As do my parents and others I have loved. But I know that she is still there, watching with her knowing smile, just as she always did. Now, seven years on, and newly married last year to my heaven-sent wife Sarah, I talk to Joanna less. Was it really her? You do not need to believe in God, as I do, to think that we really can talk to those who have departed this earthly life. I could hear her voice, and she could hear mine. I had no idea it was possible to be so close to another human being.Īfter she died in December 2016, I continued to talk to her every day as if she were still in her favourite chair by the window. We had always spoken to each other every day by phone when we were apart, but now, with Joanna at home, we conversed every day in person. Over the five long years of her illness, we became closer than ever. Three children and much happiness later came the diagnosis that she had incurable cancer. High in the Tuscan hills, a moment of surprise, and we became a couple. Two years after leaving Oxford, a group of us went to Florence one summer. She became less and less interested in giving me good advice, and I noticed some of it was wilfully bad. I was too deeply in love with her housemate, and we would go on long walks together and I’d ask for advice on how to woo her best friend.
A believer in love at first sight, I didn’t fall in love with her that day. Joanna was everything I wasn’t: clever, confident, knowing and beautiful. We met in North Oxford in the summer term of 1974, for the first read-through of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
Because depression and grief are very different, as I realised when I lost my beloved wife of 34 years. Allowing the natural and necessary process of grief to work its way through us doesn’t necessitate making ourselves miserable. We do not need to drench ourselves in misery.
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