In these first days I see how rapidly the surface of the world, like a sheet of water that’s briefly agitated, will close again silently and smoothly over a death. His, everyone’s, mine. I see, as if I am myself dead. This perception makes me curiously light-hearted.
You share in the death of your child, in that you approach it so closely that you sense that a part of you, too, has died that instant. At the same time, you feel that the spirit of the child has leaped into you. So you are both partly dead and yet more alive. You are cut down, and yet you burn with life.
This so-called ‘work of grief’ is turning out to be a shatteringly exhausting apprehension of the needed work of living. It demands to be fully lived, while the labour of living it is physically exhausting – like virulent jetlag, but surging up in waves.
The notes and emails of condolence have stopped arriving and I’ve acknowledged each of them. Yet after all this ritual and effort, he still hasn’t come home. What more does he want?
So intricate and singular a living thing can’t just vanish from the surface of life: that would run counter to all your accumulated experience. The day after his death, studiously wiping away what you realize are the last tangible traces: tiniest bits of his hair from the edge of the washbasin. This solid persistence of things. So then, the puzzle of what ‘animation’ is; of exactly what it is that’s been crushed.
This instant enlargement of human sympathy. It’s arrived in me at once. His death has put me in mind of those millions whose children were and are lost in natural disasters, starved, drowned, or systematically obliterated in wars; no wonder that bitterness and a loss of hope have filtered down the generations, with the resulting disengagement of those left alive. Millions disorientated, perhaps, by this quiet feeling of living, only just, on this near side of a cut between the living and the dead.
At the death of your child, you see how the edge of the living world gives onto burning whiteness. This edge is clean as a strip of guillotined celluloid film. First came the intact negative full of blackened life in shaded patches, then abruptly, this milkiness. This candid whiteness, where a life stopped. Nothing ‘poetic’, not the white radiance of eternity – but sheer non-being, which is brilliantly plain.
Apparently almost half a year has gone by since J disappeared, and it could be five minutes or half a century, I don’t know which. There is so very little movement. At first I had to lie down flat for an hour each afternoon, because of feeling crushed as if by a leaden sheet, but by now I don’t need to lie down. This slight physical change is my only intimation of time.
Knowing and also not knowing that he’s dead. Or I ‘know’ it, but privately I can’t feel it to be so. These fine gradations of admitting the brute facts of the case, while not feeling them; utterly different, though, from supposing that he’s still alive somewhere else in this world. This isn’t some ambiguity designed to blur the hard fact. Nor is it an imperfect anaesthetic.
This knowing and not knowing is useful, for it allows the truthful richness of all those shades of acknowledging and dissenting. Half-realizing while half-doubting, assenting while demurring, conceding while finding it ludicrously implausible – so many distinctions, all of them nicely in play. To characterize such accurate nuances as my ‘denial’ of his death would be off the mark. Yet who is policing my ‘acceptance’ of it?
What a finely vigorous thing a life is; all its delicate complexity abruptly vanished. Almost comical. A slapstick fall.
There’s no relation, simply, between your recall of the courageously optimistic dead and your knowledge of the fall of sudden blackness. But you struggle to hold both in mind at once. You try to slot together the snippets of evidence – coffin, ashes, silent house, non-reappearance of child – to become fully convinced by the deduction that you have conscientiously drawn.
My head can’t piece together the facts of a coffin under its roses and lilies, then the sifting gunmetal-grey ashes, with this puzzling absence of the enthusiastic person who left home to work abroad for a few days but has still not walked back in the door.
Not that I have delusions, as such. But a strong impression that I’ve been torn off, brittle as any dry autumn leaf, liable to be blown onto the tracks in the underground station, or to crumble as someone brushes by me in this public world where people rush about loudly, with their astonishing confidence. Each one of them a candidate for sudden death, and so helplessly vulnerable. If they do grasp that at any second their own lives might stop, they can’t hold on to that expectation. As I do now. Later everyone on the street seems to rattle together like dead leaves in heaps.
