I’m tired. I’m tired.
A year later and grief still leaves its mark like a heavy bag of shopping gripped so tightly that on arriving home you must peel your hands open and for a moment just examine your red paws.
In the middle of the night, I am back to the sugary tea and the absolute racing of body and mind. Like a starting pistol being fired partway through a marathon to start again. I’m relying on the chemicals to see me through. I ran out of resources the moment he died. I was already finished when he had gone and I lay sleeping upstairs. Subconsciously done.
In The Sound of Music Maria states that when God closes a door; somewhere he opens a window. It is meant to be hopeful. But a window is not a door. Nothing can be the same. The shape of everything has to change. A different life but still living.
I am thinking about Seb and Ozymandias. It was only during lockdown that I discovered how it was his favourite poem- or one of at least. A sonnet about the temporary nature of power; how what was once mighty and feared will meet its end. How none of us, however great our lives can avoid death.
I thought about this while looking at some photographs. An exhibition of the work of Don McCullin. A life lived witnessing atrocity and death; documentary photography that tells us that everything is fallible and frailty exists everywhere- at home and far away, in every culture; to ancient works of architecture and in the landscape the Romantic poets heralded in their glory. His gaze was one of decay. He spent his life looking through a lens and not at his shoes and in that act managed to change world view.
It is 4am and I can judge how long I’ve been up by the temperature of the tea I made when I first awoke. It is barely warm. I chose a mug that a friend had given me for my birthday last year for a tiny bit of company. I small deliberate act of comfort.
When someone dies there is a rush of commentary. Almost everyone is sorry. Some look upon it with a tilted head of curiously; like a cocksure bird trying to ascertain your next move. The house is full of flowers and felled trees with notes of regret. In all this noise there is the silence and the space; the chasm that has been left. Eventually the silence expands. Like moving from diegetic to non-diegetic sound. The plot has lost its protagonist and we have replaced him with noises that make him up. He is now the score, not the radio in the diner or the phone ringing in the office.
I pull together all of the things that make me up. My knowledge. The stuff that I can rely on. LP has been mulling over the difference between fact and opinion. Wrestling with the statements made in the playground; learning that the force of personality is powerful and how much words can hurt or heal. She is developing a sense of self. I see her dad missing in her life and the cruelty feels unreasonable. However she is tenacious and stands solid in her personality. Nanny and Grandad describe her as “irrepressible” and I see her working a shield like Captain America.
Although the hands that have held me up have dwindled in part; there are the stalwart few who recognise that this is not it. A year is no time. They have witnessed the struggle. Let me rant about the mountain of paperwork he left behind or that the bank refuse to give me a mortgage because the fact that I have never missed a payment; returned to work; am raising a child and reeling from the death of my husband mean nothing. All of this is not enough proof that I am reliable enough to pay for our house. The figures say no even with a mighty deposit kindly donated by those who admired Seb and more unbelievably the fact that the payments would be significantly lower after this is taken into account.
It seems life is not content with hitting us with the bus, the psychopath driver is reversing to try and finish me off as I claw the ground to avoid its path. There are answers of course. Don’t let my financial concerns be your take away from this post. It is in hand and really good advice has been sought. It will be okay. I am exhausted but still I get up; I show up.
My real message is that this is ongoing. The family wake up with this every day. We listen to each other’s pain. We focus on the children. We endeavour to secure Seb’s legacy. We go to sleep knowing we have survived another day; we dread a tomorrow that we know we ought to be thankful to have. Then our lives happen; in the midst of all this. We give ourselves to life and our experiences. We enjoy our friends. We prepare for the worst times with tentative plans to be together. We know that is how we make the best of the day. We mourn our loss. We mourn the loss of friends and family that simply cannot understand; we hope they never have to.
For me- dear friends; I absolutely still need you. I am in pain. This week I am manic in my mind. I am busy filling the hours with DIY. I have dangerously moved the fridge freezer in order to ease the memory of it being the last place I saw him alive, standing beside it in the early hours; telling me he felt sick. When I moved it the light in the kitchen changed for the better. I almost destroyed the room trying to tear down the 7ft cabinet that had encompassed it. Little and mighty I am- foolish too to take such a risk. I have moved the bathroom door; the totem of misery. It now stands in another threshold, doing its job without taunting me. I have ripped up the bathroom floor. The layer of lino laid in panic when I couldn’t face the visual jolt of the surface when he had died. I pulled the second layer up too. Now it is concrete, softened underfoot with beach towels; waiting for its new covering. I pulled a muscle while doing it, I broke the loo seat by kneeling on it to tear at the mocking ruin. I hoped Seb was watching as I laughed at myself and the scene; I didn’t realise how much I had injured myself until
the following morning.
In Breakfast at Tiffany’s a wise but equally lost Gregory Peck tells Audrey Hepburn that she can’t outrun herself. Wherever she attempts to retreat to, she will only take her problems with her. He’s right about that. My house will always be the place where he died but even if I left it, he would still be dead. The facts are inescapable. The only thing to do is to try and make life more bearable.
I am filling the room with plants. I am shifting my vision. I have installed a giant mirror before which LP states that she wants to become an expert at lip syncing. She bounces around to the radio. The radio that I put in there to remove his silence. She is the ultimate shift in perception- she does not know he died there.
I taunt myself with Waltz #2. The song I played on repeat when he died. The sound of resignation to the facts. All is tragedy and longing. I follow it with Somebody That I Used to Know and mid track decide that it’s time to attempt to go back to sleep. It is 5am and in an hour LP will call out to me for the day to begin and that will be it; my purpose set; a weary widow, the everlasting mother.
Ozymandias– Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”