books were tax deductible.

The event in London was sponsored by comparethemarket.com. I found myself chatting to their representatives over canapes and wine. 'What's your connection to the cause?' I asked, tired of telling my own story over and over again. 'Life insurance,' came the reply. And a light went on in my brain. I came home and reviewed my own life insurance but, even with all the proposed changes, I'm not sure anyone would make provision for someone who lost a partner who wasn't the father of her children, to whom she wasn't married and whom she didn't live with. But it cost. Boy, did it cost.

I feel it creeping up on me

It's that time of year again isn't it?

At this time of year my mum would start phoning, asking what I'd be doing for Christmas. Did I want to go to the theatre? The panto? Did the children want to go on the Santa train? I'd typically be irritable. It's only November, I'd tell her. I don't want to think about Christmas yet.

Now, no-one is phoning and, of course, I miss it. When she died, it seems the mantle of responsibility fell on my shoulders. It turns out that if you don't book the theatre and the panto and the Santa train in November, it sells out and suddenly all of these traditions seem more important. Because these traditions remind me of my mum who isn't here anymore and they remind my children of their grandma. It turns out my mum wasn't a control freak, she just wanted to spend as much time as possible with her family while she still could.

So I message my brothers and my sister-in-laws and I liaise with the ex, trying to work out how we can fit it all in and, as I do, I feel a sadness creeping up on me. It's not a sadness that I seek out, or indulge, it's just there, like a shadow or a dark cloud overhead. Two years ago, my mum was struggling to hold onto life and on the tenth of December she died. Her funeral was on the twenty-third, the same day as the Santa train she'd booked. These memories linger.

But it's not just the looming anniversary. You don't have to have been to your mum's funeral at Christmas to feel sadness as the festive season approaches. Christmas is difficult for anyone who has experienced loss. As we go about our business - shopping, planning, booking tickets - it's like we are accompanied by the ghosts of Christmases past. For me it's not just the sadness of the last two years that I remember, but the memory of the time when Christmas meant a day spent with a mum and a dad, two sets of grandparents, a coherent family unit. It wasn't perfect but still, I miss it. Instead I get the joy of watching my two little people open their presents on Christmas morning but I don't get to share that joy with anyone else and at lunchtime I will wave them off to spend the rest of the day with their dad, his new wife and his family (with mums and dads all in tact) and I will feel sad. I can't help it. I'm sad because this isn't the way I thought life would be. And that's part of the problem isn't it?

So often, we have an image in our heads of how life should be, how Christmas should be. Families should be nuclear. People shouldn't die or divorce. Christmas should look like a John Lewis advert. But, of course, the reality is that for most people, families are fractured and heartache coexists with joy. So, I try to practice acceptance and gratitude for all that I have known, for all that remains and for all that is yet to come. I try to blend the old traditions with the new. Last year, it was just me and my kids for Christmas dinner and so we went to the supermarket with a trolley and each bought exactly what we wanted. There were a lot of sweets! We had a great day and there was a freedom to being released from the tradition of the huge Christmas dinner. This year I'll probably go for a walk where Paul's ashes are scattered and remember him while I wait for my boyfriend to come back from his night shift and from seeing his family. He'll probably fall asleep as soon as he gets to me. I wish he didn't work night shifts. But he does. Life isn't a fairy tale. There is no happy ever after. But there are moments of wonder and beauty that sit alongside the deepest wells of sadness. This is life. I'm glad I'm still here. Someone has to book the Santa train after all. And as we put the decorations on my mum's tree, we will remember her and all the love that still remains.

I'm doing much better now, thank you

On Facebook tonight, an old friend asked me how I was doing. We'd not spoken for a year or so. 'Not too bad,' I replied, not wanting to go into too much detail in a public conversation that began with me wishing her Happy Birthday. Not too bad. 

At the same time, today I rejoined the charity Widowed and Young having let my membership lapse when I felt that I no longer wanted to be identified so completely with my grief. Tonight I found myself going back onto their Facebook page wanting to offer some hope to people who are earlier on in their journey. I wanted to tell them that things do get better, at the same time as recognising that, when I was in the early stages of my grief, the idea of being 'better' was almost as horrifying as the idea of 'dating' or 'loving again'. Still I offered some hope anyway and then realised that if they looked at my blog, my last post with all of its talk of trauma, anxiety and depression would not be very helpful. So, here's a hasty update.