Wandering around in an empty plain, as if an enormous drained landscape lying behind your eyes had turned itself outward. Or you find yourself camped on a threshold between inside and out. The slight contact of your senses with the outer world, your interior only thinly separated from it, like a membrane resonating on a verge between silence and noise. If it were to tear through, there’s so little behind your skin that you would fall out towards the side of sheer exteriority. Far from taking refuge deeply inside yourself, there is no longer any inside, and you have become only outward. As a friend, who’d survived the suicide of the person closest to her, says: ‘I was my two eyes set burning in my skull. Behind them there was only vacancy.’
I work to earth my heart.
A summer has gone, a cold autumn is setting in, but I’ve no sense of my time as having any duration, or any future. Time now is a plateau. I only know whether an event came before or after the date of the death. If there was a death. I didn’t see the body. His body. Not that the sight always helps to anchor your belief in the fact. What a lumpish little word: ‘dead’. And ‘died’ seems an increasingly silly verb. ‘Dead’, used of the lively J, strikes me as not only unlikely, but mistaken. A prematurely coarse verdict. Like John Donne’s phrase; ‘her death – which word wrongs her.’1 Instead I want to say ‘since he vanished’. That seems far more accurate. It’s better conveyed in French or in Italian, where without any affectation you could call someone’s death ‘his disappearance’, or you might naturally say that ‘she has left us’.
Immediately J vanished, I fell into a solidarity with other bereaved parents: an imagined solidarity, because at that stage I didn’t know any. I sought them out, online and in meetings and one-to-one, and I listen ardently to how they try to live on. So I can hear that everyone testifies to this wish once they’re in the safe company of others in the same boat: the hope for their own rapid death. Yet I can’t allow myself this comforting prospect, as I won’t abandon my surviving children. Any more than I’ll abandon the dead one. I never abandoned him in his life, and I’ve no intention of starting now, ‘just because he’s dead’. What kind of a reason would that be? I tried always to be there for him, solidly. And I shall continue to be. (The logic of this conviction: in order to ‘be there’, I too have died.)
A vicarious death. If a sheet of blackness fell on him, it has fallen on me too. As if I also know that blankness after his loss of consciousness.
This state is physically raw, and has nothing whatever to do with thinking sad thoughts or with ‘mourning’. It thuds into you. Inexorable carnal knowledge.
The plainest simplest horror from which the mind flinches away: never to see that person again. The purely cognitive violence of it. Now you understand those ideas of the migration of spirits, or of reincarnation: to try to soften that blow. Or no, not to soften it – but to provide something for baffled cognition to grasp at.
I’ve decided that this slow head of mine has to be left alone to not manage to make its impossible deduction. Meanwhile I’ll try to incorporate J’s best qualities of easy friendliness, warmth, and stoicism, and I shall carry him on in that way. Which is the only kind of resurrection of the dead that I know about.
I am inching along. But not forward, or in any other decipherable direction. If it’s crabwise, then it’s without effective pincers. This deep tiredness, as if sharing his grave; although actually most of that dead boy was poured as fine charcoal powder straight into the sea.
Now it’s thirty-nine weeks, the duration of a pregnancy, since he vanished. As if a pregnancy had by now been wound backwards past the point of conception and away into its pre-existence.
What do the dead give us? A grip on the present instant in which we’re now relentlessly inserted. Not in a contemplative sense, but vigorously. A carnal sensation. If to be dead is to exist outside of earthly time, then this tough-minded energetic ‘living in the present’ is also the life of the dead. My new ability to live in the present joins in that timelessness of being dead. Or the nearest I can get to it.
This ‘skewed’ perception of time – isn’t it perfectly to be expected? Nothing exceptionally distorted, but a common human experience which could be recognized through being described. How might you save the strangeness of this immobile non-time from being considered pathological; an evaluation which would further isolate its dwellers? But your democratizing impulse here can succeed all too well, as some hearers will comment briskly on your descriptive efforts, ‘You mean, like the feeling of disturbed time you get after a bad break-up, or if you lose your job – well, surely that’s a common experience.’ And then, aside, ‘She’s becoming a real death bore,’ they’ll recoil, shaking their heads. Or so you fear. Is this the famous hypersensitivity of the bereaved at work in you?
