My dinner date with the detective

Provence

‘What do you mean?’ I wanted to ask the man who told me last autumn it was time to move on. I hoped he didn’t mean find a new boyfriend. I like him and his wife a lot and it was meant kindly – so I kept quiet as we stood in their kitchen and they gave me instructions for my weekly visits to check the house after they left for winter. But it stung. Jeremy was still with me night and day in everything I did. I tried not to let my face fall a second time when the man told me he was paying someone else to drive his Aston Martin back to England.

I wanted to ask the same question of another man, a widower friend of a friend, who said, in an otherwise ordinary message: ‘This isn’t an offer or a request, but how do you feel about sex?’ I told him he might have well asked me how I felt about polar bears. The following week he sent me a photo of his large pink… farmhouse in Devon. Correspondence has since been occasional – and limited to pleasantries.

After I wrote a piece in March about end- of-life care, an old acquaintance got in touch. He’s younger than me but was widowed a few years ago and wanted to tell me about his wife’s experience of terminal care. She’d been in a hospice for a while and to his eyes, was failing. He’d stayed on until 4 a.m. but the staff assured him that she had days left and urged him to go home for a few hours. She died alone. When he discovered her, he – a retired detective – knew exactly how long she’d been dead.