I am doing much better now, thank you.

The grief and sadness has not totally gone. I still miss Paul (and my mum). I still sleep with his fleeces. I still find myself periodically gazing at clouds, hoping for hearts. I still see people walking towards me who share his build or his facial expression and feel an unconscious surge of joy followed by a crushing sadness when I realise it can't be him. I still pause to notice herons on the pond or feathers on the path. But I walk on without picking feathers up. It's a calmer, more reflective. more intermittent sadness these days.

Of course, sometimes I still get completely derailed by grief unexpectedly, like the time last week when the chimney sweep came to clean the chimney of my log burner, declared it unfit for use and handed me a card recommending a friend of Paul's for the job of rectifying the situation. And suddenly I was crying just because I saw his name and because Paul used to make log burning stoves and he should still be here. As his friend said when he came round to look at the stove, 'he's a bugger going and dying like that.' I don't blame Paul but still, it is, a real bugger. And just the other day, I received a Facebook notification that it was Bert Mulligan's birthday and, honestly, my heart leapt with excitement as if I thought that Paul's Facebook alter ego might still be alive even though he is not. And I almost opened up Messenger to re-read our messages, but I didn't. I didn't. 

It's nineteen months now and the fog has really started to clear. I no longer live in a state of perpetual anxiety and fear. A week or two ago, I finished reading my first novel and I've managed to watch a few episodes of TV dramas as well as a few films. I am working more and buzzing with ideas for creative projects, in fact, I have so many ideas that I'm impatient that I can't bring them all into fruition immediately. I was moaning to a friend about my frustration with my progress towards my creative goals the other day and she helpfully said something along the lines of, 'I think you're doing ok. Not so long ago, you couldn't see the point of living.' She's right. I couldn't. I have come a long way. 

The truth is, when I read my early blogs, it's almost like reading fiction. Last week I met an author that I hadn't seen for a while and when I blithely told him about what had happened, I saw the look of horror on his face and was taken aback when I remembered that it actually happened to me. I remember it of course and I can recall the anguish and the unbelievable pain but it feels distant now, like a memory of a place that I lived in for a while, that I hope never to return to. I blame the therapist in London who has been treating me for post traumatic stress disorder. He's been practising some bizarre magic that takes away some of the pain associated with traumatic memories. Evidently it's worked. I look at the photo of myself taken by my boyfriend at the seaside last weekend and I see joy in the eyes that have cried so many tears. The bags under them, I fear, are here to stay but who cares? It is such a relief to see that I can smile genuine smiles of happiness again. 

Of course, not everything is fixed - he wasn't that magic. Life is not perfect and I'm still finding my way. I still suffer from anxiety and I am worn out right down to the bone marrow. I'll never go back to being who I was before. But I feel that annoying post-traumatic growth taking place that I never wanted to hear about; who wants to trade love for growth after all? Yet, I feel it anyway. I feel like I'm changing, evolving, moving forwards into some unknown future. I don't know where I'm going but, as I learned so very deeply, all futures are unknowable anyway. All I know at the moment is that my future is a future that I want to live for and that I'm doing much better now, thank you. 

And the grief goes on

I thought I'd finished my blog with a positive post about finding new love. It seemed like a hopeful ending and I've been been trying to wean myself off blogging. I don't want grief to define me. I'm a writer and grief is just one of the things that I can write about. I also want to be a fully rounded human being and loss is just one of the things I have experienced. But I'm also a person who is committed to telling the truth, and the truth is that I have been struggling lately.

I was warned that this might happen. The people further down the road in online support groups told me that the second year of widowhood is routinely found to be worse than the first as the shock wears off and they adjust to the reality of a new normal without their partner. Not for me though, I thought. I am different. After all, I'm not a widow. I don't have grieving children and I don't have a whole life to rebuild. Neither do I have all of the secondary losses that I read about: I haven't lost my income; I'm not having to learn how to be a single parent (I've had that t-shirt for four years and, like me, it's worn out); I haven't lost my identity as a part of a partnership because Paul and I were only just becoming a couple and still lived mostly independent lives. Yet, I have lost a lot and the repercussions are still being felt, like aftershocks, long after the the debris from the original earthquake has been cleared up.

