Where stories stop: thoughts on grief, and a poem

Two days before Christmas, my mum died. She was 96 years old and died peacefully at home. It was everything she – and we - would have wished. It was a ‘good’ death.

All of that is true and important. None of it takes away from the leaden emptiness that sits in my belly. Or the wordless fears that keep me up at night. Or the feeling that I am hurtling towards the edge of a cliff.

Of course it matters how someone dies. And yet death is always sudden. Always unexpected. How can someone alive not be alive anymore? It is a stupid question, a child’s question. It is my question.

We were going through my mum’s cupboards. We found some tins of tomatoes that were three years out of date. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. These are not the grand narratives and eulogies, but the small, absurd signs of a life lived. A life gone. A life worth loving, despite it all.

But, if you grieve, then grieve. Rage. Cry. Be numb. It doesn’t have to make sense. It won’t.

Whatever you believe about death, it is a rupture. A tear in the fabric of the world. A tear in your own heart. Whether you comfort yourself with belief in life after death, or with the secular alternative that death is natural and normal, none of us escape that wrench. None of us stop telling stories to try and make sense of it.

Death is outside of stories.

I have hope that love is stronger than death. At the same time, I hardly know what that means. I have faith in the communion of the living and the dead. Still, there is a yawning absence in the world that refuses to be papered over. Death taps on the shell of hope and finds it hollow.

I still hope, stupidly. I still tell stories, desperately. It is what we have. Maybe it is the way that love is stronger than death. I don’t know. As I said to a friend, recently, ‘I can’t understand any of it’.

I wrote some words about this. I hope they might be of some use. To me, to anyone. I can only offer them to the empty space where something like love persists.

One Last Time

The last time I sat with you,

your breath was as shallow as a bird’s.

You took up so little space.

Downton Abbey was on the TV,

unwatched, your eyes unfocused;

perhaps you were looking past it all

to where flesh and bones can rest

and we can lay down the roles we play.

I held your hand within mine

as you had once held the whole of me.

And when it was time to go

I said ‘We’ll see you on Christmas Eve.’

For that moment, you came back,

saw me, gave a small nod and mouthed ‘Yes.’

‘I love you,’ I said briskly,

but the words lingered, like a goodbye.

The next morning, you were gone.

You had let the ebb-tide take you out

beyond my reach, beyond words

into the other side of the air.

And I can’t breathe for a heart

full of years and days and dreams of dreams:

paddling on Llandudno beach,

the petrol smell of Hednesford raceway

and pine trees on Cannock chase.

You were always there, until today.

I’m glad you waited for me,

one last time; glad for long sleepless nights

when the dark offers questions

which can only be darkly endured;

when you will teach me this truth:

that loss is another name for love.