A CHANGE IN LIFE AND BLOG
When Peter and I started The Third Phase blog in 2014, we’d stopped our jobs and we’d
moved out of the city. We did both with the hope of exploring the new
experiences of semi-retirement and the trials of aging as they came at us.
Then,
in the late fall of 2015, Peter was diagnosed with cancer and we had to drastically
alter everything about our lives, including this blog. As his partner, I wrote about my fears and about the uncertainty
surrounding the treatments and surgery he endured. Peter stopped writing in this blog; instead he turned
to his other blog, The Man Who Learned to Walk Three Times, shifting it from one about mobility issues and the
memoir of the same name published that year to one about cancer treatments and
his own reactions. In the last post he filed in April, 2016, when we’d hoped he
was in remission, he wrote about “his new normal,” of accepting life a day at a
time. Then, in late summer, while worrying over his difficult recovery, we
learned the cancer was back in the form of an inoperable, fast-growing tumour.
Two weeks later he died of a heart attack. And I couldn’t face the blog at all.
It wasn’t that I stopped writing. Peter, my daughter,
writing, gardening and travelling were the joys that kept me grounded. With the
first gone, it was hard to feel anything for the rest of the list for a long
time, except, of course, for my daughter whom I leaned on too much. “Fake it
‘til you make it,” was the wise advice a social worker gave me when I realized
months after Peter’s death that I needed help. And so I carried on: writing,
travelling and gardening. Waiting for the world to make sense again.
I already had a writing project on the go, and like
everything else in life, I just kept at it. It was a project I’d started when
Peter was first diagnosed. Since I couldn’t be out in the garden that November, I
decided to learn about the wartime gardens known as Victory Gardens and design
my own for the following spring. It wasn’t just a project to keep me busy; I felt
like I was doing something positive, something nourishing. After Peter died, I
couldn’t face that garden. But, then, being in it and writing about it, about the cancer,
about grief, about Peter and my love for him became as essential to me as
breathing.
It is being published on September
7th by Dundurn Press, on the third anniversary of Peter’s death. A
coincidence or, as my daughter says, a sign.
And now I’m ready to return to this blog and face reality. My
life has changed forever. I will always feel the loss of Peter. Even now, as I sit in my office at the back of the house that we chose with such care, I can't help thinking he's in his office at the front of the house tapping furiously on his keyboard before I send him my post to read for his opinion.
So the question is: how do I
have a life filled with new adventures, with friends and joy at the beauty of
this miraculous world while continuing to hold Peter in my heart? That’s one of the things I
hope to explore. My life and blog are now Third Phase Solo. I will describe the experiences – the horrible and
the positive - of being a widow – God, how I hate that word - who now faces aging alone. But I’ll continue examining the issues of
aging and perceptions of older women. And, of, course, I'll fake it ‘til I make
it.