To the outside world, I probably look like I'm doing well. I have a lovely new house, I'm working, I took the kids on a foreign holiday on my own, I no longer walk around crying in public and I occasionally manage to go out and smile at social occasions. I imagine that I've lost the haunted look of the newly devastated and the bags under my eyes have gradually faded. Most importantly, I have a new boyfriend which is surely the ultimate indicator of my success in embracing a new future. I lost one boyfriend and found a new one. Job done, surely?

But, no. In fact, having a new boyfriend, like every forward movement, has unleashed a whole new tirade of grief. I proclaimed my new love to the world like someone who was one step away from winning that slippery game of Snakes and Ladders and promptly landed on a snake which sent me cascading back to the beginning again. It happened a month or so ago on Paul's birthday. I woke up smiling in my new boyfriend's arms, looked at the date on my phone, realised its significance and everything began to fall apart. How could I have woken up happy on such a sad day? And how could I be sad while my new partner was happily basking in the glow of new love? Even worse, how could I have forgotten the significance of the date? (Not so hard for me because I never spent a birthday with Paul). As a friend helpfully said, "it's a headf**k!" I couldn't hold so many conflicting emotions in one body and I slid down that snake into a pit of anxiety that I'm gradually trying to climb out of. I've been waking up with that lurching feeling in my stomach again, walking on a tightrope again, feeling like I might fall at any moment. I am full to the brim with emotions that threaten constantly to spill out and I am vibrating again like I was at the beginning, shaken to my very core, feeling unsafe.

Things got so bad that I went back to see a therapist  She tells me that I am suffering not just from grief but from the repercussions of trauma which has been triggered by the very thing that you'd think might have made me feel better: falling in love. It turns out my whole being is trying to protect me by screaming, "don't do this again! It only ever ends badly." My mind is on red alert, looking for signs of danger in the strangest places - in the tattoos on my boyfriend's arm, in the words that he speaks, the messages that he sends, the love that he gives. My therapist has me recording my anxious thoughts and the other day I'd written down twenty-four of them by 10am. She says I'm like a victim who has been in a fire who now registers every whiff of smoke as a life threatening situation that I need to get out of when, in reality, I have a faulty toaster (my brain) and a bit of overdone toast (a new relationship which, like all new relationships, is a bit scary and not 100% perfect.). When my boyfriend mentioned the idea of one day meeting my children, my anxiety went a level higher. The last time I introduced a partner to my children, he promptly dropped dead. The one before that left and broke all of our hearts. Ok, logically I know it's unlikely to happen again. Maybe it will be third time lucky. But logic has nothing to do with anxiety. My limbic system is out of control and is over-ruling the rational part of my mind. The therapist explains that the amygdala stores my memories and determines my fears based on the strength of my emotional reactions and my amygdala has learned in no uncertain terms that love and the grief that ensues when it ends, is terrifying and not to be messed with. And yet, the part of my brain that can still think really wants to love, and my boyfriend and I are very compatible and he's lovely and is doing his best to understand........

So, I went for some hypnosis and I've seen the herbalist who has increased the anti-anxiety herbs in my medicine. I've been to the GP who has prescribed me pills that I look at every day, wondering if I can manage without or if I should give in. I talk to widows online still and find that, though their circumstances are different, they are still struggling too. Many of them are receiving treatment for anxiety or depression, one, two, three or ten years down the line from the event that changed their lives forever. And, though I don't have all of the secondary losses that they experience, I do notice that I share some of them. No-one talks to me about Paul now. Since his mum died I have lost my main connection with the people who loved him. What do I do with his memory now? And like other widows, my identity has changed. For one thing I've acquired this identity as a person who writes about grief. What do I with that as I try to move forward? Do I keep blogging, write a memoir or just leave it here and move into a new future? Meanwhile, the romantic novel that I was writing when Paul died is still on hold and I'm not sure I can go back to it. Do I start something new? What would that be? I'm a writer and I don't know what to write about. I'm a reader who still can't read a book. I'm a person who still can't watch films or TV. I'm still in transition, out of my comfort zone, trapped between the past and the future, between sadness and happiness. It's not an easy place to be.

