A journey through the life and grief of a bereaved husband.
Prologue: Lady Chatterly of Buckland and surrounding areas.
So what is one to do with life when half your soul is ripped asunder? When every fibre of your being has your partner intertwined throughout. After 13 years of being hopelessly in love, the loss is incomprehensible. There was never any scenario we ever contemplated where one of us might have 40 odd years without the other. My Lady, formerly Lady Chatterley of Buckland and surrounding areas, was a unique individual. My dear reader, if you had ever met My Lady, you would have thought so too, for she left a lasting impression on every individual that ever met her.
The Meeting of Soulmates.
My Lady and I had both had a tough life in recent times when we met. We had both reached a point where a relationship was not the most important thing in life. Family… Friends… Self… To be content with what you have and see the beauty in it. Or try to at least. As quite a gregarious individual at the time, and having recently come out of a toxic 7 year marriage with my ex, I was keen to make new and different friends. To learn new things, philosophies, beliefs. I was more open then than before or since. So, browsing local people one evening on MySpace when it was still a social blogging site, I came across Lady Chatterley. Her blogs fascinated me. Reading excerpts from her internal dialogue on life the Universe and Everything was so stimulating. Such an insightful lady. I simply said hello and left it there. To my surprise Lady Chatterley replied in short shrift and we continued the 42 debate long into the night regularly on MSN Messenger. I had been having a rough time dealing with my ex’s trouble making and Lady Chatterley would spend hours just letting me rant a lot of the time. She showed so much empathy and understanding to stranger, I couldn’t help but be drawn to her. This was not something I was accustomed to in the toxic, drug crazed circles I had previously frequented. I am not proud of my history it that regard, however I vanquished those demons just before meeting My Lady and have been clean ever since. My relationship with my ex had been toxic for years. In fact it was built on shaky ground to start with. When we argued, she would get so angry and unreasonable I could not help but do the same. I have always prided myself to some extent for generally being a decent chap, not prone to giving abuse or vindictiveness. Over the years with her, that changed. So you can imagine, I had quite a bit of baggage when My Lady and I met. My Lady was so much the opposite of my ex. She also understood the toxicity totally. Kind, respectful, understanding and would never even conceive of being unfaithful. To the end…
I had three children of my own and My Lady had a Daughter and a Son. We were so in love all we wanted was for all of us to become one big happy family and indeed that’s how it started. It wasn’t long however before my ex started to cause issues. For some reason, she couldn’t handle my finding love (never mind true love) despite her ending the relationship. The age old thing of ‘I don’t want you but I don’t want anyone else to have you either.’ It tells you a lot that after 11 years together and 7 years married, Within a week or so, my mood lifted and I was genuinely happy to be free again. I was still weak and to some extent, pathetic. My brain addled by drugs and seizures. A broken man. One thing I was never any good at was being the Alpha male. It’s all very well being aggressive in the face of aggression but this required something more refined to understate it.
My Lady had no idea back then if she was going to have to look after a physical, mental and neurological wreck. By the time I left my ex, I had depression, Epilepsy, trust issues, a wedge fracture of my T12 vertebrae gained having a Grand Mal seizure in a car and just kicked a drug habit. Doing well! I hid none of this from My Lady of course but she wanted me anyway, warts and all. Beautiful soul that she is.
Eventually, we up sticks and moved to Roundabout City. Aside from the relentless crap, we were both sick of feeling like we couldn’t go anywhere without seeing someone we knew. Too much negative history for both of us.
Over the intervening years, we settled and made a new life for ourselves. My back healed for the most part and I was able to return to work after 6 years. My Lady ran her esoteric business at the same time. Our ten year plan was on target. After a couple of years we moved to the other side of town. My Lady started teacher training and just ran with it. I always told her how proud I was of her. So proud… In just six years, she won the local secondary teacher of the year award run by the local paper… So proud…
Thanks to My Lady’s best friends husband, I got a job at a local tech distributor. Rich peoples toys in short. I got to see so much amazing tech there. Fun. Things were going well. The ten year plan was still on target.
Precious went to University and smashed it out of the park… Of course she did. She is her mothers daughter in so many ways. My Princeling has finished school. One of the poor kids that have been messed around so much this year because of Covid.
My Lady got sick at the end of January 2020 and ended up in hospital with chest infection. No need to share the details here, but after two weeks in ICU, she passed away suddenly and unexpectedly in the middle of the night when she was supposed to be getting better. We were told she was getting better and we may even be able to talk to her in a few days.
So that’s why I’m here blogging about stuff that is so personal, I would imagine some people will cringe, some will cry and some will simply not get it. Who knows. This is for me. If it helps anyone, fantastic.
I discovered when reading my early blogs, that my writing voice has 90% been stolen from My Lady. Some things are deliberate, some I wasn’t aware of. Now when I read them back it’s like My Lady reading out loud… It makes me smile. The blogs are my journey through my life and grief. A stream of consciousness and pretty random at times.
Link to my blog below.
https://lordcrookedhorn.com/author/dukemoriarty/
Amphion.
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The Life and Times of Lord Crookedhorn. 