We are about to set off for the hospice. Ev is in the back strapped in his seat and he is sleepy. He suddenly starts and looks round. He’s not here. I thought that Dad was here. I thought he was with us. It was just a joke of mine. I do not turn the engine on for a long while and we sit in silence until he becomes restless.
Sometimes the place seems ours. Our friends treat it as such. Like an out-of-the-way hotel in winter or a new private club they have access to. Dying has made a charismatic social space. I didn’t have anything on this evening so I thought I would come down the hospice and see who was around, says Kathy. Ev’s friends call by. He takes over the toys area with his gang or they build his wooden London set on the coffee table and invade it over and over with the probes from outer space while the adults conference on the low sofas or stare at the monochrome garden fattened with snow. At dusk the entire wall is dark glass. It is the shortest day.
There is a filmic quality to our life: dreamy, drowned and saved. Many hours can pass and by extension days. I live out in the open, more or less all the time, with strangers whom I trust entirely, or at any moment – equally filmic – with sudden assemblages of friends who arrive separately and together. If they didn’t know each other before, these friends, they do now.
I don’t know what director is making this piece. Someone says Bergman: European, shot flat without affect but deeply charged, with a fondness for long shots, no cuts, ensemble scenes, dark comedy and the action geared always to the man in the bed even though he is frequently off-camera. I hardly see the other patients. I cannot take my eyes off us. Death is selfish. I don’t know the protocols and it takes a bit to learn. Do you chat? How to begin? How long’s yours got? Actually it is simple. Compassion is configured over and over in mute smiles, glances, bends of the head, tentative exchanges of gifts, yoghurts, fruit, bread, a tea drunk together. Tom is young and Ev is young and I am young, so we are ever so slightly exotic animals.
The snow adds to my absorption. It smoothes and silences the world and removes it from me by degrees. We could be anywhere. It is difficult snow, no good at all for modelling. Ev and I go into the garden to make a Snowdad that Tom can see from his bed. The snow is too dry. It will not stick together. We cannot ball it up off the grass to give it any height or body. So the figure we make is only a heap, a low mound that we dress with a beard and eyebrows of copper beech and pebbles for eyes. When we finish I suddenly recognise him. It is the wide, dish face of the green man in his winter ermine at one with the falling snow, with his sides sloping and softening under snowflakes even as we work. The snow sits for a long time on the lawn and when it melts, our little heap lives for one more day.
The length of a day is no longer the measure it was. Days are no more use as yardsticks, nor hours, nor afternoons. It seems rare to have had such multiple experiences of time jammed so hard together. It creates its own kind of luck, a weird and elastic buoyancy beyond the usual rules, as if we have been outliving ourselves all the while. In the hospital we were pitching down a vertiginous chute at dangerous speed. Where were we heading? The aim in retrospect was simply not to die there. Before that, in those weeks of trying to keep together at home – weeks, or was it months, how long? – neither time nor momentum was measurable. There will be an equation for it but I do not know it. We worked three, four, five times as hard to stand still.
I am not frightened. The only time I am afraid is when I think back to the time before. I look at the other hypothesis – the what-might-have-been scene – now that it has been folded up and put away, and I see that it contains the groundwork for years of sifting through wreckage, a lifetime of damage. Sitting on the sofa looking into his room I feel none of these things so that view is unfathomable. But it was a flicker away, so slight, a hair’s width, less, that I am afraid. We three have escaped. I have the deep shock of the survivor.
The days have no point of reference, no signs or markers. We have been in the hospice for two weeks and the big marker, the opening of the exhibition, is in the past. I know it is the week before Christmas – another kind of marker, though not of our making and therefore less relevant. Within this temporal field our families and our friends signpost the days themselves by coming and going. They coalesce in shifts and vivid groups: my parents, Tom’s mother, his sisters, my brothers, my neighbours, our friends, people I’ve never met before. Some stay for half an hour, some for half a day. Some come every day. Though they themselves are subject to all the pressures of the season, to us they appear freeform and tied to nothing save us. They face only our way.