No tenses any more. Among the recent labels for temporality is ‘time dilation’, referring to our perception’s elasticity, its capacity to be baggy. But are there any neurological accounts of this feeling of completely arrested time? It feels as if some palpable cerebral alteration has taken place. As if, to make the obvious joke, your temporal lobes have been flooded and are now your a-temporal lobes.
I’ll try again: a sudden death, for the one left behind, does such violence to the experienced ‘flow’ of time that it stops, and then slowly wells up into a large pool. Instead of the old line of forward time, now something like a globe holds you. You live inside a great circle with no rim. In the past, before J’s idiotic disappearance, the future lay in front of me as if I could lean into it gently like a finger of land, a promontory feeling its way into the sea. But now I’ve no sense of any onward temporal opening, but stay lodged in the present, wandering over some vast saucer-like incline of land, some dreary wide plain like the banks of the river Lethe, I suppose. His sudden death has dropped like a guillotine blade to slice through my old expectation that my days would stream onwards into my coming life. Instead I continue to sense daily life as paper-thin. As it is. But this cut through any usual feeling of chronology leaves a great blankness ahead.
Now you expect another death – a remaining child’s – to be announced to you at any moment, and you try to steady yourself for it. It’s not so much fearfulness as a life poised in acute suspension. You’re tensed for anything. No plans can be made for any future, so you must try to inhabit this present with equanimity and in good heart. This might sound like stoicism’s programme. But it’s no philosophical stance, nor is it valour that dictates your new approach to living; only your realization that now a familiar apprehension of passing time has been barred to you. Nothing, then, like the happier notion of ‘seizing the day’. On the contrary: there is no time to seize. The former slim and orderly temporal line has been blown away, as if it had been reduced to ash as efficiently as your child’s corpse.
‘Only in the present moment is our happiness’: the stoics’ pronouncement. The irony is that now you’ve succeeded brilliantly in living exclusively in the present, but only as the result of that death. To endure, yes, but when the usual passage of time is in shards? What does your old philosophy of endurance mean, when there’s no longer any temporality left in which to wait it out?
Impossible, caught in your sheltering space of no-time, to grasp that your child’s dead when they stay so vividly present. As if they themselves haven’t the least intention of lying down gracefully with folded hands.
Unanticipated death does such violence to your ordinary suppositions, as if the whole inductive faculty by which you’d previously lived has faltered. Its textbook illustration was always ‘Will the sun rise tomorrow?’ But now that induction itself is no more, the sun can’t any longer be relied on to rise. And my son does not rise. This silly pun alone can reliably work its mechanical work.
For the first time you grasp that inhabiting the drift of time is a mutable perception; one which can stop, leaving you breathing but stranded, stock still. From this unexpected vantage point, you discover that the perception of a ‘flowing’ time must have been secreted by and then exuded from the mind, like a silkworm spinning out its silken thread from its jaws; but now its conditions of production, whatever they were, are destroyed. There’s nothing of the intellect in this revelation. It stems entirely from visceral sensations.
You could try to describe this being outside time by using a string of negatives: you live in the breathlessness of sensing that everything might halt at the next heartbeat, you’ve no conviction that your small daily plans (which, comically, must still be made) will ever bear fruit – those negatives are true but unhelpful. For this state of a-temporality isn’t experienced negatively. It is lucidly calm as it fills up your horizons. Though a novel element to you, it brings an unanxious and energetic simplicity. A crystalline life, concentrated in the instant, and pleased enough with it. This new time of yours may, in fact, be the time of the dead themselves.
