Five things that will never be the same without Sylvia Hermann
5x5 This Sunday, October 16, would have been Sylvia Hermann’s 42nd birthday.
It’s no surprise that your life changes when you lose someone — almost overnight—but it is surprising how deep those changes go. One of the greatest challenges for widows is building a daily life without someone whose routine was part of your own. It’s like being a watch that ticks without a tock.
Gradually you build new routines of your own, but those old habits lurk in the corners, always ready to remind you what used to be there. And there are some things that never feel the same. You wonder if they really have a place in the strange new life ahead of you.
This has been the most difficult five to pick of the week so far, because some of them feel trivial and some of them are too personal. I’m glad to say that I have come to terms with some things I would have listed a year ago.
1 Watching TV It was a lucky break that my work gave me free Sky TV for almost 14 years, because we used to love curling up on the sofa with a bottle of wine and getting stuck into the series saved up on our Sky+. Even on holiday we’d download episodes to binge on in our room at night. The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Lost—there was no room for trash in our schedule. I was really sad that Sylvi would never see how Game of Thrones turned out, and it was weeks before I could watch the final episodes of season five. Even now there are some series that I haven’t finished watching: and all of the intrigues and cliffhangers seem pointless without that shared experience.
2 Formula One I’m not sure when I realised that Sylvi and I both liked F1. Maybe it was in Cardiff as housemates with at least two other F1 fans, but it feels like a slow burner that slowly turned into something we both looked forward to. We talked about the drivers and the characters of the pit lane, the politics and technicalities. We made sure we caught both Saturday qualifying and the Sunday race, sometimes to the annoyance of our friends, or travelled home carefully avoiding spoilers to watch the recording. We’d set our alarms for the flyaway races starting early at weekends. It wasn’t easy as the calendar grew from 15 to 20 races a year. As our budgets grew, we started to going to a different race every year, combining F1 with our love of travel.
It seemed important to keep watching when she died, even going to Hungary for the race we were supposed to see together. Even so, it was just unsatisfying to watch alone, and as 2015 wore on I just wasn’t that bothered any more. I’ve seen more live races in 2016 than any previous year, but I’ve missed more entire weekends as well and it hasn’t bothered me at all. Maybe it’s just been a boring season, but without my F1 buddy it just isn’t fun any more.
3 Gaydon and all the other silly jokes My family and most of my friends live in the Midlands, so Sylvi and I have driven a lot of miles on the M40. Somewhere in those years, it became a running joke to see who would spot the sign for Gaydon first and call out “Do you want to go home?”. Because they were gay, you see. And that’s definitely not funny.
I’m going to blame Sylvi for this piece of bad taste, because she had a gift for silly, irreverent, poke-you-in-the-ribs fun. Like coming out of the shower soaking wet and jumping on me when her work schedule pulled her out of bed before me. So now I feel sad every time I drive up the M40, and I’ve had to change the way I have a bloody shower. And there were dozens of other little jokes like this, that I sometimes only remember when there’s an unexpected cue.
4 Friends Friendships are a strange experience when you’ve shared almost all of your them with your partner for the best part of 20 years.
I’d like to be clear almost none of my friends has been weird or off with me since Sylvi died, and that makes me pretty fortunate compared to some stories I’ve heard amongst the widowed community.
All the same, some of the friendships that had come through Sylvi felt strangely unbalanced at first, and I’m sure they felt it as keenly as me. They loved her too and when they see me we’re both reminded that she’s not there with us. When you’re raw and hurting, it’s easy for a widow to forget you’re not the only one who’s lost someone.
And if you’re going to stay friends, you have to find new things to talk about and create a friendship that’s about just you, but it can feel strange to stop talking about the person who brought you together. It’s hard to even explain!
5 Our home I knew within a few months that I couldn’t stay at our home in Peckham. It was too big, too full of memories. I could rattle around in there for years, but it would never be my life, it would always be our life without her.
So I’ve moved down the road and renovated our house so that someone new can make their life and fill it with their own memories. As much as it’s a new place and I’ve got my own routines, there are moments when I expect to find her there.
Peckham itself feels the same on a larger scale. There are places I have no desire to revisit, and some I didn’t enjoy going back to. As for London, a city big enough to avoid following your own footsteps, I’ve discovered it has IEDs of unexpected memories ready to catch you unawares. Maybe I should learn to live with them, or maybe I should start somewhere completely fresh?
