by Denise Riley
One month after the death:
This so-called ‘work of grief’ is turning out to be a shatteringly exhausting apprehension of the needed work of living. It demands to be fully lived, while the labour of living it is physically exhausting – like virulent jetlag, but surging up in waves.
The notes and emails of condolence have stopped arriving and I’ve acknowledged each of them. Yet after all this ritual and effort, he still hasn’t come home. What more does he want?
So intricate and singular a living thing can’t just vanish from the surface of life: that would run counter to all your accumulated experience. The day after his death, studiously wiping away what you realize are the last tangible traces: tiniest bits of his hair from the edge of the washbasin. This solid persistence of things. So then, the puzzle of what ‘animation’ is; of exactly what it is that’s been crushed.
This instant enlargement of human sympathy. It’s arrived in me at once. His death has put me in mind of those millions whose children were and are lost in natural disasters, starved, drowned, or systematically obliterated in wars; no wonder that bitterness and a loss of hope have filtered down the generations, with the resulting disengagement of those left alive. Millions disorientated, perhaps, by this quiet feeling of living, only just, on this near side of a cut between the living and the dead.
At the death of your child, you see how the edge of the living world gives onto burning whiteness. This edge is clean as a strip of guillotined celluloid film. First came the intact negative full of blackened life in shaded patches, then abruptly, this milkiness. This candid whiteness, where a life stopped. Nothing ‘poetic’, not the white radiance of eternity – but sheer non-being, which is brilliantly plain.
Five months after:
Apparently almost half a year has gone by since J disappeared, and it could be five minutes or half a century, I don’t know which. There is so very little movement. At first I had to lie down flat for an hour each afternoon, because of feeling crushed as if by a leaden sheet, but by now I don’t need to lie down. This slight physical change is my only intimation of time.
Knowing and also not knowing that he’s dead. Or I ‘know’ it, but privately I can’t feel it to be so. These fine gradations of admitting the brute facts of the case, while not feeling them; utterly different, though, from supposing that he’s still alive somewhere else in this world. This isn’t some ambiguity designed to blur the hard fact. Nor is it an imperfect anaesthetic.
This knowing and not knowing is useful, for it allows the truthful richness of all those shades of acknowledging and dissenting. Half-realizing while half-doubting, assenting while demurring, conceding while finding it ludicrously implausible – so many distinctions, all of them nicely in play. To characterize such accurate nuances as my ‘denial’ of his death would be off the mark. Yet who is policing my ‘acceptance’ of it?
What a finely vigorous thing a life is; all its delicate complexity abruptly vanished. Almost comical. A slapstick fall.
There’s no relation, simply, between your recall of the courageously optimistic dead and your knowledge of the fall of sudden blackness. But you struggle to hold both in mind at once. You try to slot together the snippets of evidence – coffin, ashes, silent house, non-reappearance of child – to become fully convinced by the deduction that you have conscientiously drawn.
My head can’t piece together the facts of a coffin under its roses and lilies, then the sifting gunmetal-grey ashes, with this puzzling absence of the enthusiastic person who left home to work abroad for a few days but has still not walked back in the door.
Not that I have delusions, as such. But a strong impression that I’ve been torn off, brittle as any dry autumn leaf, liable to be blown onto the tracks in the underground station, or to crumble as someone brushes by me in this public world where people rush about loudly, with their astonishing confidence. Each one of them a candidate for sudden death, and so helplessly vulnerable. If they do grasp that at any second their own lives might stop, they can’t hold on to that expectation. As I do now. Later everyone on the street seems to rattle together like dead leaves in heaps.
Wandering around in an empty plain, as if an enormous drained landscape lying behind your eyes had turned itself outward. Or you find yourself camped on a threshold between inside and out. The slight contact of your senses with the outer world, your interior only thinly separated from it, like a membrane resonating on a verge between silence and noise. If it were to tear through, there’s so little behind your skin that you would fall out towards the side of sheer exteriority. Far from taking refuge deeply inside yourself, there is no longer any inside, and you have become only outward. As a friend, who’d survived the suicide of the person closest to her, says: ‘I was my two eyes set burning in my skull. Behind them there was only vacancy.’
I work to earth my heart.
Six months after:
A summer has gone, a cold autumn is setting in, but I’ve no sense of my time as having any duration, or any future. Time now is a plateau. I only know whether an event came before or after the date of the death. If there was a death. I didn’t see the body. His body. Not that the sight always helps to anchor your belief in the fact. What a lumpish little word: ‘dead’. And ‘died’ seems an increasingly silly verb. ‘Dead’, used of the lively J, strikes me as not only unlikely, but mistaken. A prematurely coarse verdict. Like John Donne’s phrase; ‘her death – which word wrongs her.’1 Instead I want to say ‘since he vanished’. That seems far more accurate. It’s better conveyed in French or in Italian, where without any affectation you could call someone’s death ‘his disappearance’, or you might naturally say that ‘she has left us’.