3.13
24 December 2010
Dear Friends
For those who are nearby, Tom, Marion and Ev will be at home at Trinity Hospice on Christmas Day and over the holidays. Please call by for a drink or a chat, a walk, or a play with Ev if you are around.
For those further away, we wish you a lovely Christmas.
To all of you, our thanks.
With love
I am busy. There are a few things best done at 3 or 4 a.m. The lights go out around 10 p.m. and all is quiet save for the intermittent call bells that send the nurses padding off down the hall. They never run. Each room has a bell. The sound is like an electronic violin playing two notes, one answered by the other at a different pitch. The noise is designed to be insinuating rather than immediate, not alarming, but impossible to ignore. It has the hallmark of intensive testing. When we arrived it took me a day or so to place even what the sound meant within the fabric of the building. I will know those two notes for the rest of my life. I can sing them. D and C sharp.
It is the night before Christmas. Everyone is packed away. Tom sleeps and my baby sleeps on a portable bed in the corner surrounded by decorations, cards, bells and a small illuminated tree. He lies under his duvet covered with stars. Beneath the bed his stocking waits for morning, its profile packed and bulging like a snake devouring a goat.
I have had a late surge of desire to commemorate my group of three with material objects. They must have presents! This is the consolation of the real. All desires are acted on instantly. There is no time. I am in the lounge stitching a blanket for Tom. He will love it.
I bought two plaid blankets and I am cutting the letters of our names out of the green one and stitching them on to the red one. Tom, Me & Ev. I do the cutting fair enough and the stitching rough for speed. I will have the rest of my life to do it properly. A catalogue on my knee supports the heavy cloth so that I don’t stitch through on to my dress. I am too tired for mistakes now. It is a big task, mad for the late hour, but the spontaneity of it feels familiar and exciting, like how things used to be. But it means that I have not stopped since dawn. I am still trying to keep all the opposing forces in motion. I know I will be defeated but even at this late stage I try still harder. We are all at it.
The second gift is a present from Tom to Ev and I found it this morning. I knew I was looking for something, a gift to our child from his father in his last days but I didn’t have an idea what such a thing might be. The symbolism of the gift defies all categories of object that might be found. When I saw it I didn’t understand how good it was but as soon as it caught my eye, I trusted it and bought it straight away. Over the day I like it more and more.
It is a set of three small tables made in the 1960s that stack sweetly one into another like a little sculpture, a domestic Donald Judd. Three forms: big, middle and small, with a neat-fitting tongue and groove mechanism that slots them inside each other. They function together as one hermetic shape and separately as replicas of that shape. They are a family and they fit: each three planes of a rectangle with edges smoothed on top. All hail the unconscious mind. All hail the world to have such things in it. All hail chance to set them before me.
The tables will be Ev’s. One day I will sand them. Remove the yellowed varnish. For now they can be tunnels, mountains, chairs, tables, cliffs and islands. For a short while he will be able to wriggle his body through them and soon, after all
this is over, he will outgrow the smallest. Later he will not be able to fit himself through any of them and maybe for a while after that he will lose interest. Then sometime in the future his interest will return in full and he can claim them back from me. They are solid. They will last.
3.14
I have had forty-six Christmases. This one starts in a normal way. Ev is the first person I see as my eyes open. Tom is the second. Intimacy is not simple. It is made. The nurses do not disturb us unless they have to. They value our privacy more than we do and keep their interventions to a minimum. Early in a morning they check the drug levels in the syringe driver, change his position in the bed and bring his porridge. Then later they wash him, get him up and dressed. I mix Tom’s drink, help him eat and get Ev’s breakfast. The only thing I miss that I do not have at this point is a good coffee. I will have to wait until someone brings one in.
We have had three Christmases with Ev and I recall the texture of each, but without effort he creates new habits so I scarcely remember how it was before his arrival. Ev opens his stocking on Tom’s bed and helps him unwrap the blanket. Tom can still use his left hand. They pull a cracker. Tom wears the crown. Ev heaps the blanket over Tom’s head and pulls it off. Tom’s eyes crease with laughter. His shoulders shake.
