Eleven years ago, we moved into the house next to our new neighbors who were then both 79.
Only separated by a narrow alleyway between our two terraced houses, which were built during the first few years of 1900s, my husband and I knew we quickly needed to extend friendship to make our future relationship in such close quarters a positive one.
We brought our 1-year-old son around to their house with cookies and always took time to chat when passing outside. She was an English teacher in her working years and couldn’t wait to tell me about the newest novel she was reading at the time. He used to be a swimmer, as I am, and we would often have conversations about strokes nearly every time we saw each other.
They quickly became friends, and we were grateful to have neighbors we liked and trusted.
Our cats became their cats
Along with our growing family, we had two cats, Bonnie and Will, who we both loved and at times were equally frustrated with, as they refused to use the litter tray as we had trained them. We effectively turned them into outside cats, who only came in at night to sleep. In the day, they roamed in the trees behind our house.
Our neighbors, avid cat lovers, said the only reason they no longer had a cat was that they didn’t want the cat to outlive them. They started welcoming our little felines into their house throughout the day, feeding them chicken scraps and salmon. Needless to say, Bonnie and Will preferred the treatment and quickly made their home next door.
We didn’t mind, as they didn’t have children or extended family, and the cats provided them a bit of company. We got a dog instead.
They saw our kids as their grandkids
As we welcomed two more children into our family, they started to think of us as the children and grandchildren they never had, a beautiful gift, they always said.
My husband’s grandparents are no longer alive, and I only have one grandmother left, but she lives an ocean away. Our relationship with our neighbors was a taste of what it would have been like to still have our grandparents in the world.
They showered all of us with presents at Christmas and birthdays, making sure we had chocolate on Easter and Valentine’s Day.
As my boys grew, they asked to go next door to watch cartoons while I finished work, sneaking candy from her overflowing jar of sweet surprises just for them.
At Christmas, he requested we come in for red wine and mince pieces, a British tradition. On Halloween, they shooed all the other trick-or-treaters away, but phoned me to ask if the boys could ring their doorbell for full-sized bags of chewy candy.
We were able to show them love in return by buying them bits of food from the shops when they had forgotten something, doing little DIY jobs they could no longer complete, and purchasing items online that they couldn’t find in shops. But they loved it most when we just phoned or popped into their house for a chat — it was company during the endless 24 hours of each day.
I struggled with how much I could help them
It was all very wonderful, and then it became quite difficult. Their health started to deteriorate, and I constantly questioned whether I should be doing more for them.
At the very end, once she had died, I popped in even more often to see him, left in that house all on his own for the majority of each day. The last time I saw him, unaware he’d die before I’d seen him again, I left thinking, “I did what I could do today.”
Their deaths triggered so much gratitude and guilt.
Gratitude because we had 11 years with beautiful people. My children were loved, and learned how to relate to the older people because of our neighbors. And guilt because I feel like I never did enough for them.