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bigalspowerfulblog · 3 years ago

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A short drive, up a hill I know very well. The first thing I see is her coat, still hanging on a peg in the hall.

There’s a new washing machine coming tomorrow. Dad’s annoyed she never got to see it. The NHS app is still sending through her test results. “I should probably delete it,” he says.

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The comfort blanket of bureaucracy envelops us. There will be meetings with the registrar, the funeral director, then there will be the contacting of relatives and the finding of a venue.

The business of death runs more smoothly than most, it seems. The sales pitches assail us with somber dignity.

Would we like the essential funeral – the ‘simple, lower-cost option’? The glossy brochure makes it very clear that it wouldn’t mean we cared less. The more you read, the more outlandish the options. Her ashes don’t need to go into an urn. My mother could become a pair of cufflinks, or earrings, or a paperweight. It feels wrong to chuckle at these options, knowing the comfort they have brought to someone, somewhere, but I do.

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She’d kept my old schoolbooks. It’s with a tender little shock I learn I’d worked a little harder, and done a little better, than I’d thought. At 14 I’m asked to answer “How do I know I’m not asleep in Tokyo and not dreaming all this?” A thousand words – indeed several decades – later, it’s not entirely clear.

She loved that I wrote. “It’s so beautiful,” she’d always say. It’s not supposed to be beautiful; I’m just trying to make sense of the world, I’d stutter in reply.

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The man comes to remove the stairlift, which she never got to use. “It’s never good news when I come round,” he says quietly.

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She kept letters between her mother and father. They were written in 1937. Her mother, for reasons I can’t work out, is in hospital. Her father seems to be sending them from miles away. He talks about all the jobs he needs to do before he can see her. He’s talking weeks.

We used to write letters.

In amongst all this, of course I end up checking my phone. Over on Twitter someone has found an article I wrote 10 years ago and quoted it to illustrate the awful prejudice of “these people”. I’m not even sure I’m the person I was two days ago.

I go back to the letters.

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So here we are in this house, trying to make sense of the random detritus left behind – a clay sculpture of a shoe that I made when I was 11, her books about Iran, the pictures of her dog. What is a life?

Books these days tell us not to do this. Your experience is what matters; ignore the remembering mind and ignore the stories that you tell yourself, because there’s no grand narrative that pulls those threads together; you are just a capsule battered by events.

We escape to Lympstone Harbour and walk the estuary. What I thought was sand gives way, to a foul smelling black sludge beneath it. For a time I think I might be stuck, but I manage to escape, with both my foot and flip-flop in one piece. My dad is in hysterics as I hose myself down, under the setting sun.

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She was given three months to live. Month one: did everything she could to make the house nicer for Dad. Chose curtains, paint colours, chairs for rooms they hadn’t completed. Tidied drawers. Threw out things he wouldn’t need. Instructions for tidying the garage. “Get on with it,” she wrote. Month two: she planned her funeral – the guest list, the music, the readings. Then in month three, she gradually faded away.

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I’m sitting in the living room talking to my dad, when lines from “Wait For It” from Hamilton somehow inveigle their way into my brain.

Death doesn't discriminate

Between the sinners and the saints

It takes and it takes and it takes

I do what I always do with earworms – try to work out the notes, and shift it from an oral feeling to a visual one.

Aminor, Cadd9. A minor, Cadd9.

Death doesn’t discriminate. Death doesn’t discriminate.

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Beneath a black sky in a crematorium on the outskirts of town, mortality feels too big to comprehend.

We’d requested the curtains close on her coffin at the end of the service. I wish we hadn’t. I didn’t cry. I could feel the congregation behind me, all of them staring at the back of my head, wondering what my reaction would be. I shivered a little.

I once had a panic attack by a roundabout in Honiton shortly after reading To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, because of the part where you learn of a main character’s death by way of a pair of brackets tossed in the middle of paragraph.

I believe I was 15 years old, had recently had sex for the first time, and had somehow convinced myself I might have AIDS as a result, and was dying. In fact, I had glandular fever.

This time the panic subsides.

So to a hotel, sandwiches, beers, ciders, an old woman apologising for telling me off for playing cricket and football too noisily outside her house when I was young, a kid I’d gone drinking with in Torquay who now runs a web design business, neighbours, relatives, all of them looking at me, more beers, more ciders, and finally home to try and sleep, which finally happens after hours of thinking about distractions – chord progressions, card tricks, the flight of a cricket ball.

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Sleep deprived, my dad and I head out into the sun. We pull up deckchairs and watch cricket at Sidmouth and walk along the beach. I talk about work, the chatter of politics (it’s all nonsense, stop getting so worked up, I tried to keep telling her). Back to the train station. I eat an awful pasty and wait for the chapter to close. It all went fine. It all went ok, I tell myself, as the fields around Castle Cary recede, and the red bricks of Taunton whisk into view.

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