Welcome to the relaunch of bobclaytor.com 

This was my husband’s website. Bob designed it mainly during 2019 when he was planning to use it as a platform to market his artwork. He intended after he retired from teaching design and technology in September 2019 to restart his career as a professional artist. Incredibly sadly, my wonderfully kind, gentle, gifted husband died suddenly at Christmas 2019 having enjoyed just three months of retirement. 

I have adopted the website as the home for my blog, hoping that you will read my ramblings but also particularly that you will take some time to look through Bob’s work. It would be such a pity for all the beautiful pieces that he made, and the thinking that he recorded around them, to be forgotten. 

My posts will be reflections on the books, films and other bits and pieces that I have experienced. It feels particularly appropriate that I should begin with ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ by Joan Didion. 

I first began reading the book in the months following Bob’s death. I didn’t get far. Aspects of Didion’s experience mirrors so closely my own that reading it was unbearable. Returning to it with a little distance was better. It was still not an easy read. I wept. 

Didion’s husband of forty years died suddenly just after Christmas 2003. A longstanding cardiac condition caught up with him. He died while Didion was preparing dinner for them. As with Bob, he knew he had a heart condition. But nothing had alerted the couple to the realisation that his life was nearing its end. His death arrived without warning. 

‘Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.’ That was exactly how it was for us. 

The book charts the first year of Didion’s widowhood. The ‘magical thinking’ refers to the mind’s persistent refusal to accept that the person who died will not be coming back. From the day of John’s death, Didion charts thoughts and feelings that she can only regard as ‘deranged’. She knows the truth of the situation. And yet. She cannot give away his shoes. She cannot escape the conviction that he will need them. She is obsessed with knowing the exact point at which he died, as though somehow the course of events can still be fixed if she can only work out what went wrong. Doctors are hesitant to present her with the need for an autopsy, but Didion is keen. It is not that she doesn’t understand what an autopsy involves. She knows her husband’s body will be cut open, his organs removed. But somehow this will still contribute to the assemblage of knowledge that will enable the problem to be sorted, the catastrophe to be reversed. 

Five years on, I have still not packed away the stained glass project that Bob had started. My mind slips persistently sideways from admitting that he will not ever finish it. 

And the combing back. The relentless, obsessive sifting through the days, the months, the years preceding the death looking for the signs that they both missed. He knew, Didion feels. He knew the end was coming, and she was not focused, was not concerned, was not present enough to recognise it. The last birthday present he gave her – ‘he had twenty-five nights left to live.’ In his last remaining hours ‘he would have been in his office and I would have been in mine. I cannot stop where this leads me. We should have been together.’

There is also necessary avoidance, places she cannot go, thoughts she cannot think, because the path the memories lead down will be unbearable. ‘The way you got sideswiped was by going back. This vortex effect could be controlled only by avoiding any venue I might associate with…John.’

This is to me perhaps the strangest aspect, of Didion’s experience and of my own. Memories, are after all, exactly that, not the experience itself but the traces of the experience left in a human brain. The places we went, the films we saw, the paintings we looked at have always been in the past and irretrievable. There is no going back to a happy time for any of us. But the loss of the person we shared those memories with. The point where they become not our memories, but my memories, where the other person is themselves now no more than a memory. That is unbearable. There are places I will never go again, films I will not watch, music I cannot hear, books I won’t read. Because they take me back to time I spent with Bob, who is gone. There is nothing gentle or comforting about these memories. They are savage. They scream negligence, failure to appreciate, things taken for granted, moments that I allowed to slip idly through my hands and which have gone with Bob to the grave. 

There is no describing this to anyone who has not been there. ‘Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.’  As Didion says, until you have been brought face to face with it, there is no imagining ‘the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.’ I have on occasion attended ‘grief workshops’ that have floated the hypothesis that there are many kinds of grief, and bereavement is just one of multiple kinds of loss that we experience. This is of course true. Relationships end, loved ones become estranged, jobs go down the pan and disappointments accrue with a relentlessness that feeds the weariness of our ageing. It is nonetheless the case that, 

‘Husbands walk out, wives walk out, divorces happen, but these husbands and wives leave behind them webs of intact associations, however acrimonious. Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life… have all vanished.’ I can testify to this. I have had my fair share of losses and unfulfilled dreams but nothing I have ever experienced compares with the bleak place I arrived at in the wake of Bob’s death. It’s been four years. I’m way past wondering when it will get better. 

Which leads us neatly on to ‘the question of self-pity’.

Bob lost decades of life that he expected. He lost his retirement. He lost the opportunity to spend time finally doing the one thing that he had loved all his life. He didn’t see any of his children graduate university, let alone marry or have children of their own. And yet. The person who lost all those things ceased to exist at the moment of their loss. There is no Bob to regret any of this. That is the point. Where there was someone there is now no one. So who is to be pitied? No one. 

‘People in grief think a good deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as dwelling on it…We remind ourselves repeatedly that our own loss is nothing compared to the loss experienced (or, even worse thought, not experienced) by he or she who died… Self-pity remains the most common and the most universally reviled or our character defects.’

As DH Lawrence put it, pithily, ‘I never saw a wild thing/ sorry for itself.’

And Didion’s rejoinder, ‘But consider those dolphins who refuse to eat after the death of a mate.’

All this I share with Didion. All this is my story as much as hers. 

And then the divergence. Which is again about self-pity.

I have a compulsion to pick at the differences.

Didion’s bereavement coincided with her daughter Quintana’s admission to hospital with pneumonia which developed into sepsis. When John died their daughter was unconscious. It was three weeks before she was well enough to be told her father had died. The funeral was delayed until she was well enough to attend. Once she had recovered sufficiently, Quintana and her husband flew to California to recuperate fully. On landing she suffered a brain bleed and was again admitted to hospital, her life in the balance. So the story of Didion’s first year of bereavement is also the story of her daughter’s battle for life. She survived long enough for Didion to complete the book but died in August 2005. It is unthinkable. It took Didion to a place I don’t even want to begin to contemplate. 

So I have much to be grateful for. (They are marvellous people, those three thriving chips off the old block.) But again, I am not the same kind of person that Didion was. Perhaps that is actually all that matters? At the end of her memoir, Didion notes the passing of the first full year and makes ‘a pledge that I would not lead the rest of my life as a special case, a guest, someone who could not function on her own.’ She writes this in the context of her decision to host dinner for guests on Christmas Eve, as she and John had done on that last Christmas Eve they spent together. Likewise, I set out on my own first and second year with a dogged determination to live. But I have never been someone who hosted friends for dinner on Christmas Eve, or much on any other day of the year. Bob and I were a couple-y couple. It didn’t feel like a matter of setting out to continue to be the person I had always been, albeit on my own. It seemed for a time a matter of attempting to make myself over as a completely new kind of person, a more sociable person, for fear of being on my own. 

I’ve given it my shot. And I have concluded that I was always meant to be either with Bob, or alone. This is a simple statement of fact. I have accommodated myself to solitude. I would still turn back the clock in a heartbeat.

So – to the memory of my dearly-missed husband. For Bob, until we meet again.