At almost a year since he died – or he ‘died’, for the plain assertion of his death still sounds foolishly melodramatic – I read endless online papers in cardiac pathology. Eventually I try to stop my reading, then am overwhelmed by whirring ‘what ifs’: what if one of his doctors had noticed J’s (in retrospect, blindingly evident) heart failure or had taken his fainting episodes seriously; what if I’d known to draw the right conclusions myself from the signs that I, living with him daily, could see; what if the proper diagnosis had been made, what the surgical options might have done, was it better for him to have died not knowing about his cardiomyopathy, or would he have wanted to have had more years, if impaired . . . All my furious study and speculation is the uselessness of thought trying to rewind time, to master what cannot be mastered. And this thought does nothing to stop it.
In your imagination, you will endlessly witness the instant of your child’s dying. But the accompanying struggle to realistically assess your degree of responsibility for the death needn’t entail your ‘masochism’. It seems vital to not flinch from the former, while not sliding into the latter. And to get that distinction clear, just for yourself, will demand a forensic labour. To take responsibility; the word means, to weigh things up. That testing the weight doesn’t have to be a labour of guilt. Does it?
I had wanted un-frightened company. And yet I could sit alone, and needed to sit alone, to translate his autopsy report from its original Spanish with an online medical dictionary to hand, in a coolly determined rush of concentration. The living person was rather squeamish and he would not have cared for this. Needs must. I read on rapidly about the discovery of the corpse in a still-running bath, its good musculature (at that, he’d have brightened up), its chest cavity opened up by means of the conventional incision, the skull sawed so that the brain could be lifted out, the enlarged heart dissected on removal, the fluids in lungs and bladder inspected and measured. The drive to know is cool-headed; this concentrated will to understand everything about your child’s sudden death becomes intensely forensic, and dispassionate. Only much later would I wonder about, for instance, the degree of physical effort needed to shear open a chest. Or whether the ribs’ cartilage is easily cut. This autopsy happened to be imperfect in settling for ‘heart attack’, as that conclusion did not fit its own findings of the enlarged heart which instead implied cardiomyopathy; and it demanded far more research into the nature of drowning, how you can distinguish death by water from death prior to immersion by the flooding of the lungs with small haemorrhaged flecks of blood. You read on rapidly, quietly through the pages, feeling yourself as expressionless as that chilled body on the pathologist’s slab, which by now is so inert and drained of spirit for you that your difficult part lies elsewhere; in explaining later to others (though you’ll spare them from hearing exactly what you’ve learned) why your work was necessary. That it wasn’t some obsessed self-reproach, but that for the sake of your still-living children you’d needed to establish the true cause of their brother’s death and its possible genetic implications for them. You don’t want them to die too, through your avoidable ignorance. Many parents say this – that they will pursue the cause of death doggedly. Later I reflect that I had been too alone in my task. So that the local surgery could close my son’s file, I take the translated autopsy report to a young GP, who glances at it, then sits with his head in his hands, saying, ‘I wasn’t trained to deal with this. We didn’t get to read autopsies. This is absolutely horrendous.’ Perhaps he doesn’t yet have his own children. Or he does. I do my best to reassure him that it’s usual to search out each detail, to try to know. To keep your child company in its death.
Maybe to stop grilling yourself about your remotest responsibility for the death would need some sense that a future and its customary logical furnishings were in place. But now they are not. All the usual supports for your reasoning, the unnoticed but vital connecting tissues of ‘because’ and ‘then’, have been severed. The old edifice of knowing now droops forward and flops without its scaffolding. So your uncertainties will return and return, as there’s nothing to calm and secure them.
We can forgive ourselves for the death of our children.
Perhaps this forgiving ourselves will need to be done over and over again. I don’t know.
Superficially ‘fine’ as my daily air of cheerfulness carries me around with an unseen crater blown into my head, the truth is that my thoughts are turned constantly to life and to death; all that I can now attentively hold.
It still seems ludicrous to decide, finally, that I shall not see that face on this earth. What would be ‘natural’ would be his beaming reappearance, a bit sheepish at having been away from home for so long. More limp puns abound: you conceived the child, but you can’t conceive of its death.
