My Late Father

I missed the anniversary of my father’s death. He passed away in July 2013.

I had been sitting here for years waiting for someone to rescue me. A knight in shining armour perhaps. Or maybe a member of anonymous. For two years I waited on this island nation otherwise know as my sofa, surrounded by a sea of red carpet. But nobody came.

And then they told me that my father was dying. He had terminal cancer. But to my eternal shame even this failed to break the spell. I remained unable to tear myself away from the excuse for a life I had created for myself.

(And let me emphasise this: I did this to myself. What I did is widely know as ‘narcissistic withdrawal.)

I only visited my family three times a year and left the burden of caring for my father to my immediate family. They shouldered a heavy responsibility. I have no excuse for letting them do this without me. They spent a large part of their lives on the cancer ward of the general hospital, negotiating with consultants and making my father as comfortable as possible while I sat isolated on my sofa, paralysed by anxiety which sometimes spilled over into sheer terror, rocking backwards and forwards, playing ‘This Too Shall Pass’ on a continuous loop.

My father fought his cancer valiantly to his last breath. But in July 1913 I received the phone call I had been expecting. My father only had ‘He’ll be gone by the morning,; my aunt told me. ‘Come home if you can.

I whispered back, ‘I don’t think I can.’ And then a voice in my head said ‘You must. You will never forgive yourself if you don’t.’

So, in the end I did manage to tear myself away from my tiny  four-walled country. I caught a train for the first time in a decade. I arrived at my father’s bedside at the last minute. The heart was still beating, the motor still running. I kissed him on the forehead and he responded by whispering my name.

They said that he had been waiting for me but the blanket skeptic in me rejects this notion.

A few hours after we returned home from the hospital my aunt kocked on the door of my childhood bedroom to tell me that he had died. ‘He’s gone, Louise’. And her choice of words somehow comforted me. For if he had gone then there was a possibilty that he might come back.

In situations like these magical thinking seems like the only option.

Nothing Else to Say

Except this:

.

 

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone

W. H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Amidst the Debris

In the cellar of some bombed out building, we wait
Detached only half willingly from the wider world
Amidst a snowstorm of desiccated icing where once
There was an underground eatery. We sit passively
Waiting for rescue. Still and silent as fossils
On proud display in an abandoned museum
And the fixed grin and the suppressed hysteria
Of the Air Raid Warden silences me, eradicates me
We are entombed, it would seem, and these stone walls
Unyielding. The end is approaching, we know that now

We have grown accustomed to the dark
And the one we call Mother Midnight sings us to sleep
She touches us, she caresses us, she clasps our hands
She is leading us to another land, to a place devoid
Of land mines, of bombs, of air raid shelters
There is something wondrous about this woman
She shimmers in the blackness. ‘No one will come now’
She says and wrenches our spirits from our earthly bodies
And leads us through the crevices in the stone
Up through the coal-choked air and up into a clear sky

Remember…

Jenny Black.  Never heard of her?  I didn’t think you had.  We couldn’t help her so we didn’t even try.  Women with personality disorders are far more likely to be the victims of violent attacks than the perpetrators and lack of media attention is a symptom of how, in this so-called ‘civilised’ society, some people matter and others don’t.

Bella II