Life is Complicated.

 Life is complicated. 

It's the 11th July, and it's the anniversary of Kelly, my wife's, death. It's also the day that the protestant population of Northern Ireland, where I live, sets fire to enormous bonfires of stolen pallets, draped with flags and whichever community they're currently demonising. This is to celebrate the occasion, some 300 years ago, when a Dutchman fought the Scots/French King of England in an as-yet-all-of-a-piece Ireland. This battle gives them their culture and identity. 

I can't drive, even at 55, and Kelly is buried in Gulladuff. There are no buses or coaches to Gulladuff. No trains. A taxi would be prohibitively expensive. So Susan drives me. My girlfriend ferrying me to the grave of my wife. Life is complicated and unpredictable, like motorway traffic. Susan hates driving on the motorway. She's not too keen on driving generally, but negotiating four lanes of traffic with no hard shoulder, hemmed in by rotting, rattling trucks and the weaving, speeding, exhaust sniffing mid-sixties boy racers in their twin exhaust Audis, is her least favourite thing to do. But she does it anyway, even though she rarely sleeps the night before and her shoulders are bone stiff after. 

I always buy lilies for the grave. I don't know why. Kelly never expressed any particular fondness for them. But they seem appropriate for the grave. The paleness, the slender beauty. I like the smell. I consider the lily with a quick look at the internet. Interflora is telling it's customers lilies symbolize "rebirth" but I'm not sure I believe in rebirth, however keenly I'd hope for it. 

We see all the usual landmarks: The Bellevue Pub, squatting over a motorway bridge, the Dynamic Weighbridge at Toome, Seamus Heaney Homeplace, the primary school Kelly attended, just a hundred yards from the cemetery she's buried in. Life is complicated. Or it's very simple. 

I stare at the grave. It's beautifully looked after. I feel bad placing my flowers on it, slightly off-set. It's like a well made bed. Hospital corners. I look at her stone and I talk to her. I tell her what's going on. I tell her about all the terrible things happening in the world and that's she better off out of it, even though neither of us believe that. I look at her age on the gravestone, a number so small, so far from my own age. Next year, I'll be twenty years older than she ever got to be, and my eyes fill with tears at the cosmic unfairness of it. She was brilliant and funny and beautiful and so, so smart, and she never got to be 40 years old. Ludicrous. That's "so, so" smart, not "so-so" smart. She would have picked me up on that. I keep talking to her. Nonsense. The stuff I'm doing. The stuff I should be doing. How much I miss her. All the things. 

There are cows in the field next to the graveyard. Big, beige ones. At the start of my, necessarily, one-sided conversation, they are lowing gently, nodding their heads over the gate. But they gradually drift away, consumed by the brilliant trees beyond. Discreet cows. Thank you. 

I say goodbye and head back to the car park where Susan is waiting for me with a smile. We go home and I do some weeding while she mows the front lawn. Life is complicated. But it isn't always.