“The Scent of Memory”
26/08/2025.
If you don't understand why someone is grieving
for an extended period,
consider yourself fortunate for not comprehending their pain...
|
LOCKED TOGETHER IN TRUE LOVE
|
|
A Murder in My Life
by Eddie Haworth FRSA
I'm 72¾ years old and still lost, but still happy and STILL STANDING!
They say time is a healer, but healing is not the same as forgetting. It's been 28 years since I found my wife in the arms of another, and seven since the woman I loved was taken in a tragedy so cruel it defies reason, murdered by her own son, once my stepson. Now, in 2025, I find myself mostly mended, but not untouched. Scars don't vanish; they become part of the landscape we learn to walk through.
Tonight, pain, both physical and emotional, has stirred me from sleep. It's 3:30 in the morning, and the silence is thick. With no one to talk to and nothing to distract me but memory, I'm drawn to write. Not to mourn, but to mark the shape of what remains.
Loss, after all, is not the absence of love; it's the echo of it.
Here goes...
Since you left, I've tried, truly tried, to erase you from memory. But the creases on my face refuse to follow suit. I'm still adrift, bobbing about in an ocean of sorrow, even after all these years. Our love, once deep and wild, has long since washed ashore and evaporated into the sands of time.
The scent of you still returns, uninvited, and takes me hostage. It drags my mind back into that black hole I fell into twice, once when you vanished, and again when the final truth arrived.
Since our blissful marriage came to its abrupt end in April 1995, I've wandered past coffee shops, bakeries, street vendors, even freshly cut grass, and each time, I close my eyes and see yours, shining back at me like diamonds through the fog of memory.
Even the foreign food aisles in the supermarket betray me. Their smells and colours conjure your perfect image, us, shopping together in those sooks and delis, laughing along the joyful roads we travelled.
Then come the floodgates: Athens, Istanbul, Dubai, Lapland, and all those European cities where our love grew stronger. We lived on our wits and the sheer thrill of performing slapstick nonsense for strangers who didn't speak our language, but laughed anyway.
I still cook for two. Not your French onion soup, mind you, your one and only culinary masterpiece. Sometimes I cook for ten or more, as if our long-lost friends might suddenly reappear for one of those wild, hedonistic house parties we threw back when we were semi-famous entertainers in Liverpool.
I still clean the house, and I remind myself why it never bothered me that you didn't. You were far too artistic to be concerned with mundane tasks. Maybe it was your Inuit blood; no time for dusting when your ancestors were busy ice-hole fishing and shooting moose. And every time it snows, I'm haunted by a whole other lifetime of frozen memories.
Despite my wandering years in the Far East, India, China, and beyond, it was only recently that I bought a single bed. I still don't sleep well. I still wake at 3 am, hoping to find your warmth beside me. Now I clutch a feather-down pillow and try not to soak its soft, almost feminine filling with tears.
I'm astonished by how vividly you visit me in dreams. I wake with the scent of your ghost still lingering on the pillow. Then I realise it was just another cruel trick of the subconscious. I make coffee for one. I pretend to have friends on Facebook.
There are no words for the other dreams, the ones where I see a kitchen knife lodged in the neck I once caressed in 1989. Or the image of your son, broken and deranged, sitting calmly at the table across from the mother he'd murdered, sipping tea at 3 am just before Christmas Day, 2017.
No words, except this: You will never be forgotten. You are forever loved by those who saw only beauty in everything you did. I hope the child you adored remains oblivious to the horror he inflicted on you, your surviving partner, your family, and me, his one-time stepfather.
Now, you exist only in a photograph taken on our wedding day in Kirkcudbright, and a mural painted on a house wall where an extraordinary woman was stolen from this world by her only son.
I still carry the losses. But I've learned to live alone, and to find joy in helping others, those trapped in poverty, who may never know the luxury of a loving relationship to lose.
It's now 6:15 am. Perhaps I'll sleep for a while. If I'm spared, I may return to my spellchecker and write about my lost, but never forgotten childhood. I still wonder what made that old soldier from the First World War think I wouldn't remember what he did to me when I was six.
So many nightmares to sift through. And time, time is precious, like a wilted flower clutched in trembling hands.
Still, I'm glad to be here, and I know I'll never find what I'm looking for.
BUT I'M STILL STANDING
See my TV Documentary HERE - My amateur photography pages HERE