Immediately J vanished, I fell into a solidarity with other bereaved parents: an imagined solidarity, because at that stage I didn’t know any. I sought them out, online and in meetings and one-to-one, and I listen ardently to how they try to live on. So I can hear that everyone testifies to this wish once they’re in the safe company of others in the same boat: the hope for their own rapid death. Yet I can’t allow myself this comforting prospect, as I won’t abandon my surviving children. Any more than I’ll abandon the dead one. I never abandoned him in his life, and I’ve no intention of starting now, ‘just because he’s dead’. What kind of a reason would that be? I tried always to be there for him, solidly. And I shall continue to be. (The logic of this conviction: in order to ‘be there’, I too have died.)
A vicarious death. If a sheet of blackness fell on him, it has fallen on me too. As if I also know that blankness after his loss of consciousness.
This state is physically raw, and has nothing whatever to do with thinking sad thoughts or with ‘mourning’. It thuds into you. Inexorable carnal knowledge.
The plainest simplest horror from which the mind flinches away: never to see that person again. The purely cognitive violence of it. Now you understand those ideas of the migration of spirits, or of reincarnation: to try to soften that blow. Or no, not to soften it – but to provide something for baffled cognition to grasp at.
I’ve decided that this slow head of mine has to be left alone to not manage to make its impossible deduction. Meanwhile I’ll try to incorporate J’s best qualities of easy friendliness, warmth, and stoicism, and I shall carry him on in that way. Which is the only kind of resurrection of the dead that I know about.
I am inching along. But not forward, or in any other decipherable direction. If it’s crabwise, then it’s without effective pincers. This deep tiredness, as if sharing his grave; although actually most of that dead boy was poured as fine charcoal powder straight into the sea.
Nine months after:
Now it’s thirty-nine weeks, the duration of a pregnancy, since he vanished. As if a pregnancy had by now been wound backwards past the point of conception and away into its pre-existence.
What do the dead give us? A grip on the present instant in which we’re now relentlessly inserted. Not in a contemplative sense,
but vigorously. A carnal sensation. If to be dead is to exist outside of earthly time, then this tough-minded energetic ‘living in the present’ is also the life of the dead. My new ability to live in the present joins in that timelessness of being dead. Or the nearest I can get to it.
Ten months after:
This ‘skewed’ perception of time – isn’t it perfectly to be expected? Nothing exceptionally distorted, but a common human experience which could be recognized through being described. How might you save the strangeness of this immobile non-time from being considered pathological; an evaluation which would further isolate its dwellers? But your democratizing impulse here can succeed all too well, as some hearers will comment briskly on your descriptive efforts, ‘You mean, like the feeling of disturbed time you get after a bad break-up, or if you lose your job – well, surely that’s a common experience.’ And then, aside, ‘She’s becoming a real death bore,’ they’ll recoil, shaking their heads. Or so you fear. Is this the famous hypersensitivity of the bereaved at work in you?
No tenses any more. Among the recent labels for temporality is ‘time dilation’, referring to our perception’s elasticity, its capacity to be baggy. But are there any neurological accounts of this feeling of completely arrested time? It feels as if some palpable cerebral alteration has taken place. As if, to make the obvious joke, your temporal lobes have been flooded and are now your a-temporal lobes.
I’ll try again: a sudden death, for the one left behind, does such violence to the experienced ‘flow’ of time that it stops, and then slowly wells up into a large pool. Instead of the old line of forward time, now something like a globe holds you. You live inside a great circle with no rim. In the past, before J’s idiotic disappearance, the future lay in front of me as if I could lean into it gently like a finger of land, a promontory feeling its way into the sea. But now I’ve no sense of any onward temporal opening, but stay lodged in the present, wandering over some vast saucer-like incline of land, some dreary wide plain like the banks of the river Lethe, I suppose. His sudden death has dropped like a guillotine blade to slice through my old expectation that my days would stream onwards into my coming life. Instead I continue to sense daily life as paper-thin. As it is. But this cut through any usual feeling of chronology leaves a great blankness ahead.
Now you expect another death – a remaining child’s – to be announced to you at any moment, and you try to steady yourself for it. It’s not so much fearfulness as a life poised in acute suspension. You’re tensed for anything. No plans can be made for any future, so you must try to inhabit this present with equanimity and in good heart. This might sound like stoicism’s programme. But it’s no philosophical stance, nor is it valour that dictates your new approach to living; only your realization that now a familiar apprehension of passing time has been barred to you. Nothing, then, like the happier notion of ‘seizing the day’. On the contrary: there is no time to seize. The former slim and orderly temporal line has been blown away, as if it had been reduced to ash as efficiently as your child’s corpse.
‘Only in the present moment is our happiness’: the stoics’ pronouncement. The irony is that now you’ve succeeded brilliantly in living exclusively in the present, but only as the result of that death. To endure, yes, but when the usual passage of time is in shards? What does your old philosophy of endurance mean, when there’s no longer any temporality left in which to wait it out?
Impossible, caught in your sheltering space of no-time, to grasp that your child’s dead when they stay so vividly present. As if they themselves haven’t the least intention of lying down gracefully with folded hands.
