I will die on a Thursday. Mid-November, in my seventy-eighth year. At the discovery of my body I will have been dead for nearly two days, then, the room will be cleaned and fumigated. Within a week a new advert will appear in the same newspaper I purchased all those years ago, with the sole intention of finding a cheaper, more private style of accommodation after my wife and I separated.
It will have just gone 4pm and the school children outside will be filling the narrow pavements with the momentous avidity reserved for all things undiscovered and waiting. I will think of my son and the conversations we shared. I will see his face grinning and wild at first, then grimaced and melancholy in the years to follow. A cup of tea will be by my bedside, cold and half-finished in its spectral stasis. The weather will be unforgiving and dark as is to be expected from such a cantankerous season.
I will have the window open slightly. The heating turned up. Inside, the room will consist of my few possessions, ones with enough sentimental recall that they could each act as a singular map documenting the non-sequential course of my life’s journey. There will be books. The muted instruments I acquired in those demented attempts to pacify my curiosity for all things human or dead. To excavate the meaning of the words life and to live. To understand the brutal nature of death while still being cradled by its grand antithesis. Within those oxidising pages there will be characters which had me weeping at the turn of their demise, or becoming alive at the successive unveiling of their amorous affairs. There will be pages loaded with unequivocal facts, which helped me to make sense of the injustices done by one to another. Those inflicted by the whites onto the poor backs of the blacks. Those inflicted by the whites onto the poor backs of the brown and those inflicted by the whites onto the poor backs of the whites.
There will be a plethora of polemics, ones that upon a day now gone would stare back at me, as I read satiating my mind with the fury of their nailing knowledge, leading me deeper into circles charged with opinion and ego. Where ego trumped opinion and opinion lived irrespective of fact. Books that caused me to send their pages hurling against the wall of my home, and yes there will be poetry. Words that broke my heart just to prove I could still live through their agonies. Verses in orthodox form, in free form, villanelles, haikus, sonnets and cantos. In ballads and limericks, or odes and quatrains, all of which had me repeating lines throughout nights when my very bones felt like burning wood in some besieged forest. Names of my most favoured and loved authors will scramble my thinking. Sesquipedalian and prodigious, their language and their characters live nestled in an impenetrable place within. And there will be music. A portable archive of records and songs that rocked me weightless in each testing period of my life. The electric pulse of the guitar in all its tenets. The gulping blues, the restless jazz of the oppressed and destitute, the averse folk songs opening gates to the sleeping gardens of my imagination. These will be neatly arranged in a pile below my books, with the insurmountable precision of an old watch-maker who has now grown tired of time.
Then, in the mantelpiece of my heart, close to where I’ll keep all the memories of those who gave my life its breath, will be a list of names with frozen, still faces. I will think back to my wife and wonder what name now grows within the fondness of her heart. To the women of my younger years who I once gave myself to in the hope they perhaps would remain beside me on a day like this. I will remember hands, I always do, and wonder what they are doing now. Where have they planted themselves? Have they already passed through the great tunnel? Are they rooted in the palm of another or are they unlocked and free in some sensuous adventure? My breathing will grow weaker, lower, and the excitement from the school children outside will begin to wane. The song of my own dilapidating life will start its final call with each of my limbs preparing for their final dance. I will feel the hot iron of ruined love press down on my last exhalations and in that moment, irresolute and unpronounced, I will acquire the presentiment that one would rightly expect to supplement such fatalism. I will think of my son for one last time and my hands will shake, not with ailment or suffering but with an indomitable regret. I should have held him longer. Kept his hand in mine even when pride wouldn’t permit it. I should have told him he was great and beautiful. Regret – the kind inspired by the lost chance of preserving just one of those giant loves from the fallen years, as I make my departure, bowing to the audience of life.
At the close of the last lament I will feel my chest heave, as if proving to the sky it’s always been capable of supporting its own scale of universe. Tears will mar my sight, until those crowning seconds when a warm current of half-living blood will kiss each of my organs with one holy grace. A gentle goodbye. Done in the same way a dying flower may kneel upon the skin of the earth, showing its gratitude by whispering straight into the ears of its cosmic heart. Each section sharing an embrace, a final respect infused with an indebtedness fortified by the lone fact we were all permitted to die together. All the members of myself. Then, in that dreary room, with the din of wailing school-children having fully dissipated, and the world outside entering its vibrant restaurants and bistros, or releasing itself into the reaching arms of a lover, I will make my lone retreat.
Seventy-eight years ago I had a poor lonely woman greet me with her undying affection there in the arms she made for her first son. Lifting me out from inside her hot and clammy body, hampering my life with her naked flesh, whispering under joyous tears you found me my beautiful darling.
How was I to know, throughout those years, that everything would eventually culminate into something like this. Not even she, mother of all my life and blood, could have predicted the cruel and unbearable way the eyes and heart have to close forever.