The strange nature of time

MARIE: I suspect I’ve been getting a lesson in relativity or some such deep subject this weekend. It could be the heat, but I think something has happened to expand time itself.

Jon is now in England where he is attending a conference. This happens to be in the city where his grandchildren live and near other family and friends, so he decided to go over there early and also stay on a few days after the conference. This should be enjoyable, and is also useful because he now needs time to acclimatize even after such a short journey. We always used to take trips like this on our own before Jon got ill, and it is rather marvelous that, after a period of relying on me rather a lot, he now feels up to doing it on his own again.

To be honest, I have been kind of looking forward to having the place to myself for a bit – you know, the easy life where a vegetarian dinner doesn’t cause a riot, there are no car shows on TV and the toilet seat is always down. The usual pattern was always to enjoy this greatly for several days and then to start feeling a little bit lonely a day or two before the joyous return. But this time, just 48 hours into Jon’s absence, I feel time dragging. The house is clean from top to bottom, the laundry basket is empty and the fridge is full, I’ve picked a year’s supply of black currants in the garden, read a self-help book about a family with cancer and am now well into a fact-based novel about Alzheimer’s (such fun topics both), so it’s not as if I’ve been bored with nothing to do.

But it seems Parkinson’s disease has permanently changed the pace and focus of life more than I had realized, a change so gradual and incremental that it has been invisible from day to day and only becomes obvious now when Jon has removed PD from my life for a week. We have made a conscious (but not altogether painless) decision to focus on the here and the now. It is a “smaller” life than we would have had without PD – smaller circles and smaller ambitions, but a better life together, with time and energy to enjoy each other every day. Not madly chasing deadlines and promotions at work, not exhausted at the end of a busy week with too many appointments, not short-tempered with stress at all the chores still remaining to be done.

This is a good and right choice for us. But it means that when I now suddenly find myself on my own, all the time that we have made specifically for each other hangs a bit heavy on me. I don’t wake Jon up with a handful of pills and climb into bed for a cuddle (we sleep separately because of his REM sleep disorder). We don’t have breakfast together to the dulcet tones of the BBC news and the London congestion report. I don’t help Jon dry off after his shower and make fun of his choice of T-shirt. We don’t go for a walk in the woods and enjoy the view from one of our favourite benches. I don’t cook him dinner or listen to the radio with him, he doesn’t point me in the way of an interesting article and I don’t make him come and look at my nuts in the garden.

I had got it into my head that, as a general rule, Jon is missor and I am the missee, but I now see that this is quite wrong. At least tomorrow is Monday and I can take the opportunity to get more work done this week than I would normally get through in a month.