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| 10 September 2026 |
Because I was married to my Rosemary for 52 years, I miss an
intimacy that I can never possess again. From making a bed, that we would then sleep, I have perceived many more. A few days ago I wrote a blog that involved a famous
(and controversial) painting by Alex Colville called The Refrigerator. We often
walked around with nothing on.
There was
an intimacy that we shared for many years that many would say was unhealthy
(unclean?). We liked to take tub baths together. We would be in opposite sides
and our toes would happily do stuff.
But
intimacy does not have to be only sexual. When we talked she often finished the
sentences I began. I now miss being able to talk to a woman (not any of my male
friends) about stuff like what me might need to buy at the supermarket or what
we might want to cook for our evening meal. I miss walking around the block
holding hands. I miss going to buy shoes with her. She often bought the shoes I
liked. To this day those shoes are in my bedroom closet. The Swedes will have
to come when I am dead to take them away. Something of Rosemary is in those
shoes.
For 25
years we had breakfast in bed (with our
cats). Breakfast came with the Vancouver Sun and the NYTimes. We would talk
of our plans for the day.
Now I feel
like a boat that is rudderless. Luckily, my female cat Niña, demands her daily
routine of being fed, let out on the deck, and especially hearing the noise of my
filling her two water dishes (one in the kitchen that other in the bathroom next
to my room). As soon as it is 8pm, she stares at me. I open Rosemary’s armoire
(she knows of the noise it makes) and I pull out and place in my hand some of her
treats. After that she expects me to take a bath and get into bed to read. She immediately
gets on top of me.
Often I can
hear when I make the bed in the morning, “Alex, make the bed neat for the cats,”
or “Alex the kitty litter has to be changed.”
While all
this is happening, I keep looking at Rosemary’s framed portrait (the one here)
and that Bougainvillea glabra that
grows on a table by her armoire. Today it had some flowers and I knew I had to
write about her favourite house plant (in Mexico City it grew in our little
garden as it was warm enough).
That she
planted it in the pot it is in, gives me that feeling of knowing that something
of Rosemary is in that plant.
But the one
special intimacy that I share with Niña is that when both Rosemary and Niño
were alive (my male cat Niño died on May 12), she was her cat while Niño was
mine. To stroke Niña, knowing that at one time that was Rosemary’s pleasure, is
exquisitely melancholic. I talk to Niña and call her Niña muchi (a sort of Mexican endearment word). I say, “Do you remember Rosemary?” Or, I might
say, “¿Te acuerdas de Mamuchi?
But the
most tragic intimacy we share is that when Rosemary was dead on our bed on 9
December 2020 we (two daughters and two granddaughters and I ) were waiting
downstairs in the living room for the funeral people to come and take Rosemary
away. As I was thinking about it all, I knew that because I was and am a
photographer, I had to do something. I had to take a photograph. I went upstairs,
and there, was my Rosemary, dead with Niña sleeping on her chest. I took the
photograph and it is permanently imbedded in my memory. I will never show it to
anybody.
It is much
too intimate.
