A mammoth undertaking

I’ve sometimes, indeed often, felt like my life over the past year since Chris died has been like wading through thigh-high treacle – extremely hard work, and achieving seemingly infinitesimal forward momentum. But now, if I feel like that, I can simply look out of my kitchen or bedroom windows and see something tangible that I’ve achieved in that time.

Chris and I had been discussing sorting out the garden terraces for several years, but had never found a practical or affordable solution. We discussed several potential approaches last summer before he died, but nothing seemed entirely satisfactory. And then of course he got so much worse that minor things like garden design became completely irrelevant.

I realised while I was off work on compassionate leave, immediately after he died, that I would need something positive to focus my efforts on and keep me going. In the short term, that need was fulfilled by sorting out Probate and the Estate, but that wasn’t really particularly constructive – it was stuff that had to be done anyway, and just required being organised. I decided to make “sorting out the garden” my priority, and gave myself a deadline of this coming winter to accomplish it. I didn’t want to go through another potentially harsh winter worrying that the garden would slump into my house.

I first made serious enquiries towards getting designs and quotations on 2nd September last year – less than a month after Chris had died, and only days after I’d gone back to work. Then I had to settle on a design, get engineering drawings made, apply for planning permission, get quotes from two builders, select one and wait for them to have a space in their diary to do it. In itself, the process has felt like wading through treacle – it’s taken just over a year from start to finish. But I think I would be being hard on myself if I expected to do it any quicker – I still have limited reserves of energy (and work takes up most of what I’ve got) and planning permission is intrinsically slow and tedious.

So I’m very pleased now to have a concrete (and steel, and wood!) example of what I’ve achieved over the past year. And since some of Christopher’s ashes are firmly embedded in the foundations, it feels like he’s really part of it too.