And like the other widows, I have lost touch with some real-life friends. I retreated inward when Paul died, needing to be alone to process my grief and spending my time online with the only people who truly understood. Now my Facebook newsfeed is over 50% grief-related and most of my life is lived online. It's been a safe place to be but I know it's not healthy. In the real world I've not been much fun to be around and understandably people assume I should be back to normal by now. The friends who used to call to check on me don't call anymore (I don't blame them as they have busy lives and gave me so much love and support in the early days). I don't have people inviting me to go on holiday with them this year either. Life goes on and I need to stand on my own two feet. I'm no longer a special case. But the grief goes on and, sixteen months in, I am still struggling to keep reaching for the light.

I repeat the words of the hypnotherapist like a mantra: "Love is always stronger than fear," she said. Somewhere, deep down, some part of me believes her. And so I keep going and keep trying to hang on to love.

Desperately seeking young, fit, risk-averse, spiritually-inclined man, with good genes whose entire family were wiped out in a freak accident

Beverley, Writer, 46
Quirky, sincere, creative and obsessed with when you're going to die.

Catchy huh?

So, it's one thing to decide that you are interested in experiencing love again (see the blog more catchily entitled - I would do it again) but finding love is a whole other kettle of fish. You can't just click your fingers and ask all appropriate suitors to form an orderly queue. Especially if you're a self-employed, single parent who spends most evenings trapped in their own home, meeting someone is not easy. Paul was the only appealing single man that I have encountered in real life in the last decade or so and my time is precious; I don't expect to get that lucky again. So, not prepared to wait another decade, I have dusted off my fishing rod and, only eighteen months since I deactivated my dating profiles, I find myself online fishing again.

I started gently, casually, by reactivating Tinder and adjusting my personal statement to reflect my change in circumstances. I made it clear that I was not ready for a relationship but would like some male company. It was a clumsy beginning. The first person who approached me got short shrift when he asked me about my taste in books, films and music. At that time my brain was so shot to pieces that I couldn't remember anything. I hadn't watched a film or read a book for many months and had had the same CD playing on repeat for just as long. I told him to stop asking me so many questions. Luckily he was patient with me and I found myself an online Scrabble buddy (cue the blog in which I weep my way through my first Scrabble game, feeling like I am cheating on Paul who loved to play Scrabble with me). Next I met an ex-vicar who I've been for a couple of drinks with and then a fellow writer who has become like a surrogate online boyfriend. We chat about kids and writing and he offers me online hugs when it all gets too much. Sometimes he indulges my need to have someone to say goodnight to. He's not ready for a relationship either but, along with the others, he has been part of my rehabilitation into the land of the living. It's been good to spend at least some of my online time talking about something other than death and grief.

Then there are the others (oh so many others), the ones who read, 'I might like some male company' as, 'I want sex'. They like to tell me that I must have needs and the many ways in which they would like to meet them. They are fascinated to know how long it is since I last had it. One of them made the mistake of asking around the time of the anniversary and I killed his ardour somewhat by saying that actually, I could remember exactly when it was because it was the last time I saw my love alive. Sometimes these men delete me before I delete them. Sometimes I get there first. It's been a depressing business. There have been a lot of tears.

Recently I had the revelation that perhaps my ambiguous profile wasn't helping matters and that, actually, I now realise that ultimately I want more than a friend, more than a lover. I changed my profile again to reflect this new stage in my journey and said that I would like to experience love again one day but that I am still finding my feet. And things changed a little. I get messages now from people who might at least consider the idea of having a relationship even if they are few and far between. It is noticeable that I get a lot less messages than I did two years ago. Not every man is looking for a middle-aged orphaned single parent who writes a blog about grief and mentions death in her online profile. On the other hand, answering my dating messages used to feel like an overwhelming part-time job. I prefer it this way and at least it sorts the wheat from the chaff, the men from the boys. I definitely need a man not a boy, I reflect. Or do I?

