I don’t know what it means to grieve. I have seen others grieving, I have witnessed those who were there start taking their five steps, but I remain firmly rooted to the deathbed. I can’t leave its side and I haven’t tried to. I exist in a space where she is alive but unseen, living a few hours away on a train that conveniently never has tickets. I helped her die – eased the way by brushing her hair, washing her legs, giving her hope. I sat with her day after day, telling her she would live, even as she exasperatedly said she wouldn’t. She still refused to go quietly – she knew it wasn’t her time, and she didn’t let the fact she was going to die change that. It was easier to let her believe she could fight than to explain we thought the hospital had killed her, that they had given her the wrong drugs, or the right drugs too quickly; sent her into a seizure-fuelled psychosis. We will never know exactly what did it; the evidence now dust, ashes to be sprinkled in Scarborough bay and to take their secrets with them.
She said I was a ghost once, that I was the devil, that I was her son, her daughter. Her surroundings weren’t stable in her mind – her hospital bed became a war zone, a cricket pitch, her childhood home. The only constant was that I loved her, and that she was ill. Eventually, it was that she wouldn’t get better. In her lucid moments I would moisturise her legs, style her hair, let her see her face again. She thought she’d lost it – that her face was just a canvas of stretched skin with a scar for a mouth. Still, she sang ABBA with me quietly, but every song sounded sad to her near the end. The prospect of death stained everything. ‘As Tears Go By’ would echo in her mind; I remember how her face would drop as the joy of memory was infected by a panic-ridden morbidity, as she understood why it had come to her at all.
She panicked when I walked into the room. That was the cruellest thing. My presence became a silent emblem of the most likely outcome; I would not have hurried and stayed during those weeks if we didn’t think they were her last. She was glad to see me, but cried helplessly as she realised why I had come. Anxiety seeps into me as I imagine the seizing panic that must have laid with her in that bed. She stayed for her 57th wedding anniversary and then left us.
Our first Christmas without her arrived quickly. My grandfather got too many gifts from her best friend, and he told my aunt that they were keeping each other company. She shares her middle name with the woman whose bed she now sleeps in. He promised there had been no overlap. Still, we have not had a straight answer about when it started. She heard the news of this affair on Christmas morning, and was made to keep it from us, so we could hear it from him. I never did hear it from him. During the Hilary term of my second year, my father took me to lunch at Gusto Italian on the High Street, and ordered me a pint before he told me. I spent the next three days high in an effort not to kill myself. My grandpa has still never told me, and erases her from anecdotes in which I know she was a participant. Her absence from these stories makes her louder, more intrusive.
This will be my second Christmas without presents wrapped in wallpaper, and gift tags with clues on them rather than names. There will be no illustrations of the cat decorating my card, because they are both dead. I have her wrapping paper still, folded neatly between some books on my shelf; I see them between Plath and Didion. I have her illustrations tattooed on my skin – I will see them dance as I move my arms to wrap my own gifts this year.
And I write this as a gift for her, my final Christmas in Oxford is one I should always have gotten her a present for. I still have ideas for things I mean to give her, and something doesn’t quite make sense when I tell myself they will never be received. I am still knitting the scarf I knitted by her deathbed, unaware of whether it really needs to be longer or if I cannot bear to finish it. Here, each word is stitch, a rushed offering full of dropped purls and sweeping ladders made so she’ll have something to open on Christmas morning. I hope she will wear it, as I wear her poems and her mother’s jewellery. The winter sun will have to stand in for the silver crown that glinted when she smiled.
