All the Time We Thought We Had

by Gordon Darroch

  I woke in the middle of the night, wrapped in darkness and oppressed by the lightness of the space beside me. Grief surged like a storm-wave and I pumped it out in great gasping sobs. Once they subsided I settled into the kind of unbroken sleep I hadn’t experienced in months. This went on for several weeks.

  The first time I woke alone I wondered, for a few seconds, if the whole scene had been a mirage, a ghastly rehearsal for the final act. But the vacated bed and the redundant wheelchair beside it extinguished any residual hope. I had prepared myself for the emptiness, but the relief was an unpleasant surprise. I no longer had to concern myself with whether Magteld was suffering, or fetch her medicines and ice-creams from a dark kitchen. All those questions had been settled in the most abysmal way.

  Then there was the survivor’s guilt. For Magteld the end had been dramatic and violent, and yet here we were, emerging unscathed from our beds. I got up, composing a list of tasks in my head. Adam’s school had to be told he wasn’t coming in. The wheelchair and all the disability equipment needed to go out to the shed – I wanted to banish all evidence of her illness from sight, summarily. Already I was sifting the memories. The children needed breakfast. I had to call my parents so they could make plans to travel to the funeral. The shopping needed to be done. Time made its demands, ruthless and insatiable.

  Euan and Adam had been there at the end, and the shards of their mother’s demise were scattered through the house, from the empty chair at the dinner table to the wheelchair ramps, but they didn’t mention it once. I concentrated on tending to their daily lives, making sure they ate, slept, washed themselves and had time to play. Life was mechanical. Before they went to bed we sat together in the living room and I read them a story. The book in that first week was My Dad’s a Birdman, by David Almond, about a girl who helps her father cope with the death of her mother. I’d bought it while Magteld was alive, hoping I could gently introduce the boys to their fate, but fate had other ideas.

  I posted her last blog posthumously, headed with an explanatory note and a picture of Magteld at Marlies’s wedding. She is smiling, her hair and teeth perfectly straight, a glint of precious happiness in her eye. The responses flooded in. At least Facebook and Twitter enabled me to avoid repeating the wretched banality: she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead. A few friends phoned; others sent messages, by card or text or online. I was glad not to have to talk too much. Conversation was oppressive.

  In a few days I had to rustle up a speech, pluck a few dozen photos from the digital thicket and field enquiries from the undertaker, friends and relatives. I wrote the eulogy in Dutch, as a tribute to Magteld and an acknowledgement of the challenges that lay ahead. For eighteen years she had been the one with the difficult name and the foreign accent; now the baton was in my hand. Thanks to her I had two half-Dutch children and a foothold in another country’s culture. Delivering the address in my second language also meant I had to concentrate on pronouncing the words properly, which drew the sting from their meaning.

  A life of thirty-eight years had to be compressed into a ten-minute slideshow. From the infant in dungarees and clogs, turning her head towards the camera, to the dying woman, still smiling tenaciously as the darkness closed in. When the undertaker came back I handed over the images on a USB stick, together with the music for the ceremony.*

  I had one final request. A friend had written to me recalling Magteld at a wedding in the summer of 2005, just before Adam was born. It was held at a castle in East Lothian, on a long June evening when the lingering sun gave the green fields a copper tinge. Magteld had turned up, plump-bellied and radiant, in a maternity dress pulled from Mothercare’s clearance rack. ‘She must have been seven or eight months pregnant, and she was so happy,’ my friend wrote. ‘I think she danced more than we did.’ Who else could have dazzled that night as Magteld did, in an outfit that cost less than a bus ticket, carrying an almost full-term baby and glistening with joy? Though I had no belief in any kind of afterlife, there was something irresistible about the idea of Magteld dancing freely among the stars. She was no longer with us, and the human imagination abhors a vacuum. More importantly, if she was invited to dance and had nothing suitable to wear, she would haunt me for all eternity. So I told the undertaker to take her best dress, lay it beside her in her coffin and let it mingle with her in the flames.