I expected that it would be complicated to find someone who could love the new me; I have changed a lot as a result of enduring what I have endured. What I didn't realise until I started dating is that my requirements in a partner have changed too. Emotional intelligence and empathy have become my most important criteria now. Naturally, I need kindness and compassion above all things. But there are other things too, surprising things that I come up against as men message me or as I swipe through profiles.

For instance, it turns out that atheists and sceptics are no longer welcome here. Suddenly I can't countenance the idea of having a relationship with anyone who might try to argue with me about the existence of an afterlife. Where before spirituality was just a mild curiosity of mine, now it is a matter of prime importance.

Then there is the question of age and health. I find myself studying profiles and my first thought is not whether the men in the photos are attractive or interesting but how likely they are to drop dead in the near future. Suddenly I am unforgiving of a few extra pounds, social smoking or excessive drinking. I see an imaginary warning label saying 'heart disease risk' over every man who is a little overweight or pictured holding a pint of beer. I discount anyone who rides a motorbike or who likes extreme sports, preferring men who keep fit by doing yoga. I'm no longer sure about anyone over the age of fifty and find myself considering men who are younger than me rather than older. I can't countenance the idea of dating anyone who is called Paul or anyone who is fifty-three.

Luckily, you don't come across many blacksmiths on dating sites but I came across one man who upcycles industrial equipment and found myself sobbing as I told him about the lamp that Paul was making when he died. He deleted me before I had time to realise the terrible conundrum that, having found and lost my ideal mate, I can't go near anyone who might remind me of him.

Finally I realise that I need someone who has experienced enough tragedy to be able to empathise with my own journey but nothing that would suggest too much risk. A fellow orphan would be appealing, I think, because then I won't have to deal with supporting them through loss in the future (I'm not heartless, just tired of funerals) but I don't want an orphan whose parents died of cancer because that might suggest a genetic connection. And I don't want someone who is so scarred by tragedy that it poses a risk to their mental health. I already know that widowers are the gold standard when dating in the widowed community (even my bereavement counsellor tells me that these relationships have the best chance of success) and so I have found myself adding 'widowed' to my search criteria whilst wondering at the same time if I want to deal with their grief as well as my own, whilst considering if I am secure enough to not find myself asking pitifully if they loved their previous spouse more than me. It is a weird world I have entered when I find myself having these thoughts.

All of which leaves me with my opening statement: 'Desperately seeking a young, fit, risk-averse, spiritually-inclined man, with good genes whose entire family were wiped out in a freak accident'. That's not too much to ask for surely?

The food of love

At Wagamamas on a rare occasion when Paul let me buy him dinner because he was helping me with Christmas shopping after my mum's death

'People always wanted to feed Paul,' says your mum. This information makes me smile because it leads me to conclude that this is how you got by. Even as a grown man, you'd rock up to people's houses unannounced and find yourself eating plates of toast, or cake or staying for dinner. You loved food but you didn't know how to make it, though some of your concoctions were legendary: garlic sandwiches, cider vinegar potions. I don't really even know what you ate most of the time. I know you occasionally cooked fish and roast dinners for your friend but generally I assume you got by on a diet of tinned food. I know that you liked to mix things up, adding spices and garlic to tins of beans and soup and that it didn't always turn out the way you intended. And I know that you loved cheese.

'Do you like cheese?' I once asked you by Messenger.
'I am at least 40% cheese,' you replied. 'And must have it at every opportunity.'
You made me laugh.

At the beginning of our relationship, things proceeded in the manner to which you were evidently accustomed. I'd bake flapjack in anticipation of your arrival and you'd arrive hungry and eat your way through a plate of it with obvious gusto. If it was evening, I'd cook you sweet potato curry. You didn't like going out to eat. It wasn't really your style and you didn't like spending money. And nor did you like me to pay for you but, on the other hand, I really didn't like having to cook on my days off childcare. As a feminist it irked me to always be the one doing the cooking. It was another conundrum. 'I'm not cooking for you every time you come round,' I said. So, you started picking up a meal for one in the supermarket with mock seriousness, even though I protested that I didn't really mean that I would never cook for you; you took feedback on board and you were not going to have me resenting you.

