Still You

by Claire Allan

  I found the next most suitable thing I owned – a soft grey cashmere dress – and I quickly showered, put on some fresh make-up and tousled my short blonde hair, grateful I didn’t have a look that required more work, before breathing deeply and telling Craig we were good to go again.

  “You’re doing well,” he said. “You’re getting through this.”

  I smiled – a weak, watery smile – gratefully clinging on to whatever hint of reassurance I could find, regardless of where it came from.

  “No choice but to keep on going,” I said. “Time to go and mingle with the mourners, I suppose. To listen to them all tell me how he has gone to a better place, and isn’t in pain any more and how he was a good man.”

  “He was a good man.”

  “I know. And I know folks mean well . . . but . . . you know . . .” I said, drifting off. Platitudes wouldn’t make it better – no matter how well intentioned.

  * * *

  My mother had taken off her sunglasses by the time I arrived at Green Acres. She was sitting in a circle of friends, smiling and nodding. I was sure she was listening to the platitudes and being my mother – ever polite and afraid to offend – she was smiling at them. Part of me wanted to run over and tell her she didn’t have to do that – but she would have killed me stone dead if I had made a scene. She would have glared at me, her lilting Irish accent which remained despite her many years away from home ringing in my ears: ‘Don’t you make a holy show of me or yourself, Annabel.’ So I nodded in her general direction and set about fixing my own weak smile on and promising myself that I would not make a show of myself – not one bit. And I didn’t. I behaved myself right until the very moment when the last guest went home and then I drank three glasses of wine straight, cried all over my mother who ended up soothing me as if she herself wasn’t hurting, and had to have Craig tuck me into bed where I spent the following ten hours watching the clock flicker and change.

  “We could go for a drive today,” he said, in the half light. “Get out of here – clear our heads.”

  “I need to go and help my mom,” I said. “I was pathetic yesterday. I need to be there for her.”

  “You’ve been at her side for weeks, Annabel. You need a break. You will burn out – if you haven’t already.” His tone had veered from concerned to snippy.

  My own mood changed just as quickly. “I’ve been at her side for weeks, so I can’t just leave her now,” I said, turning to face him. “He’s gone. I can’t just leave her in limbo now and clear off because the nasty business of the funeral is done with. She’s spent her last few months caring for him. What in hell is she supposed to do now that she doesn’t have that any more?”

  Of course, I knew as I spoke that it was me that I was worried about – that without having to run to the hospital, pace the wards, feed my father softened food gently, hold his hand and read to him that I might be the one to fall apart. That I would have to finally accept this loss – and deal with everything else I had put on the back burner while I devoted my life to caring for the wonderful man who had always made me feel important.

  My mother? Of course I worried about her too. She seemed calm – too calm – and that unnerved me. Then again everything unnerved me at the moment.

  “She might want some space?” Craig offered and I shrugged his arm, which suddenly felt too heavy, away from me. “We might need some space from all this?”

  “Not now, Craig,” I said, sitting up and grabbing my robe from where I had thrown it on the floor.

  He rolled back away from me. I knew without looking at him that he would be crestfallen – just as I knew I was pushing him away. But grief does funny things and I kind of wished it was socially acceptable to walk around wearing a T-shirt that said “I’m grieving. Allow me to be a bit mad” on it, because then I wouldn’t have to try and make people understand. Surely they should know just how raw and horrible this felt? Surely they had all been there?

  * * *

  My mother sat on her bed, folding clothes and putting them into bin bags. T-shirts he barely wore, chinos that had become baggy and loose on him over the last few months.

  “I’m packing them up,” she said as I walked in, pushing her hair off her face and curling it behind her left ear.

  “You don’t have to do that now,” I said.

  “I know. But it has to be done sometime.”

  “But not now, Mom,” I said. “You don’t have to do it now.”

  “Annabel, pet, I know this is awful but I’ve been living with it for a long time. I knew this day would come. I was ready for it – sort of.”

  I didn’t understand that, how she could be ready for it. Sure we had all known this wasn’t going to end well but that didn’t mean I didn’t feel every shred of breath leave my body in the moment the breath had left his.

  “I was there for him, Annabel. I was there and loyal and I loved him, right to the end. I always will love him but he’s gone and, sweetheart, he’s not coming back. So I need to move on.”

  She spoke so calmly that I felt the room swim a little. It was almost as if she were talking about paying the bills, or doing the grocery shopping. Something which might as well be done now. Not something that had ripped our lives apart. I rested my hand on the chair by her dressing table and looked at her again.

  “I want to go home to Ireland,” she said, folding his shirt – his checked shirt, the one he had worn when we went to the coast and walked along the beach. I had teased him for ogling the young, surgically modified women in their bikinis and he had told me he only had eyes for my mother. I looked at it: empty, folded, slipped into a bag. “And I’d love you to come with me.”

  I looked at her as if she were mad. She was mad. Maybe she needed the “Grief makes you do funny things” T as well?

  “Don’t look at me like that, Annabel,” she said, lifting another shirt, folding it and placing it in the box marked for Goodwill.

  Feeling churlish, I reached in past her and took it back out again, holding it tight in my arms, trying to get some hint of him back. All I could smell was her detergent and fabric softener – not a hint of coffee or musky aftershave. Not a hint of my dad.

  “You want to go back to Ireland? And you want me to go with you?”

  “It’s not that hard to take in, is it?” my mother said, her face set in a way that let me know she was very much determined to go ahead with her plans – with or without me.

  “But, Mom, you have a life here. I have a life here. I have the bakery. I have Craig. We have this house – your friends, your colleagues, your life.” I was clutching at straws, of course. Straws of what I had, before. What I had before he was sick. When everything changed. What I really wanted to say of course was that I could not even begin to imagine how she could want to walk away from our home and our life, even though there was a part of me which wanted to walk away from my own life. I knew she was grieving but . . . I felt something constrict in my throat.

  “Who said anything about walking away? I just want to visit. It’s been a long time. I need to get away, don’t you understand that? Everything has been on hold for so long . . . Everything has been so hard. Illness and death. Even this damn house – it doesn’t smell like home any more. It smells of antiseptic and illness and the perfume of strangers come to pay their last respects. I just want to go home again. I’d love you to come with me – to see Ireland. Didn’t we always talk about going? When you were small? Wouldn’t it give us both a lift?”

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