  The rain that had started falling when Magteld died lasted for three days, and by the time it ceased, her funeral was arranged. I had the eulogy vetted by a translator friend for linguistic blunders, and translated my and Luc’s speeches for the English-speaking mourners. On the Friday I went to buy a shirt from a local clothes shop. The proprietor, sensing an opportunity, tried to foist a matching woollen cardigan on me.

  ‘No thanks,’ I said, ‘I’ll be wearing a jacket and tie. It’s for a funeral.’

  ‘But, sir, ties are so old-fashioned,’ she advised. ‘This will really make you stand out.’

  ‘It’s my wife’s funeral. I’m delivering the eulogy. I think I’ll stand out enough.’

  From there we proceeded swiftly to the checkout.

  Saturday was a bright, crisp day, the perfect conditions for an abrupt farewell. A week earlier we had sat out in the garden with Magteld, to wish Euan many years of health and prosperity. One of the last pictures taken of her shows her sitting in her wheelchair, in the living room, her father clasping her on the shoulders, as if reassuring himself that his daughter was still a person of solid flesh. Now the sun was shining again and the garden was set up for another family gathering, to celebrate her truncated life. The two weekends took place in the same confined space, but in different countries: one in the realm of innocence and hope, the other in the land of grief.

  Before the guests arrived Mum and I walked up to the flower stall at the end of the street to choose the single stems: yellow for Adam, red for me and white for the others. Out of respect for Magteld we didn’t interrupt the florist’s superfluous injunction about keeping the blooms fresh.

  As guests began to arrive, Luc and I went ahead to the crematorium. We were led into a small, plain anteroom and drank coffee served from a machine. We sat and talked, quietly and openly. Neither of us felt weighed down by emotion; we wanted to focus on the ceremonial duties after the maudlin frenzy of the past week. It was a blessed relief from being woken in the darkest hours by visions of Magteld in her last moments, her bleached face frozen in a ghastly yawn. We wanted to match the dignity and resolve she had shown in her final weeks.

  The dark-suited mourners filed in, clutching each other for support, weeping mutely. The funeral director distributed the order of service and copies of my translations. They tossed the single stems on to Magteld’s coffin, as she had envisaged, and retreated to the pews. The plain pine box was on a stage at the front of the room, with the mourners facing it in an arc; there was a screen above, on which her life story was relayed in a series of suspended moments, threaded together by her cornflower-blue eyes and slender smile.

  I stepped up to the lectern where the eulogy had been placed, red lines marking the most difficult words and phrases. Two thousand words of prose, crafted from the landscape of memory for nobody’s coin. The finest kind of work. The entire span of our relationship, across two decades and three countries, condensed into ten minutes. We met, we fell in love, she crossed the sea, the children were born, she had cancer, we crossed the sea again, she died. I spoke of the innate intelligence that burned inside her, like a fire in a cave, and captivated me. I recalled our first moments together in the hills above Lake Garda; our wedding on a dreich autumn day in Drenthe; the gruelling years in Glasgow as she coped with raising two autistic children, detached from her family. And finally I addressed the illness that had intruded on, and finally laid waste to, her life and led us to this dismal, dignified place.

  Luc almost buckled under the weight of his opening words: ‘Dear daughter, we have had to let you go.’ Then he started to narrate her early life, and the memories revi
ved him. He told of the day Magteld was born at home, on a morning in early March, welcomed by the chirp of birds as they built their nests in the deep-pitched roof. Of how he cycled home in the evening, and Diny would pedal out to meet him at halfway with a tiny Magteld sitting in a basket on the handlebars and squawking with glee: ‘Hoi, papa!’ Those days of fledgling parenthood must have seemed as endless and untroubled as the Dutch horizon. How as a girl she floated through life, possessed by a wistful curiosity and detachment: ‘I can see you now, wandering around on holiday, looking at flowers and plants and other wildlife.’ The boldness and curiosity that she engaged on behalf of her children as she forged a path into the political arena. And the memories forged in those final weeks as her life hurtled to its close – fraught, precious and indelible.

