A second act in later life: a garden that asks nothing back, and a choir that gave the silence somewhere to go.
People assume that the interesting part of a life is over by a certain age. I am here to tell you they are wrong.
After Tom, my daughter Anne dragged me to a choir, against considerable resistance on my part. I had not sung in public since school and I did not intend to start. But I went, to stop her nagging, and I stayed for four years and counting, which tells you something about how wrong I was. There is a thing that happens when a room full of people sing together, when the parts come in one after another and lock into place. For the length of that, the grief has somewhere to go. It goes up into the roof with everyone else's. I cannot explain it better than that, but I have come to depend on it.
And I took up my garden properly, which I had never had the time for. A garden is good company for someone on their own. It asks for your attention but it does not need to be entertained. It rewards patience and forgives almost everything except neglect, which is a fair bargain. I grow more than I can eat and I give the rest away, and there is a particular pleasure in handing a neighbour a bag of beans you grew from a seed the size of a full stop.
I have made new friends in my seventies, which the young do not believe is possible. The women in the choir, the man two doors down who knows about roses, the girl at the garden centre who calls me by my first name. A life can keep adding people right up until the end, if you let it. The trick, I have found, is to keep saying yes to things slightly after the point where saying no would be easier. That is most of it. Keep saying yes a little longer than is comfortable.