She was dying, of course, she had to, as I have because you are reading this: your Daddy’s self penned obituary. It wasn’t unexpected. As a young man I’d prepared myself by imagining at each place I’d lived the phone ringing, an unknown voice asking for me formally using the appellation “Mister”. An austere, yet sympathetic voice at the other end gently breaking the news of my mother’s death. Without fail, no matter what lover I’d been sharing my life with, this audio warning had become internalised. It was my secret, never shared or revealed, no matter how intimate I’d been to a partner. Now I’m breaking the seal open for you: perhaps you’ll do the same, or maybe, being of a different time and happier circumstances, you’ll have no need for secrecy. I’ll never know your thoughts on this, though your face will be the last image in my mind before my life ceases. Death will silence me but if you read my words I’ll be with you once more. Each time you read them I’ll be alive from your birth through the major events in your life. Do you think my words will succour like prayer? Each sentence, or verse if you deem it epic, resurrecting and filling you with memories and emotions of your silly Daddy. Similarly so, when mother died I could say, “yes, I know, you no longer exist, but thank you. If there’s an afterlife I want to meet you again. If there are things I can’t, or won’t understand about my unknown journey, will you be my mother once more?”
In all the seasons of my life, here in the United Kingdom, or abroad, this thought haunted me, cushioned shock and prepared finalitude. Jokingly you once asked if I’d make a video of myself to be played at my funeral. Do you remember my response? “No”, I replied, “I’d sooner people remember me as they knew me, not an image they may not find comfortable. Memories build the future, remain as clear as when friends and colleagues last talked to me, be it five, ten or thirty years before the ceremony you will lead. Reading my simple words will flame their memories of how they best remember me”. All positive I trust.
She’d seen ninety-two years, from the edge of the Great War to the precipitous calamities of a new century. From familiarity and knowingness to massness and impersonality. From closed religious worlds of convents and ignorance to public spectacles sped at first through cathodes and valves and then magically pixellated across the universe by technology she could never comprehend. Spy glassing towards her ninety third year she’d decided “this is as far as I want to go”, and rested, seating herself at the final stop. Behaving like a stroppy travelling granny berating a Saga tour guide, “I don’t want any more sightseeing today, thank you, young man”. Exercising her final words with the authority of one who’d lived life to capacity. Her one way ticket taking its final punch. Thin, worn, paper veined, exposing the fabric she’d become. An old relief map of a forgotten land that only the explorer remembered: now those memories were fading.
Do I appear like this to you? An old man travelled well; sometimes with finery and affluence, other times as pauper in hostels and tents, depressed, thinking he’d not reach fifty - that number long passed, exceeding the digits my father eked out. What did you really know about me? What did you imagine my inner life was? What did you tell your friends about your “old man?” A doddery bastard, confused and selfish? Did you ever wonder about your inheritance from me? Ponder the gene pool I’d shot into the egg fusing you into being? Has your mother shared her life with you? Your grandmother never did; and how could my parents? I never knew them, did I? You ancestrally suspended, cosmically concocting destiny from within your mindfulness and the snippets of what I might have told you from my blighted and disjointed life. Are roots important, or are one’s efforts of greater significance? I think you know the answer to that one my dear.
She was closing down, shutting all doors, locking windows, sealing the drawers to her expansive past. Dusting the draught excluders. Resolutely refusing to entertain the potential degeneration of what miniscule future she might palm grasp with wrinkled fingers. A realist from the cradle to her grave eschewing sentimentality. Whatever butterflies might flutter past her life’s windows she no longer attempted to reach. Nor approach the doors to what few friends remained. What vision was there in her sharp blue eyes increasingly macerated or of the memories she’d passed on? The caresses and tenderness she freely gave without thought of gain or advantage in her feeling hands and soul’s strength. Her words which only told truth. All were fading, tumbling into the earthy Irish peat she’d risen from.