  Throughout all this the wooden box sat squatly on the dais, a few feet away, barely noticed by the gathering. Some residue of Magteld was inside it, waiting to be dispatched, but her presence was elsewhere: it was in the words that filled the room and the pictures overhead, and in our minds. It was as if she were just out of reach, on the other side of a partition or standing across a gorge, silently watching. The coffin, with its coating of flowers, was the brutal symbol of that divide. We stepped up to the platform and arranged ourselves around it. The wooden doors slid open and the coffin glided towards the furnace. We clasped each other as tears streamed down our faces. Euan leaned into me, sobbing wretchedly, the first clear sign that he knew his mother was gone for ever. It was the bitterest consolation to know that he could share in our grief.

  Afterwards we convened in a side room to consume coffee, tea and biscuits. The solemnity of the service was banished; laughter was no longer taboo. The undertaker came over and discreetly handed me a plain folder containing the paperwork I needed to convince banks and similar institutions that she was certifiably dead. I thanked him sincerely for his efforts; it had been a beautiful, agonising occasion, complying with Magteld’s wishes. Presently we would go to the house and drink prosecco in the garden, as she had directed, and watch the children play, and comfort each other in the invasive sunshine.

  In those first weeks it was as if nothing had changed. Imagine a roulette wheel coming out of its spin: the unwinding isn’t apparent at first, until it reaches the point where you start to distinguish the slots and the ball begins jumping in and out of them, finally settling on a number and coasting to a halt, its manic energy spent. The early days ran on latent energy; we were too consumed with the mundane demands of everyday life to mourn, and the memories of Magteld were still warm and nourishing, like the heat from a fading star.

  It became normal to set three places at the dining table, lie across the width of the sofa in the evening, and come in from the school scooter run without hearing her voice calling out from the dining room. Sometimes I reached the end of a busy day, filled with shopping and cleaning and changing bed linen, and realised with a pang of remorse that I hadn’t thought of her once. The boys made no concessions to their mother’s absence: they ate, slept and played on the computers as they had before, and settled down to sleep after a glass of milk and a bedtime story. But the drizzle of bereavement seeped into our lives. Grief was ever present, lapping at the shoreline and occasionally breaking through in waves before retreating just as quickly. I feared it would seize me as I stared at the rows of vegetables in the supermarket, dumbly trying to work out whether we should have carrots or cucumbers with supper, and then cursing myself for dithering over such banalities when the love of my life had gone to the eternal blackness. A few days after the funeral I found an unfinished punnet of mushrooms in the fridge that was past its sell-by date and realised I had bought it a week earlier as I pushed Magteld round the shop. How the hell, I thought as I slung it furiously into the bin, could these mushrooms last longer than my wife?

  In June the World Cup began. Just after it started I drove up to a small commuter town outside Amsterdam to interview Rob Rensenbrink, one of the stars of the 1974 and 1978 Dutch teams. We chatted quite amiably for an hour, mostly about football, as he relayed the old tales, honed and polished from forty years of repetition, like an epic poem. At the end he asked me about my life in the Netherlands, and I explained, quite casually, that I’d recently arrived in the country and my wife had just died.

  ‘How long ago?’ he asked.

  ‘Two weeks,’ I said.

  A look of startled disbelief crossed his face. Only then did I realise how shocking it must be to see someone walking around in the immediate aftermath of such a devastating event, apparently unscathed, with the rubble still smoking in the background.

  The open wound of Magteld’s loss scabbed over quickly; the imprint of her last moments was no longer burned on the inside of my eyelids when I woke in the night. That final scene, when the boys and I stood by her hospital bed and watched her draw her last breaths, was etched in history, already distant, like a picture in a school textbook. Part of me still expected to discover that the whole thing was some malicious cosmic trick. I could not repel the absurd idea that I should keep her possessions in order, ready for the day when she strolled back in the door, a bemused smile on her face, and asked, ‘Where did you think I’d gone?’

