The Life Impossible – Conversations with the Dead
Conversations with the Dead
On the way to the cemetery I passed my old boss – and your old headteacher, Mr Gupta – leaving a coffee shop. After some small talk he asked me how I was doing, and I was feeling sad, so instead of saying that I told him another truth.
‘Ibiza?’ he said. Raised eyebrows, stifled smile. ‘I never saw you as the Ibiza type.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Neither did I.’
And shortly afterwards, I continued on my way.
Later, having changed the flowers on my Daniel’s grave, I sat down on a bench beneath a yew tree. I stared at the simple grey of the headstone and its spare design and engraved letters, the words made visible by shadow.
DANIEL WINTERS
A beloved boy.
March 15th 1981 – April 2nd 1992
I was there for about an hour that day.
I sat, as always, in silence. I never knew what to say to him. To his imagined presence. It wasn’t that I was averse to talking to the dead in public. I spoke to Karl all the time. But with Daniel it was difficult, for many reasons. More than three decades of grief had passed – we were deep into another century and millennium – but I still felt stuck for words. I had nothing to say but sorry. As ever, I calmed myself by counting gravestones, and doing sums with them.
I don’t want to weigh down this story too much with talk of sad things, but I want to tell you that he was a very special boy. I want to picture him. He was always tall for his age and narrow and would read books as he walked. He was bright and funny and even in a sullen mood he would have a small smile on his face as if he found the whole world a comedy. He loved Choose Your Own Adventure novels and pop music and TV that was too old for him (Hill Street Blues, which to my disapproval he watched repeats of with his dad when he was nine). He made himself triple-decker sandwiches with peanut butter and Marmite. He made his own comic strips about a time-travelling dog. He didn’t like school very much – well, not his new one because he wasn’t into sport, and didn’t want to pretend. He was a very honest person, actually. Lying never really occurred to him. I think. But he was a dreamer too. If he had never gone out on his bike in the rain that day, he would have ended up doing something creative. An illustrator maybe. He loved art and was good at it. When he was eleven, he drew a beautiful picture of a bluebird and gave it to me for Mother’s Day because he knew I loved birds.
He died before he became a teenager, let alone an adult, so it is hard to say who he would have turned out to be. There are two kinds of ghosts that torment you when a young person dies. The ghost of who they were, and the ghosts of who they could have been. His death created a hole right through me that could never again be filled. For years getting through a day was an Olympic event. There was a continual sense of terror at the knowledge that life dared exist without him. It was hard not to be furious. Most of all with myself. I should never have let him out on the bike in the rain.
I know you have known grief, Maurice, and I am so sorry to hear about your mother. For the first two years after Daniel died, I was beside myself. Beside myself. It’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it? I was there, but not there. I was watching myself in the third person. A character in a life that looked like mine but wasn’t. I missed him so much, but also I felt like I was missing myself too. That’s the thing with grief. The way it kind of sinks you into death as well. I mean, you are still biologically functioning obviously. You are out there breathing and seeing and talking but you aren’t properly alive any more.
‘I love you,’ I whispered, eventually. ‘I am going away for a while. I will think of you every day. Goodbye.’
And then I took one of those deep, shaky inhales I always did when I was near him, and I swallowed back the tears before they started and walked a short distance to Karl’s grave. I always felt like it was a walk through time. Do you know what I mean, about cemeteries? Each row another era, onwards and onwards. Karl’s headstone was marble, but black. He specifically had shared a preference for a black marble headstone.
‘It’s a bit more rock and roll,’ he’d said. He was about as rock and roll as a cheese sandwich, but he did enjoy rock music and his favourite band was Black Sabbath so that probably explained it.
KARL WINTERS
January 20th 1952 – October 5th 2020
A devoted father and husband.
The word father was weighted with pain, I know, but the devotion was real. When we moved to the bungalow, he’d still insisted we take as much of Daniel with us as possible. His old Star Wars figures, toy cars, comic books, drawing pads, the works. It was like he became a kind of museum curator and I always felt bad that I found it suffocating, seeing his memory everywhere. But even after Karl died, I never took any of it to the charity shop.
‘Karl, I’ve made a decision,’ I told his headstone, as I stood there on my fresh legs.
His silence was much the same as it had been whenever I announced something he sensed he wouldn’t like. I could almost see him raising his eyebrows. He had never been much of a conversationalist, and being dead had done very little to improve the situation.
‘I am going to Spain. To the Balearic Islands. To … Ibiza of all places.’ I flinched a little, saying that. And I spoke the italics out loud. The whole cemetery heard my distaste. ‘Please don’t judge me.’
Karl had been to Ibiza’s large neighbour Mallorca before. He had spent three days in Palma years ago, at a civil engineering convention. It had been a career highlight, apparently. But Mallorca had a different connotation in my prejudiced mind to Ibiza. Mallorca was a balanced elder sibling with a confident smile. Ibiza, I imagined, was the loud younger mischievous one who went off the rails. Ibiza, I imagined, was naughty. Right down there with Las Vegas, Cancún, Rio during carnival and a full-moon party in Thailand as a place I would least likely choose to visit, even if I had the money. A place of parties for young people with reasons to celebrate. Or maybe for rich people and their yoga mats. The opposite of me. I was old and stiff with a depressing bank balance and hadn’t danced in decades. And I had the very sincere belief that I had no reason to celebrate.
I was, in short, prejudiced. I had of course no real idea what Ibiza was like. It was a mere word. Synonymous with a loud kind of fun. And I had decided long ago, with a kind of self-punishing masochism, that fun of any kind was the very last thing I should be having. Or deserved.
‘I don’t think I’ll be going to any nightclubs …’ I reassured Karl’s grave. It was then that I cleaned the vase and placed the new foam filler inside before firmly pressing the stems of the chrysanthemums in place. I always did this, but today I was doing it with extra effort. I didn’t want the flowers to blow away. I needed them to stay there as long as possible.
‘So, I don’t know how long it will be until I come back and see you again. But I am not selling our bungalow or anything like that. There really is no thought-out plan. I will just see how it goes. A change of scene.’
A tear formed, and the sun appeared from behind a cloud, and I felt its warmth. I wiped away the tear as I smiled at another woman, another widow, vigorously wiping clean the marble of a newer headstone. I stared down at the grass, suddenly shining and bright. When you grieve someone you see their message in everything. Even in the sunlight on a blade of grass. The whole world becomes their translator.
And then I told him what always comes so easy when it is too late.
‘I love you, darling. I will see you later.’ And then I added, with barely a second’s thought: ‘I am sorry for what I did.’
