Biscuits And Letters

Navigating my way through the unknown, I discover that swear words are good for my soul.

Dear Reader, if you’re offended by swearing this might not be the post for you.

——

Dear Mark,

I wrote you a letter last week. Did you get it? I wasn’t sure where to address it, because I'm not sure where you are anymore. Are you here?

Last week was really hard, the unwanted truth was trying to eat my motivation to get through this. I couldn’t feel you as closely as I had in previous weeks. I thought it was perhaps because I hadn’t been able to tell you about all the things that have happened since January. With the kids, our life, the decisions I've made on our behalf ... We normally talk about all of this, so I decided to write you a letter. Except after a couple of pages I'd run out of content. My thoughts stopped earlier than I expected because during the letter I suddenly realised that you already knew all of it. What I thought I wanted to tell you instantly felt known. How odd.

I can only assume that either in the act of writing my message was delivered to you, or you've been here all along. Of course there’s a third nihilist option. Everything could be a product of my imagination and you’re totally gone, but since you didn’t want to believe in that alternative I find myself rejecting it on your behalf. I want to believe in the recourse we agreed. Validated by Rabbi Alex Goldberg in the last hours of your consciousness, he gave you such confidence in your life's legacy. The possibility of your continuity beyond death lends me great comfort now, most days.

The challenge to my faith is that the idea of continuity stretches my rationality beyond its current capacity. If you're here with me now, able to receive my thoughts and observe our life, why don’t I always feel comforted. Why only sometimes?

Your parents contacted me from their holiday this week. Your Mum said that they felt you were with them, in the Caribbean, which is nice. But it’s also weird because for the whole time she thought you were with them, I thought you were with me. This isn’t some petty spat for attention, you are successfully bending my mind around the space time continuum. Of course I want you to be with them, they need you too. I want you to be with your parents, your sister, your friends - as in life - you are not mine to keep. Which means I'm having to expand my consciousness to believe that you can be anywhere and everywhere, across the globe, while simultaneously being very much dead.

Continuity

I think I can get into the idea because I know you would enjoy being an eternal, infinite article. Also I trust you to use your power for good. In a dream the other night you told me that you were OK. I woke up crying because I hadn't realised how deeply I'd needed to know that, thank you. Inevitably you knew what I needed before I did. In my reverie you were playing with the universal forces of entity. You’d discovered how to mess with people in this consensus reality. The most common way you visit me here is through your giggle; I can hear you snigger across all existence when something silly happens in this terrestrial realm. I've noticed you use songs on the radio, break stuff, or deliver it, just in time. Wind and weather, I see you. I enjoy your friendly ghost games and I wonder, what else are you learning?

Potentially you’re only just getting started at being continuous. Perhaps the reason I feel you less clearly and constantly now is because you've begun to expand yourself elsewhere. Our growth in this life was always a mirror for us both, perhaps we're still on the same path of learning despite your death. Is our continuousness because of our interrelatedness? Conceivably you’re challenging yourself as I am, stretching away from dependency, bit by bit, day by day. Maybe you’re expanding and exploring your presence independently to your physicality. In which case, are you telling me that it’s OK for me to not need you?

Bull shit.

Nothing

I miss you. Come back, right now. Please.

The moments when I can’t feel you here are my absolute pit. Your absence is gut wrenchingly atrocious. Do you remember when we were talking about anticipated grief last year, I told you that it felt like I was carrying a bag of dog shit around my neck. Like the little bags hung on countryside fences, that stinking package of mess hung at heart height, continuously made me want to gag. Well, it turns out actual grief is like that too. It's disgusting.

There's a revolting onus relentlessly stuck in my throat. As a result of your goneness I carry an odious parcel inside which makes me continually nauseous. This dog shit existence is worse in every way for me; I want to take this shit off from around my neck. But I can't. The best I can hope for is that I get used it. Nothing is as good without you here. Literally, I've been looking for things in our life which are better unaccompanied by you. Nothing. How annoying that you won’t come back to relieve me of this shit. The best we can hope for is that your potency dwindles over time into something more tolerable, so that fewer people notice the atrocity around my neck.

It's all so shit. I want a better word for it, especially in this Substack where I'm trying to be semi-professional and somewhat eloquent. But there really isn't a word sufficient to capture the awfulness of it all. Do you remember on the day you were diagnosed the Cancer Specialist Nurse came to meet us on the ward. She closed the curtain around us and sat beside you on the bed. I was in the plastic chair, and she said to us, “I'm so sorry. This is fucking shit. In all my years of doing this job I haven't found any better words for it. I hope you don't mind me swearing.”

