I would liken it to that feeling of being transported somewhere.” She was owning her desires in a way she had never experienced before. I found I could be quite noisy and I’d never been noisy before. Masturbation soon began bookmarking Pauline’s days, morning and night a welcome respite that briefly lassoed her out of her grief. “Some of them seemed quite shocked when I said I wanted to buy a vibrator,” Pauline smiles as she talks. One friend recommended she take up gardening more frequently, wholly unaware that what Pauline was most in need of wasn’t a pair of secateurs. And yet when he died: “I couldn’t say, ‘Oh God, I wish I was in bed with him, entwined together, with his arms around me, kissing, and doing the things we used to do.’” “We enjoyed an active and happy sex life throughout our marriage, which was only cut short in the weeks prior to his decline,” she recalls. But the physicality they shared was undeniably another – and not something she felt encouraged to share. A dog-eared Sunday supplement left out for her on the kitchen table was one. When Peter, her husband of 31 years, died of leiomyosarcoma – a rare type of soft tissue sarcoma – after a short illness in 2021, Pauline was left grieving for many intimate things. And if Pauline is feeling this way, then perhaps others are, too. The feeling of him, and his solid body, was what I craved.” We’re meeting again, in a noisy coffee shop, because Pauline feels like her sexuality, in her early 70s, is being silenced in ways she’s unhappy with. “But I soon realised nobody recognised that what I was missing was the physicality of Peter as well as the psychic and emotional sharing that we had. “In the first few weeks, people recognised that I was bereaved, they came at me with all sorts of platitudes,” Pauline tells me, months after our first meeting, over the clatter and din in a central London café. The electrical wires were humming again, but she was increasingly feeling as if she had been put on mute by everyone around her. More often than not, people didn’t get it: “They don’t imagine that you’ve had a sex life.” But why, she asked? And what did that signify for others her age? A few days later, she sent me a Spotify link to an early 90s Bruce Springsteen song – Human Touch – describing how his melodious yearnings for “somethin’ to hold on to” summed up her recent frustrations as a more mature widow, a year after her husband’s death. Younger people like me “got it more”, she told me, referring to her thirst for physical intimacy as a newly widowed 72-year-old. Pauline sat inconspicuously at the back of the darkened room and, when the Q&A was over, she quietly introduced herself, quickly drawing attention to the section she’d most connected with, the chapters where I explored self-pleasure and sex in the early months of my grief. P auline and I first met at a book event last year a small gathering in a London arts club that marked the paperback release of the memoir I’d written, chronicling my young widowhood in my 30s.
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