What I am seeing is an exquisite artefact held aloft. In many homes Christmas is a ritual pattern of small occurrences, yet to make this one happen – the child, the cracker, the paper crown – in the only place where it might have had a chance of happening, multiple agencies have played a role. Opaque and transparent, I cannot count them because I do not know them all to count: consultants, surgeons, nurses, therapists, doctors, relatives, friends, colleagues, strangers, donors, supporters, volunteers. Tom and Ev on the bed are a rare work of culture, dazzlingly constructed.
This year the hospice is the place to be. Tom sits in a wheelchair in the lounge and our friends arrive bearing gifts. The L-shaped sofas fill. Ev rips into present after present. These are his consolation prizes. There are too many of them. I hide them in the bathroom unopened.
Friends bring food too. But food is losing its function. Something is going wrong and the going wrong has folded in quickly. In order to be swallowed, food has to be pulped and eating even small quantities of solids can cause spectacular, all-hands-on-deck choking with nurses summoned. The bacon sandwich I brought in on Saturday is treacherous today. We cannot have such violence in front of Ev. But in fact we just cannot have it. It is too debilitating. So we adjust and we invent, we experiment further and further and shift the way we think of food, towards alchemical blends and suspensions of creamy fluids rich in goodness. Food becomes about colour, hue and dye. A palette of sharp vert of mint and soft pea, pumpkin with saffron strands, beetroot mash, flaming carrot shot with turmeric or stringent red tomato.
But I forget Christmas dinner. I fail to register its significance and Christmas dinner for Tom comes as small pats of slurry in monotone shades. When you destroy the structure and texture of meat, roast potatoes and glazed carrots this is what is left: three mounds merging on a plate like a bad chart, a pictorial rendition of malice. He is grieved and for the following hours is knocked out of sorts. Mine isn’t anything either – I hardly taste what I eat – but there is little solidarity one can make apart from endless just-right silken soups, rice pudding, or the panettone I mash in solace with alcohol and cream, poison for a diabetic but we are beyond that now. Drink is thickened and food thinned, all substances converging towards an optimum consistency, a nutritional medium medium.
We are shadow chasing. Food is losing its charge. All is separating out and the laws that govern us no longer govern him. Today he gives up the nebuliser for his chest as too intrusive. Let it all lie.
3.15
27 December 2010
The 28th December – tomorrow – is Tom’s birthday.
He will be 53.
Do join us for a drink in the evening at Trinity.
x
One. One. One one. The first day of two thousand and eleven is spent underwater. All of us are drowned and those who enter the room to sit awhile become complicit in the drowning party. Tom’s mother is here and his sisters. His chest sounds like a stream, not free-flowing but blocked, choked upstream by leaves, sticks and silt, like a hidden rill shrouded with trees and wayward hedges running down the side of a path in Hampshire. He showed me once this place: the ditch where he used to play. I sit by the side of him to watch and listen. Sometimes I hear the noise in another way. Then it doesn’t sound like a stream at all but like a fire when wind blows fitfully over the embers in a fickle stoking of energy.
Where is Ev? I don’t know. Somewhere. At some point, maybe it wasn’t today but another day, Tom wakes and we look at each other. Aaah. Yes. I see you now. This looking is just as it was. I know it well. I feel its charge like a little current unbroken. Maybe I can feast off this in the time to come. Maybe it will last me till the spring or longer but I cannot rely on it. My memory is wasted, over-stacked with stuff, and my hoarding is erratic at best. My memory may fail me. Perhaps it won’t be a sporadic loss but a totality. Perhaps I will forget everything that has happened in the great wash of the hereafter. The present will be overtaken soon enough.
Epic sleeping is new. They said it would happen and everything else they said would happen has happened so I believe this too and I understand what it means. The lack of appetite is shocking. His appetites of late have been drug-fuelled, byzantine, outrageous but no, eating shuts down quietly and quickly in a day, two, without a fight. He has nearly stopped drinking. I keep temptations to hand: puddings, soups, biscuits melted in milk, cakes soused in alcohol, but none can rouse him.
