‘We have one life, my dear Evelyn, one life and we must use it well.’
– Sarah Winman, Still Life
In the last few days, a ‘polar blast’ has swept in, cutting the temperature in half one day between mid-morning and lunch. Snow falls in the Blue Mountains, on the western edge of Sydney; the evenings are crisp, and fingers are tinged with pink. Wind swirls around the city, leaving a trail of debris – fallen limbs of trees scattered across the city’s floor. I walk around the block at lunch and there’s tension building in the air, a sense of distinct unease, heavy and foreboding.
Over the course of the last month, I’ve been putting pen to paper, trying to capture the final chapters of a life.
I text colleagues on the Monday after the weekend it happened and find the words ‘my Nan passed away’ wholly inadequate to describe the loss. I find I can’t convey to them the ache that comes from knowing that, as a result of the many tough choices I’ve made in the past year, I wasn’t there to say goodbye in person – to hold her hand and tell her how much I loved her. I am here instead of there; the distance between the two is long and vast and infuriating.
My words will form part of a eulogy. At the funeral, someone will speak on my behalf.
It’s the best that I can do.
‘Her children would make the journey in reverse, and their children would take the same route back, and thus it would continue, this generational migration, where what mattered was not the final destination but to be on the move, searching, changing, becoming.’
– Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees
Monday evenings form new rhythms. The looped inhales and exhales shared with a group help me to shake off the weight that builds throughout the day. A small class, a gentle teacher; the life-affirming sensation of breathing in and out as one part of a collective whole.
I buy myself yellow roses – her favourite – as close friends send me proteas and white gerberas so that my flat smells fresh and fragrant, like an abundance of friendship.
A week passes by in a daze. A rush of deadlines spirits the days away yet, in the quiet moments, time stands still with staggering solidity.
I take a slow Saturday to recalibrate – forbid myself from leaving the flat, forcing myself to feel the depth of loss instead of turning my gaze and pushing it aside. I clean, do slow and gentle yoga stretches, and curl up in bed. A candle flickers. Light streams through the wooden blinds and creates gentle patterns across the cream walls. I eat cereal for lunch and return to bed. I think – I don’t want to be grieving her, I don’t want to be thinking in past tense. I want to tell her about the long walk I’m doing next weekend, about the friends I’m seeing soon. I even want to beam myself to the depth-of-lockdown calls where she’d reveal she’d done nothing that week and I’d reveal that I’d somehow done even less. I toss and turn and doze and call a dear friend in the early evening – a welcome and much needed moment of support.
There’s a sense of being anchorless. It hits me one Sunday evening, the realisation as obvious as it is painful, that I can’t call her again. Not a call on a Sunday evening or a Friday night, not a call while walking home on a Monday or a Tuesday after work.
It hits me again one Thursday evening. I should call her, I think, and pull my phone from my bag. As I open the contacts list on my phone, I realise that I can’t and that I won’t be able to again.
I haven’t brought myself to remove her mobile number from its prime position at the top of my favourite’s list.
Maybe I never will.
‘It is understood that grief is a way of surviving life and that a straight line can never be drawn beneath it.’
– Sarah Winman, Still Life
A friend talks of grief by way of legacy. Of how the ripples of one life flow through others.
I think of my Nan’s legacy as being one of generosity and hospitality and great storytelling. But there’s also a legacy in the quieter moments – in the cups of teas, the sitting in the garden, the telly watched together.
I think of all the ways friends have cared for me recently – organising for NHS volunteers to sit with her in the quiet of night, care packages and hugs, flowers and comforting calls – and wonder if maybe that is part of her legacy too. For she won’t just live on through her family, but through the ripple effects of her friends and her neighbours and those who knew her. One friend reminds me, ‘all your friends knew her through you talking of your weekly calls.’ They know of my love for her and that is all I can wish for.
I put off writing the eulogy for a fortnight. Yet one evening, with the sun setting gently around me, I open my laptop and begin to type.
Every loss – whether of a person, an idea, a place, or a dream – forces us to learn new ways to grieve. Sometimes we sink into it, knowing that we must purge the feelings to get to the other side. Other times we resist it, avoiding it at all costs – and there will be a cost, there always is.
They say grief is the flipside of love. The depth of pain revealing the depth of feeling.
This time around, I’ve had to learn how to grieve someone I couldn’t ever imagine living without, couldn’t imagine never seeing again. No heading straight to her house from a long-haul flight. No grabbing a cab from the station and directing it to hers. No ritualistic taking off of shoes and putting on of slippers while the kettle boils. No cups of tea shared at all times of day. No fish and chips of a Friday and roast dinners of a Sunday.
I’ve had to say goodbye to someone without the usual rituals of attending a funeral followed by a wake.
In many ways, the writing of a eulogistic tribute has been a blessing. A pause in the rush of the everyday to reflect and remember and be thankful for. For there is much to be thankful for – the years spent together, the meals spent together, the memories made together.
Maybe my two final weeks with her before I returned to Australia was the most fitting farewell. She was well then and we were able to enjoy each other’s company. We said goodbye in the drop-off bay of a hotel near the airport, both inconsolable with the unspoken acknowledgement that it might be the final time we saw each other in person. But maybe too that farewell was not really that moment but the moment an hour earlier when we’d both been in her house, drinking a cup of tea together. What does a final farewell even mean? Does it matter what it looked like or how it felt?
We place so much emphasis on single, particular moments instead of the abundance of smaller, yet more meaningful, ones around them. A moment of goodbye instead of focusing on all the hellos. The ‘meet cute’ instead of all the moments that follow. The emphasis on a wedding day instead of the long-drawn-out process of building a life together. The end of a life instead of the wholeness of it.
My dad and I and swap our eulogies for her via email. I’m struck by the similarities between them, by how clear her legacy is. At its heart – a love of family and a talent for making us feel welcome in her home. As a result, all of us wanted to spend more time with her. It was never an obligation, as it is for others, but always a privilege. We knew it at the time but know it more so now.
A life well lived and lived full of love. May we all be as lucky as that.
‘I will come back here, bring me back when I’m old.’
– Laura Marling, Goodbye England (Covered in Snow)