My husband died in his sleep 6 months ago and the last thing he said to me was, "See you in the morning..." Every memory I have, of 40 years of living and working together, is like an icepick in my heart. Yet I would not give up even one. He was a unique and extraordinary man who seemed equally at home in both sides of his brain. He was an artist, a philosopher and a poet, yet could fix the car, doctor the dog, shore up this old shack in a hundred ways with eqaul skill. He looked life right in the eye, but dealt with it straight from the heart.

Next week I will take his ashes down to our river, now low and slow after a long, hot summer, and scatter them on the bank, so the first big rain of the season can carry them down and eventually out to the sea. Moving through this sometimes seemingly unendurable grief process I am more and more convinced that accepting death, rather than shaking it, should be my goal.

Although it is as self-evident as the earth under my feet, I sense that I am still fighting this acceptance at some deeper level. As a gardener I know full well the place death has in the cycle of life, but it is hard to bring the general down to the particular when it comes to losing someone you love. Maybe mourning is a work in progress that is never finished, the shape and ache of it changing over time.

Nancy