Let us lie down together holding hands, looking in to one another’s soul. There is a real beauty there, an understanding in the eyes that has passed between two women like never before. Dared I dream of you? Never would I even know how. But you magically appeared. If I wake up, will you still…
Post Traumatic Stress
Every night I wake up multiple times out of nightmares in which I am frantically running around performing multiple tasks to hold at bay some faceless enemy. I never win or lose, I just battle on and on until I wake up. The nightmares started when Laura was in hospital. I kept thinking that as…
A perfect day
Today I cycled through Central Park, past the confetti of spring flowers, brown twigs and mud, to the place where Laura and I had our last perfect day before she was diagnosed with mucosal melanoma. We lay out all day under the trees on our picnic blanket, reading our books, snuggled in each other’s lap,…
Lessons from Eva Zeisel
My dear friend Eva Zeisel, who died age 105, nearly didn’t make it past her 30s. She was arrested in Russia in 1936 on suspicion of plotting to kill Stalin and thrown into prison for several years (including 1 year in solitary confinement). While Eva’s fellow inmates went mad or committed suicide, she survived by…
Doggie Love
Laura LOVED dogs. She spent the last 4 years of her life photographing them and took up grooming so she could spend extra hours playing with her furry friends. ‘All I had to do was love them. I didn’t have to be special. I didn’t have to have a great resume or anything for them…
The Circle of Love
Does true love attract more love to it like a magnet? It certainly seemed that way for Laura and I. We felt incredibly blessed by the outpouring of love and support on this blog, by the flow of donations to the Go Fund Me page and by the unstinting help and compassion of the friends…
Hug Thief
Since Laura’s death I’ve become the hug thief. I steal hugs from anyone – doormen, kindly shop assistants and small children. I am shame-proof. Gone is the awkwardness born of growing up in a country where Downtown Abbey standoffishness was the norm. So imagine my glee when I read online that a 20 second hug…
Shadows
The Tibetans believe that our karma grants us a certain unalterable life span and when that span is exhausted there are signs forewarning of our impending death. One such sign is ‘shadow images’. I gasped when I read that in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Eighteen months before Laura died, she had started a…
Tree Love
Washington Sq Park – October 2013
Another Poem from the Memorial
When I Am Among The Trees When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily. I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which…
Downton Abbey
Posh tosh, but we loved it! Downton Abbey was one of Laura’s favorite TV shows. It was the first thing we watched together (she introduced me to it a few weeks after we met) and it was the last thing we saw together….
The Bossy Pants Award
Laura and I’s favorite vacation photo is a boring garden snap which prominently features Laura’s finger indicating the direction in which I should have taken the shot. We howled with laughter over this picture. We both thought each other was ‘the bossy one’ in the relationship. It was a source of endless mirth and some…
Seeing the Light
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying gives an extraordinarily vivid description of the dying process (chapter 15), which almost exactly matches the stages Laura went through. Equally interesting is a section called Phowa: The Transference of the Consciousness, which tells how there are 9 routes for a dying person’s consciousness to leave the body. Evidently the…
A poem from the Memorial
Death is Nothing at all Death is nothing at all.I have only slipped away to the next room.I am I and you are you.Whatever we were to each other, That, we still are. Call me by my old familiar name.Speak to me in the easy waywhich you always used.Put no difference into your tone.Wear no forced…
The 49th day
The buddhists say that on the 49th day after a person dies their soul passes on to its next life, or to a higher plane. I dreaded the 49th day after Laura’s death, knowing her spirit (which I have glimpsed as energy in our apartment and felt as ‘arms’ around me or a ‘cheek’ pressed…
Soul Love Forever 