The Room where it happens
"Open up the window and let me breathe..." (TB Sheets by Van Morrison)
I'm writing this to you, and, after all, your email is on this distribution list, so maybe you’ll read it even though you’re in the after
If I was to advise you anything upon entering a room where a death is going to happen it would be to bring a good book. I read two, Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore both by Haruki Murakami; the former bought to my attention by Harry Styles, a Russian Doll of artistic discovery, like all good crushes. I’ve bought another Murakami book since but I can’t open it, I haven’t enjoyed fiction since Kafka on the Shore, which I put down to watch your final breaths. And there I’m held, paused amongst the living, still inside the room where it happened.
Rooted in that moment between life and living, listening to your laboured breathing and drinking in fiction while you’re sleeping, coughing, sleeping, coughing, coughing, coughing. Please sleep. I do wish they’d turn off the air conditioning, I’m freezing.
You do not live on your deathbed but you’re still alive. You do not live whilst sat beside the dying, but you’re still alive. There’s a lot of life but very little living in that room. Death takes his final bow after a lot of anticipation; he might not be coming at all, you begin to think. He times it well, offers you relief, you’re always ready when he enters the room, you might not want to admit it, but you want him to enter that room, the room where life cannot go on living. Not even yours.
There’s a version of me that lives inside that room, reading a book and glancing at every movement, offering words of comfort and lifting your body as carefully as I can because it’s feeling uncomfortable but also always in pain. I can’t do anything to send her packing. She walks alongside me, staring at me silently, and when I look at her she says, “Remember the night when he wouldn’t settle and he was so scared? Remember the night when he stopped being able to speak words and he gargled sounds and looked confused and scared when you said you couldn’t understand them? Remember how when you’d have a night at the hotel you were so tired and drained you couldn’t speak to those anxious at home? Remember how for a whole month when you got home you couldn’t talk about any of it? How you still can’t. How most people, except your sister and your uncle, don’t know the full story? Remember how the three of you were able to laugh over drinks when you escaped the hospital for the final time? Remember that lovely night on the river with Tak? Remember how the three of you walked the peak like tourists the next day, shell shocked and hungry for beauty and nature and life?”
Last month she woke me up to remind me of the time my sister and I were sitting in the hospital corridor, waiting to see you, and a morgue drawer, that’s what it was, a metal draw with a handle and a lid, was wheeled past us followed by two crying sisters, walking behind their mother. She wanted to remind me of how we watched it silently and then exchanged a look. Siobhan had realised what it was before I did. There’s something so horrifying about a morgue drawer, worse than a coffin. I wonder if both of us knew we didn’t want to be part of that scene then, if that’s why we ran out of the room with you still in bed, mouth open, not breathing, and took ourselves to a bar. Life. The living. There is a version of the three of us, your brother and two daughters, that lives in that room, bonded in a way we never wanted to be. You don’t walk out of that room together, you each walk out alone. It’s isolating. But those three live on together, sharing the exact same pain, and the exact same laughter, trapped inside that room.
Death is a separation but it doesn’t only separate the one who stopped living, who is no longer alive, it separates those left living. It creates a before and an after. A together and an apart. No one warns you about this. No one can. You can’t speak to the before when you’re in the after. We know we can’t question the dead, what we don’t know is that we can’t also question the living once they are in the after. They crossed a continent in that room where it happens and now an ocean of grief sits between them and the before. The good news is that when you land on that continent there will be people waiting for you with open arms as you stare back at the people over the horizon who you have now left behind.
I have been in the room where it happens twice, and the experience was very similar, save culture wars and a lack of hospice care in the latter. What I know from the girl I left behind in the room where my Aunty died, is that she not only lives and breathes with her other Aunties, her Mum and her cousins who live there with her, still in that room, still in the pubs they escaped to between hospital shifts, still in the lounge of my Aunty B’s old house drinking together and laughing (you laugh a lot when someone is dying, something else no one tells you), but the after versions also found their way back together, different, separate, but still somehow together. Out of the room and back to the living.
For me it was fairly quick last time, the weight of my grief not nearly as heavy as those who lost a mother or a sister. Heavy enough, but it is not at all the same. Oh, she still whispers memories to me from inside the room, but the shock of them is different. I am oddly lucky to have had an Aunty show me how to lose a parent in the most graphic way. You asked me once, how I knew when I told you why you needed a drip, even though you were dying, “I was with Aunty Kath”, I said. And you looked at me as if you hadn’t seen me before, I think you might even have wanted to ask some questions, but you didn’t. Instead you told me I should be a nurse. People are always telling me to be things that I’m not; therapist is the one I get most. And I smile and think, ‘You really don’t understand what a writer and performer does, do you?’
Writing is a bit like being in the room where it happened. Every time you unwittingly create a new version of “you” who goes on living with and without you. Left behind in your words, entombed forever in an idea you left behind the moment you finished it. You cross a desert of ideas and you change irrevocably because of it and you leave only your words, to be interpreted as they may. By the time your friends and family are watching or reading you’re long gone, over the horizon, a little further out of their reach. As if you’re marching ahead in time. They can’t travel the desert with you, it’s a journey you take alone. You say goodbye, I’ll see you on the other side. And you do see them on the other side, but not really. They get further and further away from you. They talk to the you before, or the last you before that, or the you that lived 10 years ago. Of course they do, we can’t talk to the after. Depression and it’s recovery are also the same, only this time you travel the dark underworld, perjury, the land of the not dead, not living. This time the deathbed is your own. But that’s another story.
