To your love, to your life

A women's struggle through grief and her coming face to face with death.

 

To your love, to your life

 

 Nearly a year has gone by since I leaned over you to make sure you were all right and instead, felt your dying breath against my face. Since then, time has slowed down. Each day is an agonising uncertainty, me always hoping that you will come back

that I’ll hear your key turn in the lock

that you’ll leave your shoes out in the hall for me to trip on

that your voice, your voice will fill the house again, a spell blowing away the curtain of dust

I think this is what they call mourning.

 

I make tea. Endless cups of tea that never get drunk.  Eighteen cups of tea each day. The house fills with the smell of bitter tannins.

Have a cup of tea, dear. The ghastly, oh so British tradition of preparing cups of thinly caffeinated brown fluid in the face of disaster. Men in army hospitals were given cups of tea and it-

leaked through their dressings

It k-

It must have looked like blood, like the blood I found on your-

It killed them.

 

I spend the long nights lying awake, staring holes into the ceiling above my bed. I’ve tried counting sheep, straining desperately to imagine harmless bleating sounds and white, woolly coats.  I try to see them leaping blithely through a wooden fence. One sheep, two sheep, three sheep

The fourth one tries to jump through the fence and gets stuck. I move forward to help it then realise that the fence is not wooden. It’s barbed wire. The sheep is impaled on its cruel spikes, twisting desperately.  Red blood, fairytale blood, spurts out onto its white coat. I can’t help. I can’t. There’s nothing I can do to stop the endless flow of blood. Its face and coat is covered with it now. Harsh shrill bleats, like screams, emit from its tortured throat. And there’s nothing I can do.

I’m sorry, I tell it as I back away. I’m so sorry.

This is when I wake up in a cold sweat. The same as every other night.  Alone.

So I play games with myself.  Imaginary games. I let myself imagine that, eighteen years ago, two girls, first year students at university, were walking towards each other down a narrow path between two buildings, Psychology and Sociology. No-one else was about. It was a beautiful day and the sun was shining. I let myself imagine that they almost walk into each other.

We collide and books spill out of my arms onto the path. I go to pick them up but you’re quicker. You hand them to me with a dramatic little flourish, laughing. And me? I look into your deep brown eyes for the first time, see eighteen years of my life, our life, unfold and blossom.

At the last moment, though, they manage to avoid each other and one awkwardly apologises. They hurry on

 

You flick hair impatiently out of your eyes and ask me what I’m doing tonight, because you know a good place we can go… I nod mutely and we walk together

Down the path, the narrow twisting path, away from each other, to resume their ordinary, safe, mundane little lives.

 

Your eyes deceived me.

I saw life. I saw hope. I even saw

(love?)

Not this.

I didn’t see eighteen years into the future, did I? Oh yes, it’s all very well for you, you’re gone now, removed from it all.  You hid the future from my eyes. You hid cells, multiplying out of control. You hid long hospital appointments; hours spent waiting outside operating theatres. You hid blood splattered across white sheets, which I couldn’t wash out. You hid the endless hum of ventilators, the rush and hiss of oxygen.

How could you, I cry out every day. How could you leave me?

 

Dawn comes, and with it the first cup of tea of the day. I watch as I drop the teabag in, brown diffusing through clear water. You used to love having your tea strong.  I watch the brown spreading, thickening, until the bottom of the cup is gone.

And all I can see is my own face, looking back at me. And all I can see are eighteen more cups of tea, reminders of eighteen years we once spent together.

Eighteen years of love and hope now turned into cups of tea.

Eighteen years.

How can life and love be so fragile? How can one cell, one misbehaving cell doing what it’s not supposed to, destroy an entire body? How can it take your thirty-six years of beauty and funniness, your thoughts, your dreams? All the characters in your head, both real and imaginary? How can all of that suddenly be gone?

How can I still love you even now, when your body is breaking up under the ground? And how do I carry on?

Nineteen years ago today, two girls met at university. One fell in love with the other instantly. They went out, they walked hand in hand, they argued, teased each other, talked, went away together and eventually got married. They spent eighteen years together but at the end of the seventeenth year, one was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  A year later she died, but that didn’t stop the other one’s love. She loved her wife even when she was dead. She loved her wife when she was lowered into the ground, when her body began to break up, when eventually she had dissolved into the earth and had been taken up into the roots of a tree planted over her grave. She loved her asleep and awake. She loved her even when her body, too, began to fail until eventually she was laid in the ground, under a tree planted thirty years ago.

The sun’s first rays tentatively enter the room. Outside, the wind shakes the branches of a tree. And I know what I must do.                    

I’m coming to you.

                                                    ***

It’s better here. It’s more peaceful.  I’m coming to find you. You’re closer to me. Closer. Closer…

I turn the corner and there you are, in a patch of sunlight.

It’s so quiet here; I can’t even hear the birds singing.

I kneel beside you. This is the only place I want to be. The grass is warm and a leaf from your tree drops onto my head. I’ve brought you something.

You are still as I reach into my rucksack and bring out a thermos flask. Not a sound comes from you as I unscrew the lid, pour a cup of tea. It’s warm aroma fills the air.

Here’s to you.

My hand tilts and I pour the nineteenth cup of tea into the soil covering your grave. It gets absorbed instantly and I look at the earth for ages, unable to move. Somewhere, far away, perched on the branches of a tree perhaps, a blackbird begins to sing.

Author's Note

This is really only an early draft. I'm thinking of adding it to my Advanced Higher English folio. Anyway, I would really appreciate any kind of feedback.