It’s worse than being dead. Were she dead, I could at least mourn. I am back to a terribly empty house. The wind rackets outside against a vacuum of dust and lack of air. I am bereft.

She is in a care home, a very good care home at a price I can cope with, but at a 45 minute drive away. She is no longer cared for by me, she is no longer at my side. I have left her in the care of others. She has crossed the Styx and is there, in the mist, on the other side and can’t even wave. Knows not how to wave. Leaves me without even a backward glance.

I drove her there today and drove home, the most difficult hours of my life. Of course, as everyone argues and as I realise, it is the right thing to do. The place is called O Lecer. You can find it here. It is on the far side of Vigo, a drive away round the orbital or through the centre of the city, a drive I hate. They had place for her as she had been on the waiting list for a good while. We visited often before deciding. Or not deciding. I no longer decide. My will is no longer my own. It has been taken out of my hands. I am like a puppet dangling from strings jerked up and down by others high above, invisible, by some malignant angel who looks down and laughs.

So now I am alone and for the first time in 45 years I look to where her head should be on the pillow and it is empty. Her place on the sofa is empty and her chair at the table is empty. She no long walks by my side. Her hand is no longer in mine, Better to have died than be this zombie stalking the earth through a mist of incomprehension.

And the sun shines and the shopping has to be done and the bed has to be made and I have to eat. Life, as they keep telling me, goes on. But is it necessarily so? Ask Camus!

The astonishing thing is how much space she took up when she was alive. How crowded the house was which is now gapes with emptiness, an emptiness which stalks me and mingles with the very air I breathe. Yet, strangely, instead of expanding to fill it, I seem to have shrunk to allow extra space for her absence to fill. It yawns in the sunlight that dapples the morning and in the autumn shadows that fall early now and worst of all hovers over the bed as I try to sleep.

The other astonishing thing is my own misery which seems to have retired back into my soul, my anima, my will to move, I have become strangely numb and have become, like her, a sort of zombie myself that stalks the world beyond his time.

Nietzsche tells us that the greatest weight is the eternal recurrence which rather than make us grind our teeth, should grasp with joy. Well, the greatest weight for me is guilt and I would look with horror on its return and would not wish it on my greatest foe. I have not Nietzsche’s strength which sent him mad. I would rather wish for the end of all possibility of recurrence, of the end of all possibility of possibility.

Forty-five minutes is a long while and I cannot fathom it, am lost at the end of its tether, in a world quite at odds with the world of her presence, of her love, and I cannot fathom it. The air I breather is different now and I stutter at the trial of it and I cannot fathom it. The cruelty of forty-five minutes is the cruelty of a satanic fall from grace and I cannot fathom it. Here are the final lines from Blackbird my Blackbird which seem apposite:

Can you imagine that?
Can you imagine words that cannot be exorcised?
Can you imagine after that, alive?
Can you imagine moving still
towards the copper shadows wrought by another sun
under the hill towards beyond?

I ask you gentle reader, gentle spirit, gentle friend,
with what words can such days as these be climbed?