The persisting impression of the living-on of the dead child as your mind ploughs on along its familiar cognitive furrows. It’s like that cartoon image of Donald Duck running straight off the edge of a cliff, his webbed feet going on paddling wildly in the air – until he looks down. He’ll only plummet once he’s put together what he’s just glimpsed, the ground far below, with his realization of his mid-air state.
Wherever can you find written accounts of this lived time without consequence? It’s rare. Here, though, is Emily Dickinson’s quatrain, relentlessly to the point:
The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence raveled out of sound
Like balls upon a floor.
‘Sequence raveled out of sound’, indeed. One note no longer implies another’s coming. You watch the water cascading from the tap to splash into the basin. Yet noting small events and their effects doesn’t revive your former impression of moving inside time. The tap turns, water pours. You can observe sequence. Nothing, though, follows from this observation to propel you, too, onward into the old world of consequences.
Not that your sense of time is ‘distorted’. What’s changed is more radical than that. Simply, you are no longer in time. Only from your freshly removed perspective can you fully understand how our habitual intuitions of time are not without their limits, and can falter.
To tell someone with a dead child, ‘You should move on,’ is doubly thoughtless, because there’s no medium left through which to move anywhere. We were drifting through our former time like underwater creatures furnished with gills that they didn’t notice they had, until they were fished up out of their element and their breathing apparatus failed.
If there is ever to be any movement again, that moving will not be ‘on’. It will be ‘with’. With the carried-again child.
Your old stance is changed – not by melancholy, but by the shattering of that underlying intuition of moving in time, an intuition which you can’t register until it’s collapsed. If time was once flowing, extended, elongated – a river, a road, a ribbon – now the river is dammed, the road blocked, the ribbon slashed. Well-worn metaphors all shot to pieces.
He is not dead to me.
You live under the sign of the provisional. Often with faint amusement over little debates: do you unpack this coral dress from storage as if, when the summer arrives in a few months, you’ll still be alive to wear it? Yes – but purely because you enjoy the zing of its colour today.
Time arrested, as the triumph of metaphor, or so it would seem at first. Perhaps, though, it’s more a crisscrossing and slippage of emotion, which you can only recount through descriptions which serve the dead and the living indiscriminately. So if this inability to grasp the fact of the death is my own lot, the dead themselves may well share it. All those many faiths in which the freshly and suddenly dead don’t yet realize that they’re dead, and so have to be placated, or to have novenas held for them, or their corpses sat up with, all night long, at wakes, now make perfect sense; those left behind need to keep a wary eye on their dead who can’t be trusted not to reappear. And why wouldn’t they be shocked and furious at being ousted from life?
Analogies ramify. Plunged in some florid jungle of ‘as ifs’, you sense them roaming everywhere, blossoming like bindweed, tying everything together then spiralling upward, entwining you and the dead in conjoined experience.
In how many ways this folded-together state appears. You already share the ‘timeless time’ of the dead child. As if you’d died too, or had lost the greater part of your own life. As if a new no-time stands still in your veins. That’s the overarching ‘as if’. Then there’s an ‘as if’ of uttering, when the speech of the one left behind can turn staccato. That first day afterwards, speaking by phone to the funeral director, I needed to yet could not get the word ‘ashes’ out of my mouth without a strenuous physical struggle. ‘Aa-aassh-aashhes,’ came a dry stammer. As if uttered through sawdust. It wasn’t any conscious repugnance at having to say that word only hours after my last glimpse of the living person. But something bodily felt. A cut fell between the thought and its voicing. My jaw must have worked over the word ‘ashes’ like that of a dying fish. Or it must have been as slack as J’s own mouth once the rigor mortis had worn off; but that analogy only comes to me now, well over two years later. Immediately after the death, my firm intention to speak the needed words ‘disposal of his ashes’ would not be carried out, physically. I’d believed that thought is made in the mouth, and is often discovered only through speaking aloud. Now on the contrary, to my own astonishment and embarrassment, my mouth was bluntly refusing to pronounce the phrase that waited clearly if silently voiced in my head. Previously I hadn’t believed that speech is simply the translation of something already formulated in thought. Now I was faced with the evidence that sometimes it is, but that the translation can fail. No passage across the lips. The brain could calmly entertain the word. The mouth would not. ‘Aaah-sssh . . .’ it went. As if it had itself become sifted up thickly with ashes.
