One of the many letters I received when Fiona died contained an entirely unintentional contradiction. In the body of the text, the writer said that ‘people say time is a healer, but that is not true’. Later on, however, she signed off with the words: ‘Time is a great healer’.

It may simply have been momentary confusion – or it may reflect the profound contradictions that drive the weather patterns in the land of grief.

Wiser heads warned me that the second year of bereavement may well be harder than the first – and so far they have been right.

The landscape of that first year is, of course, littered with milestones.  Those first 365 days may have millstones erected over everything from final diagnosis to birthdays, Christmas and wedding anniversary. I have passed by them all. 

Like any milestone – you can see them as you approach up the road and brace yourself for them.

The road ahead

In the second year, though – those milestones are smaller. They lurk, rather than loom, now.

Looking out along the road of a freshly hatched New Year, the landscape is featureless with no obvious monuments to break up the view. Across it stretches a road just wide enough for one, and I have hefted my pack to walk along it.

When I get up close, I shall surely see the milestones, and stop to reflect beside them – but they no longer define the road. On some days, I have a feeling that I shall wish they did. Distances look bigger when there is nothing to break up the miles.

“A landscape without landmarks is not a landscape without beauty”

One of the last big trips that Fiona and I made together was to the Middle East. 

For two days, we stayed in a beautiful resort accommodated in an old fort in the desert. Descriptions of the desert as featureless, though, do not do it justice. 

The absence of landmarks simply means that you appreciate the undulating dunes and the spectacular sunsets all the more.

A landscape without landmarks is not a landscape without beauty.

I am counting on it…