She never shied from facing, no matter how unpalatable, the life she experienced daily, to articulate its realities. As in her active life, now in its dimming, she’d begun a systematic check list as a competent and courteous captain would knowing his vessel was finally docking. Running through the cargo’s manifest, ensuring everything was correctly labelled, consigned and despatched. If only I’d been as loving and trusting as she, rather than a man who’d taken too much, breaking hearts, leaving in my searching, empty wake, misery. I can’t remember the number of times I begged Mam leave her husband, to escape his brutality to both her and your Dad. She never did. She remained loyal, in spite of everything. What would you have done? I never hung around too long did I? Leaving you: why? Did it benefit me? Did it assist you in growing up and maturing? I always left the women I lived with, after claiming I’d always love them: why? I guess you understood. You always possessed a dispassionate objectivity seeing realities and people as they were. Cool and collected, yet jolly and loving, not getting entangled in the fractured psyches of others. If only I’d possessed your security and sense of being. But I didn’t. I was myself, never willing to lay roots I knew would be pulled up and burnt in autumn, preferring instead to imagine I should leave no footprints. Of course, that was impossible. I did. Sometimes big, messy ones, slush dirty no thaw could wipe out. As if I could live formless as wind and not leave traces. I was like any other bastard stamping over the feelings of others. Was this a cute way to deny my actions, absolve me of guilt and responsibility? What was I imagining? Was it really how I thought of myself? A giant blob of inferiority and self-effacing embarrassment being what others wished of me before adoption. Doing the deeds of conclaved adults, wishing I’d never been born. Becoming what others wanted, I wailed, cried and shit myself to sleep in misery, foolishly claiming it was my way of living. What do you think of your Dad’s approach to life? Was I a coward, refusing to face my demons, unable to forge my own life? Living and dying simultaneously throughout my troubled life with its breakdowns and doubts. I had confidence in my abilities but no faith in what I could do. A zombie: half bastard, half normal, each half diminishing the strengths and characteristics of the other. A vacuum where the half empty half full line meets.
She was dying, ebbing away, becalmed in her neap, dipping her feet into the Styx as dénouement dawned. Speaking her final, crystal clear words to my then wife: “is that you dear? I thought so, I can smell your beautiful perfume”. You remember Jane and the pain she’d caused, don’t you? Refusing to attend our wedding because you didn’t feel comfortable with her, admitting much later when you commented how different I’d become living with her. Was I so different? Do you mean I wasn’t as bad as I thought, before I met and fell in love with her? Did you always make such comparisons? Were you glad, or happier when I walked out on her, unable to take more of her insomniacal nightmares? I’m happy you understood your silly Dad and told him the changes he underwent: I’d never have known. Did you omit other thoughts you regret not telling me? That’s why I’m buried: the incised headstone and plot giving you space to talk to me. Make time for your Dad to imagine I’m looking down on you, even though you and I know there’s no heaven. But there is life after death, isn’t there? So, think of me temporarily resurrected next to you. Simple, eh?
I’d spoken to mother’s general practioner, a generous woman, captivated by her ability to stick `her final years of illness with good humour despite her prognosis. Kindly she’d approached a consultant who several months before Mam’s death greeted me at the old peoples’ home she was to die in, a stones throw from where this story begins that desperately cold winter long ago.
“Your mother has three options”, he said to me. “Put her in hospital where she’d be hitched to life support to ease her breathing difficulties. Two, we could leave her in the home, dose her with steroids and other medications to induce sleep and ease her discomfort. Or, finally, accept the way she is now; conscious and participating in the life of the home, where she’ll continue to experience the ebbing and flowing of pain as she slips away”.
A quality of life issue wasn’t it? A variation on the Buddhist prerogative that every one experiences pain and personal grief. It was my time to decide what course of action to take on behalf of another, as, perhaps you have already done for me. By such means emotions of life and death are generationally shared, easing each one through their psychically flawed journeys. No one’s written my obituary: I’m expressing my thoughts, transmitting a personal narrative. It wasn’t Mam’s style, guess she was more able to show affectionate commitment than I. She lived in the real world, and even though it was cruel, heartless and full of ignorance, she never once surrendered her goodness to their clamours.