One day, in January, you decided to show me that you could be the new man you felt I needed you to be. You determined to cook me dinner. You arrived, Ainsley Harriot cookbook in hand, with a bag of shopping and set about chopping in my kitchen while I went to a doctor's appointment. I returned to the smell of burning and you, dripping with sweat and visibly shaken in a way I'd never seen you, pans all over the kitchen and a pile of orange slop deposited onto two plates. It tasted ok, I said, just slightly singed. I said it added to the depth of the flavour. It took you a full hour to calm down. It took another hour to clean the kitchen. You never cooked for me again. But I loved you all the more for trying.

How do you survive that?

A year ago my beloved partner, Blacksmith Paul, died. We'd only been together for eight months, although we'd known each other when we were younger and not realised the depth of the connection that we shared. It is a tragic story of chances missed, bad timing and true love. I was a single parent, recently orphaned, who had not been lucky in love. I'd known a few things that I thought were love before but nothing like this. This was the real deal. Too scared to risk things going wrong after the last boyfriend debacle, I'd been reluctant to introduce him to my children but, on the sixth of March 2016, I did. I can still see him standing in my front garden that night writing messages to Hephaestus the blacksmith god with them, releasing paper lanterns into the sky. They loved him. I loved him. He loved me. And that was the last time I saw him. Five days later, he was dead. No-one really knows why. It seems his heart just stopped beating. He went out of touch and I went out of my mind with worry. On the thirteenth, two of his friends and I broke into the tiny shack where he lived alone in the Peak District and found his already decomposing body on the bed. My world imploded and I experienced the kind of relentless pain that I didn't know existed. I didn't think I could survive it. But I did. Like lots of other people who have been through impossible heartbreak, I continue to survive.

It seemed appropriate just before the anniversary to spend last weekend at the AGM and birthday celebrations of the organisation Widowed and Young. The organisation has been a lifeline to me over the past year even though I'm not really a widow, even though I'm not really that young, even though I've not been sure that I really belong. It was only a short relationship after all and we weren't even married; I've not been sure that I can compare my loss to the loss of people who have been married for years, some of them with children. But the members of WAY have always welcomed me and, over the past year, I have spent most evenings in an online room with the only people who truly understood how it feels to have your future ripped apart. It felt right to make it to the AGM, to meet some of those people in person, at this time. The title of John Irving's novel, 'A Widow for One Year' keeps going round my head. When I read it, I never thought that it would be me.

It is strange the solidarity and comfort that can be found from being in a room full of people who have known great tragedy. As I stood in the hall of the hotel in Stratford last Saturday night, I looked around me and was overwhelmed by the thought that every one of the people in the room had lost a partner, that all of those people had had their worlds blown to pieces. The love, and the lost love, in the room was palpable. Still, it wasn't a sad occasion, on the whole. There was fun and laughter and by the end of the evening everyone was on the dance floor. It turns out that the widowed have lost more than their spouses - their inhibitions have gone too. For them, the worst has already happened. In some ways, they have been liberated from fear and they know how to live, how to love. They are a truly fabulous bunch. It was a fabulous weekend.

Even so, gradually, inevitably the stories came out. I found a girl (really, just a girl) crying in the toilets and offered her a hug. My heart broke for her. How could someone so young survive something like this? Then I spoke to a man who had lost his wife just after his baby girl had been born. She'd developed ovarian cancer while she was pregnant. 'That's so sad,' I said feebly and he nodded wearily. He had told this story before. And then there was my online friend, who had given birth to her only chid the week after her partner had been killed in a bike accident. She was choosing funeral flowers when she should have been choosing baby clothes. 'How do you survive something like that?' I found myself thinking, kicking myself at the same time because I already know the answer. You survive because you have to. Because, unless you kill yourself (and most people who have been widowed will have considered it), you have no other option.

As I sit here, a year on, I find myself reflecting, not just on my enormous loss and sadness but at the resilience of the human spirit. Sure, my grief is still deep and I still cry a lot. I still wish that I could rewind time and bring Paul back. I wish I could undo this long year of pain. And I know that grief will not be tied up neatly at the end of this year but will go on for as long as love goes on (forever). But I can also see how far I have come. I have moved house and started new ventures. I have let go of the work that was weighing me down and now only do work that I love. I have written more than ever before and made new friends. I am even, very tentatively, dating again. And I experience joy, like sunshine between clouds of sadness, on a regular basis. Slowly I am building a new life for myself. What's more, I can tell you how I did it. And this is how.

