Storyteller's World

Sometimes I get to take the funeral of an elderly person, married for many many years, whose surviving spouse tells me, In all those years we never spent so much as one night apart.

Can this be true? Not even when babies were born? Even when Tom was born 26 years ago, it was still usual for new mothers to be kept in hospital for a week before being allowed home, and new fathers certainly weren't allowed to stay with them! But perhaps we're talking here about home deliveries (sounds like Domino's Pizzas, no?) where there wasn't any time in hospital at all.

Certainly in our life together there have been lots of nights apart as one or other of us has been away on retreat or at a conference or whatever. Missing your spouse can be a good feeling; it stops you taking each other for granted; makes you realise how selfish you can get if you don't have to consider another person and their needs. I quite look forward to it sometimes.

But now Alison has gone off to Norway for the PME Conference in Bergen. And once again I am amazed that the thing that first tugs at the heart and gives that sharp shock of temporary loss, is going into the bathroom to clean my teeth, and finding her toothbrush missing from the rack beside mine.