On her recent UK visit, my sister notes how beautiful and various the architecture is where I live now. I haven’t noticed, not really, not in any complete sense, just odd observations here and there.
At the moment my father dies I have been sent out of his room - my mother wants to wrap my birthday presents for the next day - and am sitting at the kitchen table, flicking through a Sunday Times magazine, marvelling at their levels of trolling and trying to count how many chocolate chip cookies I can fit in my mouth at once with the aid of a hot cup of tea. My mother comes into the kitchen, pale, still, eyes wide, and says my name once. It takes a second before we are both racing upstairs, not hesitating at his doorway - there is something to be done and we absolutely have to do it. But even standing over him, touching him, me tonguing chocolate chips from between my teeth, we aren’t sure. I have to ring up his GP and say, “I’m really sorry; I *think* my dad’s died?”, sounding twelve years old, not thirty-two (for another eight hours). We watch him and watch him and watch him, our eyes so used to seeing the living that we keep seeing a vein pulse, a chest rise, an eye twitch. The doctor comes and takes long, long minutes to pronounce him; my mother and I terrified past words that he might still be alive, that this could be the final stage which goes on for more weeks, or months.
We call who we need to call, and we sit with him. We both kiss him.
Because his illness was fast but linear - diagnosis; prognosis; declining speech; declining movement; increased fatigue; bed bound; mute; eyes closed; slowed breathing; less breathing; slower pulse; FIN - it seemed a matter of shading. But the truth I’m struggling with is far more black and white: alive; alive; alive; alive; alive; dead. That’s what jolts me when an elderly man reaches across me in a supermarket aisle, his forearms just like my father’s. It’s not my father’s forearm: he’s dead.
The vast majority of the messages of support I receive understand the complexities of the relationship we had. One particularly pragmatic friend reminds me that ‘If you take the euphemisms out of an obituary, you’ve got prepositions and a resume’. But even a gentle death, at home, on a sunny day, of someone with whom you have this complex relationship, is savage and impossible to understand.
I’m noticing the local buildings again. Mostly Victorian, with hints of Dickensian munificence, plus my beloved high rise blocks and some Georgian scraps around the edges. The temptation is to make a pun about how I’m looking up, but these reminders of dead builders and dead architects and dead designers are reminding me to look forward instead.