Maureen’s story can be read as a ‘life lesson,’ wise and gentle advice for us all.
METAMORPHOSIS
MAUREEN MARTUS
Grieving is an exhausting business. It saps the body and the spirit.It was six months after Rob’s death before Joan could summon up the energy to
clear out the last of his things.
Clothes, still smelling very faintly of him, his beloved fishing gear and his disreputable
gardening hat were all packed into boxes, ready to go.
She had cried a little, but not as much as she had expected. She had so many
special memories of her beloved Rob. He was her childhood sweetheart and they
had been all in all to each other for over sixty years.
Joan sat down on the side of the bed where he had lain for those last harrowing
months, ravaged by pain until he was just a pale shadow of himself. She opened the
drawer of the bedside table and found his pillbox. She had a vivid memory of how
they had marvelled together at the cleverness and simplicity of the idea of the plastic
box with a compartment for each day of the week. That box had become the
framework of his life, controlling the multi-coloured pills, daily, weekly, night and day
in the early days of his illness when he could still swallow pills.
As she ran her finger over the raised letters – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday… it
suddenly struck her that she had no idea what day it was. She had withdrawn into the
safe cocoon of her home and her memories, relying on kind friends and neighbours
to do her basic shopping and ignoring the looks of concern on their faces and
resisting all their gentle attempts to draw her back into the big, wide world.
She got up and looked at herself in the mirror – really looked for the first time in many
months. How shabby and faded she looked. Her body and her hair were shapeless
and her face was pale and drab. She was shocked. Rob had always been so proud
of her looks. He had called her ‘my bonnie lass’ right up to the end. How sad he
would have been to see her like this,
She straightened her shoulders and held her head up high and could see an instant
change in the image in the mirror. She had a shower and put on a crisp navy dress
and bit by bit the old Joan started to emerge. Before she lost her new-found energy,
she made an appointment for a real hairdo and accepted her neighbour Helen’s
invitation to attend a U3A meeting. She expected it to be boring, but it would be a first
tentative excursion outside of her safe shell.
The speaker turned out to an articulate and entertaining man, talking about the music
of Cole Porter. She was surprised to find herself laughing and even humming along
with the familiar old tunes she and Rob and sung and danced to over the years.
She joined the U3A that very day and quickly filled the empty spaces of her life. She
became so busy, in fact, that the little pages of her new pocket diary were too small
to hold it all. She went out and bought a big monthly planner, so that she could see it
all at a glance. As she was filling it in – Mondays for walks in Johannesburg,
Tuesdays for creative writing with Zara, Wednesdays for evolutionary theory – she
suddenly remembered Rob’s pillbox and realised that U3A had become the healing
pillbox of her own days.
She went and stood before the mirror again. She saw a trim, smartly-dressed old
lady with her history etched in the wrinkles of her face and the zest for life rekindled
in her eyes.
Joan threw back her head and laughed out loud.
Maureen Martus © 2006
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