Unanticipated death does such violence to your ordinary suppositions, as if the whole inductive faculty by which you’d previously lived has faltered. Its textbook illustration was always ‘Will the sun rise tomorrow?’ But now that induction itself is no more, the sun can’t any longer be relied on to rise. And my son does not rise. This silly pun alone can reliably work its mechanical work.
For the first time you grasp that inhabiting the drift of time is a mutable perception; one which can stop, leaving you breathing but stranded, stock still. From this unexpected vantage point, you discover that the perception of a ‘flowing’ time must have been secreted by and then exuded from the mind, like a silkworm spinning out its silken thread from its jaws; but now its conditions of production, whatever they were, are destroyed. There’s nothing of the intellect in this revelation. It stems entirely from visceral sensations.
You could try to describe this being outside time by using a string of negatives: you live in the breathlessness of sensing that everything might halt at the next heartbeat, you’ve no conviction that your small daily plans (which, comically, must still be made) will ever bear fruit – those negatives are true but unhelpful. For this state of a-temporality isn’t experienced negatively. It is lucidly calm as it fills up your horizons. Though a novel element to you, it brings an unanxious and energetic simplicity. A crystalline life, concentrated in the instant, and pleased enough with it. This new time of yours may, in fact, be the time of the dead themselves.
Eleven months after:
At almost a year since he died – or he ‘died’, for the plain assertion of his death still sounds foolishly melodramatic – I read endless online papers in cardiac pathology. Eventually I try to stop my reading, then am overwhelmed by whirring ‘what ifs’: what if one of his doctors had noticed J’s (in retrospect, blindingly evident) heart failure or had taken his fainting episodes seriously; what if I’d known to draw the right conclusions myself from the signs that I, living with him daily, could see; what if the proper diagnosis had been made, what the surgical options might have done, was it better for him to have died not knowing about his cardiomyopathy, or would he have wanted to have had more years, if impaired . . . All my furious study and speculation is the uselessness of thought trying to rewind time, to master what cannot be mastered. And this thought does nothing to stop it.
In your imagination, you will endlessly witness the instant of your child’s dying. But the accompanying struggle to realistically assess your degree of responsibility for the death needn’t entail your ‘masochism’. It seems vital to not flinch from the former, while not sliding into the latter. And to get that distinction clear, just for yourself, will demand a forensic labour. To take responsibility; the word means, to weigh things up. That testing the weight doesn’t have to be a labour of guilt. Does it?
I had wanted un-frightened company. And yet I could sit alone, and needed to sit alone, to translate his autopsy report from its original Spanish with an online medical dictionary to hand, in a coolly determined rush of concentration. The living person was rather squeamish and he would not have cared for this. Needs must. I read on rapidly about the discovery of the corpse in a still-running bath, its good musculature (at that, he’d have brightened up), its chest cavity opened up by means of the conventional incision, the skull sawed so that the brain could be lifted out, the enlarged heart dissected on removal, the fluids in lungs and bladder inspected and measured. The drive to know is cool-headed; this concentrated will to understand everything about your child’s sudden death becomes intensely forensic, and dispassionate. Only much later would I wonder about, for instance, the degree of physical effort needed to shear open a chest. Or whether the ribs’ cartilage is easily cut. This autopsy happened to be imperfect in settling for ‘heart attack’, as that conclusion did not fit its own findings of the enlarged heart which instead implied cardiomyopathy; and it demanded far more research into the nature of drowning, how you can distinguish death by water from death prior to immersion by the flooding of the lungs with small haemorrhaged flecks of blood. You read on rapidly, quietly through the pages, feeling yourself as expressionless as that chilled body on the pathologist’s slab, which by now is so inert and drained of spirit for you that your difficult part lies elsewhere; in explaining later to others (though you’ll spare them from hearing exactly what you’ve learn
ed) why your work was necessary. That it wasn’t some obsessed self-reproach, but that for the sake of your still-living children you’d needed to establish the true cause of their brother’s death and its possible genetic implications for them. You don’t want them to die too, through your avoidable ignorance. Many parents say this – that they will pursue the cause of death doggedly. Later I reflect that I had been too alone in my task. So that the local surgery could close my son’s file, I take the translated autopsy report to a young GP, who glances at it, then sits with his head in his hands, saying, ‘I wasn’t trained to deal with this. We didn’t get to read autopsies. This is absolutely horrendous.’ Perhaps he doesn’t yet have his own children. Or he does. I do my best to reassure him that it’s usual to search out each detail, to try to know. To keep your child company in its death.
Maybe to stop grilling yourself about your remotest responsibility for the death would need some sense that a future and its customary logical furnishings were in place. But now they are not. All the usual supports for your reasoning, the unnoticed but vital connecting tissues of ‘because’ and ‘then’, have been severed. The old edifice of knowing now droops forward and flops without its scaffolding. So your uncertainties will return and return, as there’s nothing to calm and secure them.
We can forgive ourselves for the death of our children.
Perhaps this forgiving ourselves will need to be done over and over again. I don’t know.
Sixteen months after:
Superficially ‘fine’ as my daily air of cheerfulness carries me around with an unseen crater blown into my head, the truth is that my thoughts are turned constantly to life and to death; all that I can now attentively hold.