Rowan and I were together for 34 years. Those years were the best of my life, and I can’t yet imagine a future without him. Rowan and I were fairly self-sufficient. We spent a lot of time in each other’s company, often on our own. We shared interests and had a similar outlook on life. More than that, we had a compatibility that made it easy for us to encourage and support each other to achieve much more than either of us could alone. Rowan’s temperament was more relaxed than mine, so he smoothed off some of my rough edges, while I provided the drive he sometimes needed to realise his ambitions.
I think that Rowan and I complemented each other in a number of ways. When we worked together, I was ‘big picture’, he was detail. His approach was organic, mine more regimented. Rowan often complained that I was too analytical, that when I asked how he felt, or why, he couldn’t answer. He just ‘was’. But he understood me far better than anyone else I’ve ever known. With Rowan, I felt truly accepted for who I was, hackneyed, I know, but essential to being fully oneself. He encouraged me, delighted in my ‘difference’ from other people. He never wanted me any other way. He may sometimes have been uncomfortable with my behaviour, and would wish that I change it, but never did I feel that there was anything essential to my being that was awry.
I feel like I’ve just been tipped out of a kayak into a maelstrom. My equilibrium has gone, I have broken my rudder, and lost my paddle. I have been thrown up on a new beach downstream, am mending the rudder and making a new paddle, that won’t have the well-worn feel of my old, familiar friend. There is no going back, only forward, into new waters and new adventures. Rowan wanted me to go there, and was fully confident that I could do it. He will always be with me, wherever I go. On a practical level, he asked me to take some of his ashes to the top of a Colorado 14 thousand foot peak (more for me than for him, I am sure). Beyond that symbolic gesture, his outlook on life will forever colour my own; his energy, enthusiasm, endless curiosity, freedom from cynicism, his compassion will influence me for the rest of my life. I am immensely fortunate to have shared so much of it with him.
I wrote this very shortly after Rowan died, tears falling on the keyboard. Just a couple of months later, everything is still raw for me. Rowan was not afraid to show emotion, and at times I was embarrassed by this. I have learned, though, very late in life, that I should not have been. So, hard though I knew it might be, I had to share this with you.
