The Cows
She looked for the umpteenth time at the cows and wondered what to do with them. Party cow, Nurse cow, Meditating cow, Shopping cow, Clown cow and countless other collectible cows, collected over many years by her late lover. She'd loved them.
Late was a funny way to describe a dead person she thought, not for the first time. It had been almost a decade and the grief wasn't the burning scar that it had been for the first years. Instead, it had settled, like a new layer of invisibility, only truly seen by herself. Others could see it of course, especially if they too had nursed a loved one through the most appalling of endings but she was glad to be able to move through life without the burning any more and she knew others were glad too.
The burning grief of the recently widowed can be a lot to handle and so she found herself feeling gratitude for the timing of her late lover's death. It had been before the world was thrown into the chaos of covid and so there had been bandwidth for people to grieve in a normal, collective way. Funerals had been big affairs back then, not the selected handful allowed to gather whist everyone else watch on zoom.
She couldn't imagine what it must have been like for people facing cancer in those times. She herself had been able to go back and forth, in and out of the hospital, settling in at the chemo suite for the three day treatments that ultimately didn't stop her wife from dying but perhaps had given her some time.
Time. The ultimate moments of time. She found herself often looking back over time and wondered if this sometimes prevented her from moving forward and yet, if you didn't know where you'd been, how could you know where you were going?
She sighed. She sighed a lot these days she'd come to realise. it seemed the only response to so much of what had happened in the years since the world had been locked down and then reopened in what often felt like an entirely different form.
She looked again at the cows. 8 of them sitting on a bench, waiting to be moved as part of the great loft emptying. It had taken years to let go of the things her lover had loved so much. The usual things like clothes and bags and shoes had been hard enough but readily accepted by charity shops and occasional sales on eBay.
Not so straightforward were the collections. She'd been a great one for collecting. She'd always put it down to her traveller roots and had proudly picked up treasures from around the world on the holidays that had made working so hard worthwhile. She'd apparently had teapots in the 1980s but the woman hadn't seen those.
For 20 years they had done life together and now, as she looked at the cows and thought of all the ones down stairs, in the kitchen and even in boxes in the loft, she felt she really had to make some decisions. Getting rid of them didn't feel right. Having them all over the house felt too scattered. A bit like the people of her life who over the years of the pandemic had become scattered, separated, and some even became late.
She had the sense that she'd like to gather people together again. Bring the herd back together. A metaphorical call to remember ourselves. It was the only way to go forward she thought. You have to put the past behind and look to the future whilst staying precisely in the present. It was a big ask and she wondered, as she had very many times, what her late wife would have made of the new world order.
Looking at her life now, living happily as she did with another love, she was amazed at the human capacity to adapt and grow and keep loving, even when in agony and fear and grief. It was amazing really.
Her room was a mess and the loft had been tipped everywhere but she could feel an emerging sense of order. She'd thrown out endless cards, letters, even photos. Old art projects were gone, an abandoned dolls house was given to a neighbours child. All of it could be moved on. Except the cows. the endless cows, collected, gifted, displayed, boxed up and now, ready to roam again.
She was going to get them all out, clean them up and put them together on a shelf, waiting for the right day to return them to full display. Clearing up a life after death seemed an endless process of rediscovery and though she wasn't quite sure if her friends would be able to ever gather again in the same way as they used to, she was satisfied that at least an intention could be put out into the cosmos using the cows as proxys for people.
She smiled to herself. Her wife had always said she was a swami nutter. She was ok with that.