Whatever’s the name for this transfer of affect? It’s rather like that blurring of physical edges that happens between lovers: you become the other one, you can feel as if through their skin.
All this entangling with your dead child, though, becomes evident in thought only as you look back. At the time, you’re naturally and easily inside several states. Or inside two lives. For if timelessness is the time of your dead, then you will go with them into their timelessness. Here you can live mundanely, indeed brightly. You’re fused with the dead, as if to animate them. They draw you across to their side, while you incorporate them on your side.
Inside your sheltering thicket of branching ‘as ifs’, it’s not only as if the ashes of your child had blocked your own mouth, but as if your own future is as neatly guillotined; as if you wipe away the physical traces of the dead as cleanly as that life itself was wiped away; as if in the same breath as the flow of time halts, your old sense of your innerness drops into pure exteriority; as if these are sensations of being with our dead while they can no longer sense time nor have any interior sense of themselves; as if, yet without actually believing this, you’ll be with the dead when you die; as if now both of you inhabit a companionate exile rather than being two parallel units of loneliness; as if, as you’d carried the unborn child inside you, so again you carry its lively memory; as if you need to die yourself to continue that long habit of attentiveness which can’t immediately be resiled from the dead. As if care will not give up its affectionate task.
Later, I’m struck by the force of so much being with the dead. I hear it constantly in other mothers of dead children. Such imagined empathy seals your sense of stopped time. Like one of those dogged pursuers in classical mythology, you’ve followed your dead into the underworld, one foot in either realm like Orpheus turning back on the threshold to check that Eurydice was still following behind him, almost safely retrieved. If your feeling of arrested time were indeed the time shared with your dead, then your unwanted re-entry to the usual flow of the world’s time would mean that, like poor Orpheus, you’d come back alone. Is the force of this story that we can only stay in the company of our dead for as long as we don’t notice them as really separate from us, caught in their different realm? Although that fierce Demeter contrived a better deal: to fetch her daughter Persephone back from Pluto’s darkness for half of each year at a time. Shared custody.
These skeins of ‘as ifs’ don’t arrive as considered comparisons, though, but as direct feelings. In fact ‘as if’ scarcely applies here, although you’re forced to use it in retrospect to try to convey this many-layered impression. Something more intimate’s in play than straightforward analogy. Yet it’s also something removed from any direct ‘identification’. It’s neither your sameness with your dead, nor your full separateness from them. And I’d fight shy of considering it magic to fight off the fact of the death. It’s not fanciful bewitchment. It feels fleshly, and solidly true to this fresh world of feeling. Once you can no longer experience any flow of time, any sequence, or any induction, then sensations that once would have been incommensurable can now flourish side by side. What then do we call this multiplied perception? Liminal?
Not only will ‘as ifs’ flourish, but also the more familiar and expected ‘what ifs’, whose prickings, like showers of arrows, torment those in the aftermath of a sudden death. They position you imaginatively before it happened, so that now you’re in a position to have prevented it.
How tactful we become in avoiding all and any expressed measurements of loss. Never would I compare my state with that of, say, a widow’s. Never would I lay claim to ‘the worst grief of all’. And, among my own kind, never would I compare my own infinitely lighter lot with that of the parent of a murdered or a tortured child, or a suicidal child, or one killed in a stupid accident, or one very young, dying painfully slowly.
