The C-Word

An essay on grief, mortality, and (failing to) control our relationship with the past

I’m taking a short break from writing this week, so I’m sharing this long read essay with you which was originally written in 2021. If Peak Notions coming into your inbox each week is something you value, please consider supporting it by signing up for a free or paid subscription, and by sharing it with people who might enjoy it.

Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.

- Elizabeth Bishop, In the Waiting Room

Tomorrow is the five-year anniversary of her death, and the irony isn’t lost on me as I mindlessly draw the toe of my boot gently back and forth across the drab grey carpet. This hospital waiting room could be any waiting room, anywhere. Blue pleather chairs are spaced widely apart in limp acknowledgement of the pandemic. There’s that hospital smell – disinfectant and hot bodies with overcooked vegetables, but they’ve made an effort, so there’s some sort of synthetic fragrance in there too. Something that, at some point, gestured at floral. Masked women, including myself, sit along the off-white walls with a void of grey carpet separating one side of the room from the other. It could be some sort of cultish ceremony. I contemplate, not for the first time, how bizarre mundane rituals can be if you consider them. Waiting to be seen by a doctor is one such ritual. A collective precipice between ignorance and knowledge.

Not a single one of us wants to be here, I can see. Each face seems to read worry, but I might be projecting. It doesn’t help that only patients are allowed because of the virus, so each of us must sit nursing our silence. I prefer it that way. I am here to find out by myself, quietly. The idea of having someone else here – especially someone I love – if bad news is coming, is unbearable. Something like this needs careful thought, to be rolled around the inside of your head so that you can get a sense of its contours. I want to know that I can think about it, so that I can decide what to do, and which version of myself to present to everyone else. There is also the constant internal reminder not to be too dramatic about all this. It’s far more likely to be nothing than something. I’m too young, for one thing. But anything is possible. I have seen that. I have sat in rooms like these before and seen how swiftly previously unknown facts can twist a life into something unrecognisable.

Five years. Each November around the anniversary, I feel a great unsettling in the week or so leading up to it, as though some sort of subsidence is taking place in my foundations or someone indecisive is moving the furniture around my gut. I’m fine until suddenly I’m not, and I’m back there again. Hauled with a bewildering jerk through time until I land, breathless and hollow, back in the navy chair by her bed at the hospice I haven’t set foot in since that day five years ago. I walked into the room where we knew she was going to die only to find that it had already happened. Her body lay in the bed where I had climbed in beside her when I visited the night before and told her I was with her. That I would see her again in the morning. I left when she fell asleep, going back across the road to where we were staying, and instantly lost consciousness on the couch – that liminal slumbering place of temporarily rejected spouses and children off sick from school – as though I was an absence only sleep could fill. It was the kind of deep sleep that the body relents to almost as a kindness to itself; a bone-deep, dreamless dormancy that is like a small death. A sleep in which you not only vacate your corporeality, but simply cease entirely to be for a while, as though the body is trying to reboot itself, or to exorcise a threat.

I woke later that night when she called me, asking me to come back to her. It was almost eleven o’clock and I guessed that she would be asleep again by the time I got there. I was so weary, so paper-thin. I didn’t feel confident that I could arrange my face to render my fear unreadable. I was afraid she’d see right through me, so I told her that I would come in the morning. I did come in the morning, but it was to find her lifeless; of her but not her at all. I realised then how little of a person is their body, and what a paltry facsimile the body seems without life in it. It was not her really, but it was enough like her to hurt in a way that I had never experienced before.

Only when I left Ireland did I realise that we do death differently to other cultures. Several of my British friends are horrified by the idea of a wake, when everyone from the elderly to small children will gather in a room with a corpse, to witness the body and to honour the life. In this context, a lifeless body is not disgusting or frightening, it is simply a vacant house, a ponderous object, but one of a singular category. It is owed a unique respect, even reverence, because of its prior owner and function. The treatment of a body reflects the value of a life lost, and of life itself. To see the body, to touch it, is to absorb the reality that someone is truly gone.

I stood by that bed, looking at her. Someone had placed flowers on her chest – the truncated nose of a lily, and some smaller, less imposing blooms in clashing colours. I bent forward and carefully picked them up before tossing them angrily into the bin by her bed. She would have hated them; hated this instant transformation of her body into a relic, a symbol. The flowers seemed an attempt to soften or translate what had happened. I loathed them with a hot prickling in my guts – their vulgar colours, and their reflection that the person who had placed them there did not know my mother at all; they were an articulation of someone else’s needs and beliefs, colonising a chest where my mother used to live. Her death was a raw, animal egress – an antithetical, unjust monstrosity. The flowers seemed to mock that.

I sat slowly into the navy chair and heard myself scream. A long, bestial wailing. Savage. I have never uttered anything like it, before or since. My mother would surely have told me that it was shameful to make that sort of racket in a public place, especially one full of terminally ill people. I could not seem to stop it. It came out long and coarse even as I disapproved of it and struggled to recognise myself; a brutal articulation of months of compacted despair, rage and terror. Here was the thing I had feared, and it was as bad as I had anticipated.

‘Laura?’ My eyes blink wetly, and I look up. It is the doctor, an older man in blazer and ill-fitting trousers. His eyes are the colour of deep seawater, and he is looking at me carefully, as though sensing furious movement under my stiffness. ‘Are you alright?’ He asks. ‘You tell me’, I think. Somehow, while I have been gone, spirited away by a five-year-old moment, the waiting room has emptied, and it is my turn. I don’t really believe that I am ill. I don’t feel it, for one thing. Tired, yes, but we have all been tired this year, and I put the tiredness down to my body’s intransigent unwillingness to submit itself to all of the unacceptable aspects of this year. So no, I don’t believe that I am sick, but a hospital waiting room is a place where I have spent so many of the worst hours of my life, and anything is possible. I’m not entitled to health, or even to life. None of us are.

