On a miserable Wednesday morning in May 2021, my friend Robyn and I boarded a flight at London Luton airport bound for Lisbon. Ahead of us were sunbathing by the ocean a few days before spending a weekend in the city. ‘I think I want to have some fun on this trip,’ I said, turning to Robyn in the driver’s seat of our hire car, her chestnut hair whipping in the wind.
‘And by fun, I mean I want to meet someone.’ ‘Oh yeah?’ she replied, her eyebrows raised. ‘Yeah.
Why not?’ I was ready. Seven months earlier, I’d lost my fiancé Ben to cancer and Covid 19. I was 30; he was only 36.
I was still trying to figure out how I was supposed to live without the man with whom I had become inextricably woven over the past six years. But I had wants that needed tending to, corners of my body that needed to come alive again. Widow’s fire — the desire for intimacy and sex following the death of a partner — it turns out is real.
It was one of the many things about loss that I hadn’t anticipated, but then nobody tells you the truth about grief. We’re told it plays out in six definitive stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance and meaning. But as I discovered, there are no rules, no right or wrong way to grieve, and there’s certainly no timeline to it.
Grief can make you feel like you’re descending into madness. It follows you everywhere, like a predator stalking its prey. You can swing from rage, disbelief and feeling overwhelmed.