Still, you needn’t have erected some dubious hierarchy of grief in order to wonder what’s particular to losing a child, of any age, and why this loss feels so different in kind from your experience of other deaths. And this question demands more than the obvious observation that the stronger the love for the dead, the sharper the loss. Perhaps what’s specific is this: that with the death of your child, your own experience of time may be especially prone to disturbance because the lost life had, so to speak, previously unfurled itself inside your own life.
If you had once sensed the time of your child as quietly uncoiling inside your own, then when that child is cut away by its death, your doubled inner time is also ‘untimely ripped’. Yours, and the child’s. The severance of the child’s life makes a cut through your own. You as its mother can no longer be present to yourself in the old temporal way. A sculptural imagination rises to grip you; the hollow of the old shelter for the living child has now been gouged out of you. It was the space of the child’s past, which used to lie like an inner shell enveloped by your own time. That child you had, alone, when you were young yourself, a child you grew up with, nested like a Russian doll whose shorter years sat within yours, gave you a time that was always layered. Then you held times, in the plural.
Yet after this scooping-out by the death, a fresh incorporation arrives: the child gets reanimated in your effort to embody its qualities and carry them onwards. Perhaps this is the peculiar fate of mothers of dead children: still to contain that other life, and to shelter it twice over. Once before the child’s birth, and once after the death when you’re left with an impression of a spirit internalized. This partial rebirth can be exhaustingly preoccupying; much like a pregnancy run in reverse, spooling back from the point of the child’s death to its incorporated life in you. And this exerts itself in the pressure of your forceful but not especially disconcerting sensation of living outside time.
I dread forgetting his odd blend of being quietly wry and yet completely without guile. My mind figures, ‘Well, if J hasn’t called me for such an unprecedentedly long time, then maybe it’s true after all that he died.’ Then I’m embarrassed but amused to overhear this silly calculus totting itself up in me.
Whenever I need to mention to someone that ‘my son died’, it still sounds to me like a self-dramatizing lie. Tasteless. Or it’s an act of disloyalty to him. For I don’t experience him as in the least dead, but simply as ‘away’. Even if he’ll be away for my remaining lifetime. My best hope’s to have a hallucination of his presence when I’m dying myself.
Perhaps only through forgetting the dead could it become possible to allow them to become dead. To finally be dead. And that could only follow – once time itself had taken the initiative here – from consigning them to a time that had decided to resume its old flow. Of its own accord. When or if this may ever happen, I can’t know. And can’t want it.
Time ‘is’ the person. You’re soaked through with it. This enormous lurch into arrested time isn’t some philosophical brooding about life’s fragility. It’s not the same ‘I’ who lives in her altered sense of no-time, but a reshaped person. And I don’t know how she’ll turn out. If writing had once been a modest work of shaping and correcting, now all your small mastery has been smashed by the fact of your child’s death. That you can’t edit.
You find yourself noting this, but without ever needing or even wanting to have recourse to words like sorrow, grief, mourning. As if all those are too familiar, too sepia, and almost decorative, blandly containing. You entertain no reflections, either, that a life will leave its reverberations hanging in the air like a passage of music – nothing so sweetly melancholic. Instead, your living in this instant, this thinnest imaginable sliver of being, turns out to be hard-edged. Side views are occluded without any softening penumbra. Your sight is pared down like tunnel vision. Yet to your narrowed focus, the dead of this entire city are present all at once, elbowing in the streets. Silhouettes stream everywhere: horses, carriages, cars. Traffic ghosts smash right through you whenever you cross a road. Grey ribbons of painless collisions. But these aren’t misty or violet-tinted, are nothing to do with ‘mourning’ as you might once have fancied it. This is sharp and harshly clear. Your surrounding fluid of intuitive time had abruptly drained away. Now you live in an unshaded clarity of dry air. Its translucent simplicity buoys you up.
By what means are we ever to become re-attached to the world?
No time at all. No time.
And by now I’ve stopped making these notes.
What follows is a postscript, drawing on them, about what I’ve had to learn about living in arrested time.