The more we go on living the further we move from where we started. I’ve had to learn that painfully and, over time, accept it. We move on ahead and shout back at shadows of people who have also moved on to somewhere else. But still the old versions of ourselves go on living together in a room where something happened. A school classroom, a particularly raucous holiday, Christmas 1999, a Take That concert. On and on those people go on living, occasionally they meet each other in their current version “Oh, remember when!” They say. Easy company slotting together, the desert shrinking to the size of a beach for a moment. Then off we go again, on another adventure, leaving that version behind.
I wasn’t expecting to become so attached to grieving, I didn’t even notice I had until I realised I couldn’t open that new book. To enjoy another Murakami novel would be in some way to move on. And I’m not ready. You grieve in a bubble where only you and the dead person exist and no one else is allowed in. What if I leave and you cease to exist? What if I forget you? What if we stop these conversations we’ve been having ever since you took your last breath, or maybe just a little bit before. What if the love stops.
It doesn’t
Of course
I do know that
But could you please tell my heart?
I've been wearing your jumper all week. My hands reached for it by instinct, inviting you back into the room with me, where you had always been, hiding in the shadows unseen.
There's been a lot of rain lately.
Hot water and lemon, that's what you would drink in those months before, whenever we went out for dinner. Feeding your skeleton. Hot water and lemon. I feel too nostalgic to drink it in your honour.
Hot water and lemon
The little smack, smacking of your lips as you contemplated your food
The cavernous grunting sound of your chewing
No one eats as loud as you did
Your feminine fingers resting your chopsticks between them expertly
I always liked your hands, my favourite part of you. They betrayed you; delicate hands that conveyed your sensitivity, which you tried to hide behind your endless impatience
I have your fingers, I think
Your toes too, but we won't mention those
I never understood how you could be a Pisces too, with your business head and your seeming indifference, but if I had been paying attention I would have realised that your hands gave you away
You were delicate
And lost
Desperately searching for a Father figure you could admire, an insecurity you passed on
I wonder if your Father passed it on to you?
I wish we could ask him
You showed your love in shyness, I do that too. I wonder who you got it from? Your Mum, probably. Funny how much of myself I’ve found easier to accept since you died. “Oh, that’s just like Dad”, I say, and instantly forgive myself. I hated myself because I hated what you did, I hated all the bits of you that were like me after that. I read your distance as indifference. Now I watch my sister do it with me, and I scream at her silently through the impenetrable field of my grief, “I do love you but right now I just need to love myself.” I wish I could explain it better than that, but I can’t. It’s been so long since I loved myself I need a moment here. It’s so lovely.
It was hard to talk to you after, you were elsewhere, and we were before, ringing in the new Millennium through tears. You were elsewhere, loving yourself. Which now I pause to think about it is all I would have wished for you. I’d have known that then, if I was able to love myself.
The unconscious things we do, I wish these words would convert to tears. Instead they register as a tension inside my throat, my neck, my jaw. Some emotions are too big for crying.
Some emotions are too big for words. The problem with writing about grief is that you've got to distance yourself from the event before you can do it. For the writer it feels as though someone unplugged you when you can find no words to describe what you're feeling. And you can't. You can't do it. It tumbles out of you unseen, unrecorded, unwitnessed as if it never even happened. Well, you've got to go on living, they say. But I can't when this is unwritten.
All year, all year, is it really nearly a year, Dad, is it nearly a year? All year I’ve been tongue tied in my feelings, saying nothing at all, or far too much, it’s like writing a solo show, I never can explain it until it’s finished. It’s why I’m so bad at pitching. How do you explain what you haven’t yet completed? I’m not done, I’m not done grieving. I’m not done, I’m not done writing. And still, they come to you for a handy blurb, a sentence or two. I don’t know how to headline a feeling. Sorry.
It’s hard to love someone like me, who processes life through words on a page, or a stage, who doesn’t know how to do small talk, who talks in philosophical riddles, head in the clouds, looking for the answers to the whole universe, crossing deserts alone, creating stories, living a life through the lives of all the characters inside your head. It’s hard to love someone like you, travelling the World, leaving everyone behind, moving onto something new, starting again and again. Two fish swimming in opposite directions, it’s hard to love someone like us, who never seem to know what we want, except that’s it; we never want to know what we want, it’s over the horizon, not yet seen. That’s what we’ve been talking about ever since you died.
And in these conversations you’ve been teaching me how to love myself, in a way you never could when you were living. That’s a beautiful thing. Is it any wonder I don’t want to leave the room where it happened? Where we started those lessons, where you smiled every time I walked in, where you loved me so much you could die right next to me. But it’s nearly a year now which feels like a good time to allow your soul to get on with the business of blissful oblivion.
And I will
I will
That’s what I’ll do on Monday 11th of January 2021
I will
That’s what I’ll do
“Dad”
I’ll say,
Whilst holding a glass of Champagne,
“I think I must get on with the business of living.”
And you won’t answer because you’ve already moved on
"It’s been so long since I loved myself I need a moment here. It’s so lovely. " I keep going back to mine all the loveliness of this piece. It raises so many questions and thoughts...
Wow- glad I found my way here. Such a creative inspired journey.