Words, with oblique references to reality, are easier for me. Creating what I wanted the real me to be, rather than the failure I too often felt. In the proverbial six words your Dad’s story runs: “adopted aged one, thereafter second best”. In my final living thoughts I couldn’t forget the heartaches I’d given you leaving your mother. If there is an all powerful being I’d ask him, or her, to forgive this transgression against your innocence, praying it never deflected you from the happiness you deserved. I know at times I’d ask your forgiveness and you assented. But did you really? Did you not harbour residues of anger and hatred against me? Did my words, too often brutally honest, soothe and convince you I never meant any harm? As an adult there may be things you’re not been proud of doing; if you have we’ve shared similar pains of regret. If you’ve reconciled yourself to accepting life involves hurt my memory, too, can be at peace.
I displayed no tears, or mawkishness, hearing the consultant’s options: neither did you, informed of every aspect of her finality. Strong, understanding, mature: my sole rock. What was occurring was nature unstoppable. A slide into obscurity. I remember you watching a cat devour a captured bird, commenting, “it’s only nature, Dad”, early childish evidence of your objectivity, eh? All we’d be denied was laying out the body in the front room. Death’s effrontery with its silent nothingness has no place in sanitised modern society. When you sit on the bench in Golders Hill Park with the metal plate inscribed as my will declares, will you think constantly of me and how we both enjoyed the pleasures of this pleasant green space where I saw you learn to ride your bike? I hope so.
I was never one for faffing. Life is continuous choice as we DNA our way though its obstacle course of debris strewn options. Weighing emotional variables and calculating which piece of re-constructed evidence justifies actions mollifying our conscience. As Mam had made decisions, from having me circumcised, to buggy pushing me to casualty with a broken left arm when I was three, to embarrassingly discovering teenage sexual excess.
The choice was easy. She wouldn’t be admitted to hospital. Nor would she vegetate, lacking dignity with uniformed strangers concerned more about their institutional hierarchies and salary chits than patients. She was certainly not staying in the home to become an ornament on a mantelpiece; a dog with a nod by wire head. Glared at, talked about, not conscious enough to bark back at dehumanising indignities, though each word would be heard. I decided. Whilst she stayed in this place, on this earth, in her chair, in her home, with all its common, familiar and tasteless vulgarities, she’d be conscious and aware of other lives and deaths surrounding her.
I didn’t regret my decision and Mam’s final earthly words, casual and kind, vindicated my choice. On her behalf I had, in a small and significant manner, resolved her final weeks. Are these to be lessons for you to pass on to your children? Some time in the future, me long gone, in a dark place, silent, and you
ahead of me, experiencing what I’d never know. I hate the thought of dying. The finality of endless nothingness. Knowing I can never talk to you again, nor see your smile. Is it any wonder I needed my own ghost as a child to comfort me, to assure me there was something beyond the understanding of what we think we know. I can’t imagine you not here. I can’t imagine nothingness. All that lives beyond me of significance is you, and you too will become nothingness. Your jolly, happy, smiling face, no more. Enough of these thoughts. My writing is to clear my conscience, give you insight into your Dad’s destructive life, to repay a treasure I laid waste. Waste measured by an inability to see that life is what individuals make of it. Instead I hoped an archangel would descend to earth and rescue me, switching on neon announcing I’d been discovered for the world to admire. If I’d made life simple there’d be no need to invent obscure reasons to explain my self. Why couldn’t I admit I was foolish, reckless, irresponsible and cowardly, with a penchant for destroying love. To hide the truth I devised sentence after sentence to distance myself from admitting reality, throwing weak poetry on paper to give feign gravitas and worth.
Conscience’s clanging metallic noises deafened me, violated my senses, woke my mind to memories that were, like Mam’s, decomposing with the passage of years. Within such a short time I’d forgotten her: how could it not be otherwise for a bastard? Emotional scaffolding she’d erected, ensuring her survival in a harsh world, and the unseen supporting powers she’d sprinkled around me, dissolved. Her support transforming my existence from outcast bastard to object of worth. Was it worth her efforts? When she became invisible after death and cremation, I barely thought more of her existence. Gone, like us all to dust, no different than anybody else. Not godlike, merely mortal.