You'll remember how we appreciated her candour. She was excellent in her role, we were impressed by her, and also we were right to want more. After she left we discussed how frightening it was that she didn't have a better clinical explanation for our situation than, "It’s really shit." We talked about what we would have wanted her to say and realised there wasn't anything. Your diagnosis was more than "a bit rubbish". We knew by being normal she was trying not to alarm us, we didn't need drama from her. She wanted to avoid confusing us, so she wasn’t being scientific. Her calm demeanour helped it all to sink in - we were fucked. If the technical terms she used were swear words, then everything had become appropriate. We were now in the context of survival.

Will you therefore please stop shitting with me and stay with me, until I feel less wobbly. Thank you.

Everything

This week a lovely friend sent me a poem. It's based on a sermon after the death of King Edward VII (1841-1910). It got me thinking about how the Edwardians must have been trying to work out how to do grief in a reasonable fashion, after the Victorians had gone so very over the top with it all.

Death Is Nothing At All, by Henry Scott Holland.

Death is nothing at all.

I have only slipped away to the next room.

I am I and you are you.

Whatever we were to each other,

That, we still are.

Call me by my old familiar name.

Speak to me in the easy way,

which you always used.

Put no difference into your tone.

Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed,

at the little jokes we enjoyed together.

Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.

Let my name be ever the household word

that it always was.

Let it be spoken without effect.

Without the trace of a shadow on it.

Life means all that it ever meant.

It is the same that it ever was.

There is absolute unbroken continuity.

Why should I be out of mind,

because I am out of sight?

I am but waiting for you.

For an interval.

Somewhere. Very near.

Just around the corner.

All is well.

I love that it specifies tone of voice, laughing and jokes. I think you'd have found this poem comforting before you died. It caused you such misery to imagine the pain your death would inflict on me and the kids. We talked about your hope to continue as a soul, you wanted ancient human thinking to reveal its wisdom to you. Since every culture in history has believed that death is not the end, you were imperceptibly excited to find out if there was any truth in it.

This poem says so much about how it feels to live without you. On many days it's so easy to think of you as not gone and only in "the next room". Maybe we can thank cancer for that, because you were actually in the next room for several months before you died, like a practise for grief. You were in the lounge while I cooked dinner, or in bed while I did the laundry. You could still be resting in the spare room, while I settle the kids into their beds tonight.

You are never out of my mind now, although you are always out of touch physically. It's strange that you seem so very near so often, but I can't say that to the kids because there are moments when the emptiness is almost impossible to tolerate. I can’t expect them to ignore that truth. In the letter my friend sent there were words from Rabbi Marc Gellman. He describes death as "eviscerating" for the bereaved. It means to disembowel or remove essential parts. I think you'd agree that this is the perfect description for us both, in dying and in living.

Here and Not Here

Rabbi Gellman continues to say, "Death is nothing because our soul's journey continues beyond the grave, and death is everything because no other separation from our loved ones is so final or devastating." Ouch. That's why you, me, and Rabbi Goldberg cried after he prayed for you. It was a release to the tension in which our son would now exclaim, "Biscuits!"

When things are intense, stressful or pressured, instead of swearing our wise little boy says, "Oh, biscuits!" He has bad days too, but you've been there for those, so you know. He doesn't swear at me yet, but he wants to. He gets angry, hostile, and anxious at times. We all do. You’re in everything, as you wanted. And also in nothing, just as you feared. It’s a shitload to deal with, to be honest with you. Our son has learned how not to swear from the TV programme, Bluey, which you used to watch with them. The Dad, Bandit, says “Biscuits” when it all gets too much, he was always your favourite.

There are moments when our separation from you feels viscerally devastating. It really does take the biscuit. You’ll remember that you said, “I think dying might be easy compared to what’s ahead for you.” Well, from where I’m sat I think you might be right. I believe I can take this shit but I really don’t want to. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.

I don’t know what your gig’s like in “the next room”. I hope you’re OK. If so, why not come here and have your fun with me. Please help me not to lose my shit in the endless nothingness that spans my lifetime. You’ll be forever in my heart, therefore forever wounding me. We’ll be separated and together. I am alone and with you, always. I need both possibilities alive in my heart and mind - you are both gone and present. Here and not here.

Bisc-shit

I've no idea how to explain that paradox to a child, I barely understand it myself. Rabbi Gellman’s closing thought is that we take what our soul needs on any given day. I like the simplicity of his advice.

All I know is that change is rarely comfortable, and understanding the discomfort is when the learning happens. There are days when our Daddy deprivation is desperate. Can you see when our children dissociate from their innocence, do they come to find you? I reckon if you’re spinning around the cosmos you now know more about wholeness than I do. Give me a sign towards helping them, when you get a moment, would you?

I’m living with the hope that we’ll eventually understand by doing; that I’ll eventually understand my doing. That’s not much to nibble on for half a lifetime, but this biscuit will have to be enough for now, until we learn otherwise.