The Widow's Handbook: winner of the Helen Bailey Award 2022
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Loving more than one person

26/4/2023

2 Comments

 
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​I sometimes feel like I'm living two parallel lives. The one where Tim is still alive. The one where the what ifs weren't ifs. The one where I loved only him. And then there's the one that I am in now, without Tim but with my wonderful wife Dee.

​This new relationship started about three and a half years after Tim died. Last year Dee and I got married, and we are about to buy a house together.
 
I still love Tim. I always will. But I also love Dee. And I don't think that's a problem. The way I look at it, is – I have a cat. Dee arrived with two dogs and a cat. I didn't stop loving my cat because new animals arrived – I simply love them all. I am the youngest of five siblings, but my parents didn't say "we can only love the first child", their love expanded for all of us. In the same way, I can love Tim, but I can also love Dee, and my love for her is no less for that. Love isn't like a piece of pie that is cut up into slices, it's infinite like the universe. 

2 Comments
Karen
15/5/2023 17:54:47

This resonates so much with me! I have 3 dogs and 9 cats and to the people saying “but you can’t love them all!”, I respond that we aren’t born with a certain quantity of love to be spent throughout our lives. Life creates more love all the time as encounters happen. Love is not finite, it is infinite.

On a side note, I just found your website and you saved my day and changed my view of things. For starters, I can finally put a word on my pain: I am a widow. I am a widow!
We weren’t married and we lived together only last summer when he was isolating from his kids because of his chemo and we only had been together for 4 short years but I am his widow. Whatever people say or think, I know I am. Thanks to you, dear Suzanne, I finally give myself permission to see myself as his widow and it helps me somehow, I can feel it does somehow.
Thank you so much, Suzanne!

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Suzanne
15/5/2023 18:29:40

Thank you Karen - your kind words have made my day

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    I was widowed at 50 when Tim, who I expected would be my happy-ever-after following a marriage break-up, died suddenly from heart failure linked to his type 2 diabetes. Though we'd known each other since our early 20s, we'd been married less than ten years. ​

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