  I saw her in the box of jewellery on her bedside, in the photographs in the hallway, her iPad and the books she would never finish, the row of shoes by the door, the dresses hanging on the clothes rack and the two pillowcases I put on every time I changed the bedsheets. None of it had had time to gather dust. Yet I also had to face a world that constantly confronted me with my loss. I had to tick boxes on official forms marked ‘widowed’ and ‘single parent’ and make endless phone calls to banks and utility firms and government offices to extract Magteld from the circulatory system of capitalism. Detaching myself emotionally was my way of coping with the bloodless demands of bureaucracy. I filled in the forms, shoved them in an envelope and dispatched them quickly, as if disposing of them in an incinerator, before the grief could scorch me.

  After the funeral my parents caught the ferry back to England. It was a fine evening, and before going to bed they went out on deck for a drink. My father walked over from the bar to the table where my mother was sitting, carrying two glasses of beer in his hands. In ten seconds they would be sitting together quietly, reflecting on the drama of the past few weeks and perhaps feeling fortunate to still be in good health.

  Somebody had discarded a tray on the ground just by the table. My father stepped on it. His momentum propelled the tray across the iron deck surface and into a heavy pillar. The outdoor furniture on a ship is designed to withstand heavy storms and makes few concessions to fragile flesh and bone. My father’s foot collided with the pillar with a thud that sent him keeling to the ground.

  The beer glasses hit the deck, exploding. My father hobbled back to his cabin and into bed. In the morning his foot was in agony. My mother drove him to the hospital, where an X-ray revealed he had suffered a double fracture in his toe. The configuration was so irregular that the consultant invited his students to take notes on it. He had an operation to insert a metal plate in his foot, like a war veteran. It would be several months before he could drive again, and the slight imbalance in his gait still lingers.

  My father’s fractured toe changed the complexion of my parents’ summer. He was unable to walk beyond a few steps or climb a flight of stairs. He slept on an improvised bed in the games room. For the first few weeks he was effectively housebound. One stroke of luck was that I had asked them to take Magteld’s wheelchair and Zimmer frame away with them, so they could go back to the Beatson Cancer Centre in Glasgow. Although the chair was configured for Magteld’s more slender frame, Dad managed to squeeze himself into it and wheel himself around the courtyard at home. He ended up using the chair for longer than Magteld.

  His sudden disability put everyday pleasures beyond reach: gardening, snooker, cooking, boating on the Norfolk Broads. He relied on others for simple tasks such as taking the bins out. Their su
mmer holiday was cancelled, plans to visit us in The Hague postponed. A helter-skelter journey of a few metres, on the deck of a passenger ferry, had thrown my parents’ lives into turmoil. It is a lesson learned hard and forgotten easily that we are only ever one bad fall, serious infection or hard collision away from joining the ranks of the sick and dependent.

  I came back from the supermarket the day after Magteld died to find the answerphone blinking. The message was from the deputy head of the school we had chosen for Euan. Months of grappling with the special education system had finally been rewarded with a place, and I was invited to make an appointment.

  Two days later I cycled through the Vogelwijk, a neighbourhood of wide streets, redbrick houses, lush greenery and elegant restraint. The school was on the edge of this middleclass nirvana, nestling at the foot of the dunes.

  I had a sense of foreboding about the meeting. The previous week I had received a letter from the leerplichtambtenaar, the council official whose job is to ensure children attend school. I emailed back explaining that Euan was still waiting for a suitable place.

  I sat down across a table with the deputy head, sipped fruit tea from a mug and listened as she explained the arrangements to me. Euan would begin in September, she said finally.

  It was the answer I had feared. September was three months away, and Euan had not been in a classroom since the end of March. Magteld seemed to be hovering just over my shoulder, seeing if I could pass this first test of my ability to raise the boys single-handed. Failure here would mark me for all time. I knew what she would have done: she would have put her foot down, gently but clinically, and kept it there until she secured the outcome she wanted.

  I fastened my jaw and said, ‘In that case we have a problem.’

  I set out the points one by one, as if laying down counters. Euan had just lost his mother and needed support in dealing with his grief. His Dutch was lagging behind, and our family had just been deprived of a native speaker. A five-month break in his education at such a time was unconscionable. And then the clincher: the council official agreed with me that he should be integrated into the Dutch school system as soon as possible.