A few weeks ago I met a woman who had become a doctor and then, after some 15 years, a nun. While in holy orders she met a monk and they fell in love. There was nothing for it but to leave the convent. So, after several years of waiting and thinking she left and they married. Out of the cloister he became, perhaps inevitably, a priest and she took up the full time position of priest's wife.
They grew old together. Eventually it was time for him to retire from parish life and they planned a new life in a pretty, old city. Shortly before they were about to move he died unexpectedly. There was nothing for it but to move there on her own. Suddenly it was hard to go to church, to see someone who was not her husband take the service. Each time it was a disappointment, never quite the way she remembered it, the way it had been when her husband took the service. So she changed denominations and became a Quaker, finding in it something of the convent, quiet, reflective and surrounded by other people. No priests to remind her of her husband. This was when I met her.
Epilogue:
Three days later I was up late one night finishing a piece of writing. It was in the middle of a Mozart season on a popular national radio station and members of the public were phoning in to request pieces and dedicate them to loved ones.
I was busy writing; barely listening at all.
Then, pausing for a break, my ears slowly reconnected with the sound and I heard a piece being requested. The presenter gave the woman's name, the same name I had been introduced to three days earlier, and her city. She was dedicating the piece to her husband's memory.
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