I’d woken up a month before finding myself here in this blue pleather chair, and felt it. A hard little mass intruding between my probing fingers and my pounding heart. It was as much a part of me as any other, but my body had recently generated this foreign object and placed it here. I did the usual things; the recommended things. Wait, observe, note if it changes in size, shape. Curse the precocity and mysteriousness of female bodies. I’ve lived with a pebble buried deep in my chest like a threatening secret, wondering about it, forgetting about it in moments, and then remembering again. I carefully researched the many potentially innocent explanations and chastised myself for thinking about what life would look like if it wasn’t innocent. How cruel it would be for the same people who sat on that navy chair with my mother’s body in that room, each sitting vigil one-by-one, absorbing her absence for themselves, to have to witness anything even slightly like her illness again, regardless of the outcome. In the weeks leading to this moment, I have both worried about what the angry little pill in my flesh signified and been certain that it signified nothing, yet here it remained. I have felt dramatic, silly, embarrassed, complacent and frightened.

As I always do at this time of year, I have spent far too much time alone in rooms with my mother, living her last weeks and hours again. Feeling her pillowcase against my cheek, falling asleep on that couch, and waking up to her calling me, asking me to come back to her. I have once more lifted the flowers from her chest and discarded them, emptied her things from her hospice room even as her body lay in it. I have sat in the hospice waiting room, remaining like a sentry with nothing to protect, until they take her body away, and then I have gone for breakfast with my brother and our partners, even though it seemed utterly preposterous to be out in the world, eating, when she wasn’t in it any more. I had French toast that morning, because it is what I would have done before, and I stared down at it, wondering who that person was, who ate French toast sometimes.

‘Do you want to follow me?’ the doctor asks. I realise I’ve drifted again, even as he stands the requisite several feet away looking at me curiously over his mask. He has seen it all, I’m sure, before. He has seen worse. I quietly stand, hook my coat and scarf over my arm, and follow him toward his office. He has a slightly rolling gait. I wonder why that might be, and, completely arbitrarily, which musician he most likes, as his appearance gives me no sense of it. I hope it’s something unexpected like Dolly Parton, or that he is passionately interested in reggae. It would help to humanise him for the coming conversation. As he opens the door and I follow him through, he says ‘So I have your test results here’. He shuts the door softly and I think about asking him whether he likes Dolly Parton.

--

Afterwards I take an Uber home, getting out early as the car passes the fancy butcher shop about ten minutes’ walk from our house. I want to move my legs and I buy a big joint of beef to roast – too much for two people. Every year on my mother’s anniversary, I try to do something positive to remember her. We will have this tomorrow with her roast potatoes – the ones that she took an almost thrillingly obnoxious level of pride in because of their perfect ratio of crispy exterior to fluffy centre. Most of the time, enough years have passed to allow me to remember her as all the things she was when she was well. A whole person. Funny, infuriating, loving, sensitive, sometimes unrelenting. It is only in November – the brutal, narrowing month of a moribund year that it is – when the grieving process contracts again, and she comes to me as a person with cancer. Of course, there was no fixed version of her. The person my mother was when she called me, small and imploring, the night before her death is as valid – as truly her – as the one who told me in my final year of school that there were no safety nets for me, and that my life would only be whatever I could make it myself. ‘But you’ll always help me, won’t you?’, I asked, suddenly frightened by the abyss of the world swelling like a liquid around me, and of my own infinitesimal smallness in it. ‘Yes, I will. Unless I die’, she replied softly. This was not the only time she told my brother and I this, and it always struck me as slightly cruel and hysterical, especially because she knew she was all we had in the world.

After her death, it was clear enough why she said it. She needed to know that we could be without her, and that we understood the ultimate isolation in which we all must live. She did everything for herself, and a vast amount for others. My mother was cosmically alone, and she knew it. She wanted us to be self-sufficient, and to go competently through anything, even her death. Even her death. As I walk home with the beef in a paper bag, I feel again the wail tear from my throat in the hospice room, and I feel a bit embarrassed, even now, as though she’s walking alongside me and saying ‘Ah now. That’s a bit much.’

I get through the front door and J comes slowly down the stairs. His pace is deliberately casual, as though, like the doctor, he wants to avoid spooking me. His features are soft, carefully arranged; neither hard nor sympathetic, but I recognise the slight tension he has tried to bury in his big brown eyes. I take a breath. ‘Nothing sinister’, I say. ‘I’ll be fine’. He nods gently. I can see now that he has been regulating his own worry. He knows what tomorrow is, and he always works at projecting a sort of soothing jollity on her anniversary. Somehow it never feels insensitive or grating. Instead, it permeates the November-dark rooms of the house with a sense of optimism, and it tempers the force of her absence, which gains velocity with the resurrection of unbidden memories, and the thought of all the change she has not witnessed.

It could be tempting to think about justice, and whether it ever visits itself upon the inner workings of a human body. If I do that, I might think about why it is that her body grew a virulent mass whose appetite for life would eventually subsume her own, and why my body put its energies into developing this small, inert bump, like a child with moulding clay working hard at something whose reality could never meet her intention. Meaning, like those flowers on my mother’s chest, is something that we apply topically in retrospect, like a weak medicine, to bend our experiences into something with a purpose. Something that we can insert into the narrative of our lives and that we can take ownership of. The truth is that bodies function and malfunction despite the wishes, and sometimes the actions, of their tenants. In the vast universe for which my mother told me seriously to prepare myself, cells divide any way they are inclined to, and they are benign, or they are malignant. My mother prepared me as best she could for anything I might have to encounter. For some things, there is no real preparation. There is only the route through.