I wrote. Sometimes, I wrote all night long, often with tears streaming until the words on the screen blurred in front of my eyes. I just had to tell the world my story, even if they thought I was mad, even if I felt mad myself. I needed to get it out. When you're in love and your partner dies, you just want to talk about it and my laptop listened when friends were asleep. The very act of writing calmed my mind. Sometimes, just trying to find the perfect metaphor for turmoil gave my brain something to do and when I had finished, I felt sated. It was like literary self-harm, releasing the pressure from my heart and mind. And in sharing my words, I found support from compassionate friends and from other bereaved people. I also found meaning, as I realised that my words were helping other people. Writing gave me a purpose and, when your world has fallen apart, a purpose is what you need.

I learned to slow down and I learned to say no. I rarely went to social occasions (it all seemed so trivial and alienating) and I removed from my life anything or anyone that didn't make me feel good. I let go of the pressure to meet other people's expectations and focused on myself. I filled my life with the things that made me feel better: not fixed, but less bad. I went outside as often as possible and looked at the world from high hills with big skies. I walked crying through woods and parks, not caring who saw. I swam, feeling the support of water, absorbed in the rhythm of the strokes. I learned, finally, to meditate, practising mindfulness on a daily basis, staying in the moment, learning to name my emotions, to focus on the feeling of the ground beneath my feet. In deep grief, the moment is the only place to be; thinking about the future all too often gives rise to panic. So I stayed in the moment, even when that moment was pure agony. I gave in to pain and sobbed so hard that I thought I was going to die. Like the writing, it brought release, it brought peace.

I exercised. Gently at first, more vigorously now. My bereavement counsellor tells me that in shock, we are in fight or flight mode all of the time. Exercise seduces my body into thinking it has fought and afterwards, it can relax. I tried to remember to eat. I tried to remember to drink water. I tried to remember to sleep. Finally I understood what people meant when they talked about the need to look after myself, about self-compassion. I asked myself what I needed and I tried to give it, to myself. In the absence of anyone else (and often there was no-one else), I had to care about number one.

Still, I reached out to people and I learned to ask for help. I had regular bereavement counselling, saw a herbalist, paid for help at at home (luckily, I was able to afford to do it). I said to my friends, 'I can't do this!' Some of them stepped up to support me. Some of them backed away and left me floundering. When I moved house, I told Facebook that I couldn't manage and a whole hoard of people came to help, some of whom I barely knew, some of whom I hadn't seen for years. I will never forget the kindness of the people who came forward. (I am trying to forgive or let go of the people who let me down. Not everyone is able to be close to a disaster zone.)

I learned to stop caring about what other people think. I let go of my own idea of how I should be. When I'm on my own death bed is it going to matter than someone I don't even like that much thinks I'm self-absorbed, or that someone I barely know thinks I'm too vociferous in my grief? Does it really matter if my children go to bed an hour later, or watch a bit too much TV, so long as they know that they are loved? Does it really matter if I am ten minutes late and don't send thank you notes? As Dr Seuss says, 'those who matter, don't mind and those who mind, don't matter'. I learned to value myself as my partner valued me. My resources are precious, my energy is precious, my time is precious. I am careful now where I invest it.

And this year, I have invested a lot of it not just in surviving my grief but in supporting other people who are in agony. Every day, for the last year, I have talked to the people on the Widowed and Young Facebook group (and to the writers from Refuge in Grief) and, regardless of the differences in our circumstances, I have felt myself to be at home in those places. There is solace to be found in the communities of the heartbroken. There is no silver lining to the cloud of my grief and yet, I am grateful for the wisdom that comes from experience and for the companionship of the people I have met. I am grateful for the knowledge that I am not alone, that other people have been here too and they have survived. We know what it is to love and we have known great loss. We have stared death in the face and we will make the most of the time we have left. We know how precious life is. We know what love is. We are warriors and we will survive.

A version of this blog also appeared in The Huffington Post 
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/beverley-ward/how-do-you-survive_1_b_15265562.html?1489079553