It will be five months since Linda passed this week. Five months. It still seems like yesterday! It was around this time four years ago that she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer and this time last year that the last of her tablet therapy failed and she was put onto intravenous chemotherapy. The last roll of the dice in effect.
I said when the storm broke in July 2022 that our lives were in a state of suspended animation, but I was wrong. The last six months of Linda’s life were a trial but the three years before that had been a kaleidoscope of riches, love and laughter brought to the fore and the hassles and hardships of life were put on the backburner. Always of course with the spectre of her illness and the knowledge that her life would be curtailed hanging over us. But in some ways, they were the best years of our relationship. I was with her 95 percent of the time. And I guess that makes her loss sharper now.
She slips away now, into the recesses of my memory where she resides always.
I think that the description of my life being in a state of suspended animation is more apt for my current situation. I feel a bit like Tom Hanks at the end of Castaway. My life is ahead of me but I am stopped at a crossroad, unsure of which way to go. The answer will come but I just have to endure.
The Tour de France started on Saturday and of course my Facebook page keeps reminding me of the trip Linda and I took to the start and finish of the 2019 edition. The photo on today’s post is of Linda and I at the Trocadero after Caleb Ewan of Australia had won the last stage on the Champs Elysees. For those with a bent for history, Adolf Hitler was photographed from the same spot in 1940!
I’m sure Linda had heard of bike racing when I met her, but she certainly got an intense lesson in the art of it after that. I remember the first Tour de France we watched together, on a mattress set up in her lounge room at her old place in Queanbeyan so we could watch the race into the early hours. She became somewhat interested over the years although the intensity of that interest ebbed and flowed over the years. Her favourite rider was the great Belgian, Wout Van Aert.
Over the years she saw a couple of Austral Wheelrace finals, a classic World Championship points race, watched numerous European stage races, usually flitting in and out of consciousness as I watched on television in our bedroom and of course saw the Tour de France peloton charge through Brussels and stood at the Arc de Triomph as they finished their lap of France in 2019.
Not long before she died, I heard her give lecture to an ignorant friend of hers on the strategies and tactics of professional bike racing as if she was a veteran team manager. My effort to instruct her on the greatest of sports had not been in vain!
I am going okay. Happy yet still a little sad. Moving ahead without knowing exactly where I am going. Not living in despair, just feeling a little lost occasionally. But we keep moving. Keep living. And that is good enough!
Until next time.
Strange Notations From a Laborious Life 