Yesterday, on the last day of the old year, we were busy. We took Tom out on the common in his chair. Ev ran ahead. The air attacked our lungs and the cold rushing to our heads after the warmth inside loosened us and sent us mad. Stalling at kerbs we levered his weight up and down and about. We were erratic and tried to go too fast. Tom was jarred. The rest of the day was spent with friends in rolling sequence, eating and drinking and staying up late like everyone else. Yesterday though was a year away and today is payback for the brain. Tom folds in on himself like a three-dimensional structure made of tissue onto which has fallen a fatal drop of water.
A new year has begun. Perhaps the one cruelty of this story is that after this, when I look on to the garden, it will look the same. There will be no outward sign. At death the world does not alter: no shift of earth or change of colour, no noise, no shimmer of light, no falling or collapsing of physical objects. The tree standing there will still stand. Stay, stay awhile longer.
Heather brings a celeriac soup with chestnuts. It is riven with bacon and warm seams of root.
I wake from a dream. It is my only dream of the last two years and not so significant at first it seems but then I’m not so sure. In the dream I am looking for a studio but the work I plan to do in it is precisely and entirely the work of mourning. I am shown one like many I have seen, with white-painted floorboards, neon strip lights, slightly down at heel, just fine. But the studio is submerged under water: far, far down. Dark water, dense with creatures in shoals, swarms and pods, fills the windows and presses on to the skylight above. There are fish of great size and whiskery mammals like primitive beavers gone wild in the deep. There are dugong, ancient porpoise and illuminated colour-saturated krill, creatures with trumpets for mouths and kissing orgiastic lips. There are fat, fleshy, nameless things, fish with radiant internal architecture and skeletons of glass and giant anemones or maybe squid trailing filaments in foliate loops. They are ecstatic, pressing and magnifying themselves against the glass on all sides. They rub and fondle past each other and then retreat to become tiny opaque blobs against blackness, with new creatures ever coming forward to replace them. The water teems with their impossible numbers, all drawn out of the darkness by the single bulb of the studio light. I like it. I say. I will take it.
I ha
d promised Tom a fish soup and as soon as the kitchen opens at midday I go to the French place with my flask in honour of the dream. We had eaten it there years before and I remember the viscosity as being just right for his throat. It is a real bouillabaisse, made of crushed warm little fishes, bodies and bones suspended in red oily stock, with no flour, no hidden thickener, the best for miles around. Talking to the chef I have the urge to tell him who the soup is for, as if to stress for him how much it means. But I don’t say anything. It remains a transaction. Soup. In a flask. I do the errand and hurry back. He eats three teaspoons before he stops. I rub his neck at the place pressed and tucked against pillows where it angles into his back and get small sighs of delight. Stay, stay awhile longer.
Ev back from play brings in three sticks from the common. He lays them on the stool beside the bed. A present. Big, medium and small – he knows our configuration by heart.
This evening we have a little party. A small group come by for wine and songs. Tom knows the friends who come this evening. To each one’s touch and greeting he utters a different sound but his eyes are closed. Only when he hears the voice of Ev at his homecoming does he open them. I see this. I am the only one who does. I am so very lucky. I might have turned my head to catch something and I would have missed it. I see that look. Their reach to each other is unchanged.
3.16
Thinking of a history of Death’s depictions I can think of none that resemble what is happening here. Who is he? For a start a man: the ancient, skeletal, scythe-bearer, cloven-hoofed one, lord of darkness, thief, shadow. Our imaginings of him are puerile and simple-minded. They are pathetic, fantastical. They fail on every count. Where is the one-in-daylight, clearly seen; the functionary; the attentive one who commands all of our attention in real time; the one who withholds, withdraws; our symmetry; the one we call Nature? Childbirth is nothing. Death is mighty. The 0 to our 1. There is nothing in the world like it. But there is nothing in it that is not like the world.
The Iceberg Page 24