Post mortem bells chimed religion, observance, sanctity, humility and servitude to higher authorities, tolling deafness until I fell upon the ground screaming. Demanding through tears my hearing be restored, faced by gaping mouths, inert, silently mocking, I wondered where I was. Shaken from complacently imagining I had purpose and meaning to my life. Memories of her re-surfaced: holding my hand, tying my shoe laces, wiping my muck streaked face, walking with her to the communal wash house where other woman toiled as naturally as they breathed, wringing out laundry, ensuring their kids kept close. Lost in steam, dampness and suds, chatting incessantly. Casual, profound, fleeting conversations with working women of which I have no knowledge. All I remember is the sound of them: high pitched, singy-songy, laughing. So different than your early years. Walked by both parents, talked to by them, transported, sharing innocent moments of laughter, welcomed, two adults in awe, agog at what you brought to their barren lives. Wash houses replaced by washing machines, cosy suds, no need to go outside to mix with common people mouthing prejudice and stupidities.
Was she a reality? Had she been alive all those decades? Were her ashes as illusionary as her life? Was my love for her real or a means to bind and assuage my emotional wounds? Profound or exploitative? I’d not been her son, her flesh and blood, merely a child abandoned, a foundling pushed from the nest of birds with bigger ambitions than brat rearing. She’d not delivered me from her insides, nor accepted her husband’s sperm for me to be. Nor pushed me through the unseen with searing pain into light but instead had storked me to a safer destination than where I’d been born. I told your mother you’d been created that night we made love, as a friend lay sleeping in the second bedroom. I knew my shot sperm was wriggling its way to the egg to combine making life. I saw your mother’s nipples change from rosy pink to deep autumnal brown, recognised the process preparing for lactation. Saw clearly the goodness of that night, shortly after we’d returned from the south of France, tanned and fit from cycling the Alps. I was almost happy, I knew what I’d wanted I’d got: a girl child. It could never have been a boy. I didn’t want my DNA replicated. I imagined my life was changed, that I’d be faithful to your mother and you. God, how wrong I was. How despicably I continued to behave: as of old, as if nothing had happened. I’d not been reformed, I was beyond reclamation, preferring the sordidness I knew best.
Unlike Mam, who’d taken me in despite the whinging of her relatives unsure what this baby bastard might grow into. A twin headed monster breathing fire and brimstone, dark evil cloud scudding above him foreboding death and pestilence. Whore child brought from the abyss of depravity to be scorched with the morality of sages purging his congenital miasmas. A child infused with horror and nightmares destined to disturb the peaceful tranquillity of her in-laws. They were right, my daughter. Bastard’s are impossible to rehabilitate to normality.
Conscience awakened once more. Waves of sound crashed angrily. Rain sharpened rusted metal flakes grated flesh from my palms. Particles of iron penetrated my life line, littering upon my wrist mites of hued reddish brown mixed with dirt. Rustling razor wire was wound around my torso lacerating flesh, painstakingly liberating memories. Embalmed by metal wrappings, poesy tied with enamelled flowers, a card carefully placed besides my shadow bore my name in fancy script written with black ink. I was somewhere else, lost, shafted and alone.
Adults screeched anger at mother’s pot bellied pregnancy. Flame red hair lounged down her shoulders loose as soft down tufts between her legs that had parted and stickley plaited months previously. Madness roamed the house, career bladed its path from basement to attic, from kitchen to garden, searching to slash flesh. Dysfunctional insanity starting at grandfather’s fear of the apparition sitting next to him in the kitchen, spreading ghastly destructive forebodings. His own haunting memories of his first wife left die submerged in vomit betwixt bed and floor, enwrapped in sheets, Turin shrouded, sickness devouring her faded body. He craving his own needs to drink and socialise closed the bedroom door behind him, passed the brightly lit Christmas merriment tree in the garden.
Is there anything, my dear, in your life approximating such wanton psychosis? No, I hope not. The only hurt you’ve experienced is from me, mellowed by my desire never to abandon you. Yeah, I took a coward’s direction and fled your mum, but lived close by, seeing you each day. In the magnitude of things not much of a concession but for me a great deal more than I was granted.
Forgive me. Say it loud when you deliver your peroration. Let not one dry eye leave the chapel of rest. No, my dear, not for me, but for the mean way I treated you and the innocence I violated with my manliness.
