As a widow, I know the strangeness of grief and that ghosts come in many forms | Kat Lister

My husband died three years ago, but a credit card can conjure memories of him, blurring the line between ‘now’ and ‘then’

Grief totems aren’t always easy to rationalise. Once a loved one has departed, their footprints can be found everywhere and they often linger in the most unexpected places. A toothbrush casually discarded by the sink. An airline boarding pass shoved into a tatty paperback novel. A few months after my husband died in 2018, I found his credit card during a routine search for my trainers, and with a reverence one might pay a precious artefact, I stroked my fingers over the braille of his name before placing it back inside his wallet.

“I’ve got ghosts on my phone,” the Bafta-winning writer, director and actor Mark Gatiss mused in an interview with the Radio Times. “I know this isn’t unique to me but I’ve lost my mum, my sister, my brother-in-law and now my dad, and there is something very odd about being orphaned, even at 54.”

Kat Lister is author of The Elements: A Widowhood

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/30Si2he