I thought I would be scared by the idea of someone having died here, but actually I am strangely comforted.
I’ve spent a few weeks now reading everything I can about Arthur and Edith. I am considering writing into a few Facebook groups just to see if anyone has context – is that too much? It feels too much, some days.
I’m not sure this book would work for anyone who hasn’t been through something similar to Abi. While she is able to capture the feeling of being underwater and slightly removed from reality, I suspect it would feel very jarring to anyone looking for a more linear or conclusive narrative.
We had asked him, for his last day, who should take him. Usually his mum. But I wanted to be there. To mark it in some small way.
In the end, it was something of an anticlimax. A traffic-jam left me dropping him at the door before heading off to park. He filled out a few forms:
Q: Did you feel like we treated you as a whole person?
A: No, I felt like a severed leg
And then he was in and out within 10 minutes, just as usual.
But he didn’t want to ring the bell.
“My husband has a brain tumour,” I told her, “we don’t know how long we’ll have.”
She might not have her sight anymore, but I swear she looked into my soul for a moment.
“My daughter died of that,” she said, “it was just a few months after I’d lost my husband. You have to keep talking to them. All the time. Like they’re still there. And you have to find the happy things now. For as long as you can.”
‘Get your affairs in order’ is about so much more than just the paperwork (and there is so much paperwork). You have to go through all your assets, list them out on paper, and allocate them. You have to figure out how to distribute all the tangible parts of your life that will be left behind. The sum of almost four decades of life doesn’t go far in cold hard cash.
Somehow, despite how devastating the subject matter of the book is, the story itself manages to bring light into the situation. The reality of all this, four months into our journey, is that you can’t live in a state of dread and despair all of the time. You have to find a new normal.
The thing is that anticipatory grief makes us all crazy. The day after we got the histology back and had a name for this horrible thing, I broke my favourite coffee mug. And was utterly inconsolable.
If someone met me for the first time right now, they would have such a strange idea of who I am as a person.
This book captures the feeling of hiraeth – the longing to return to a time and place that no longer exists and can never be re-visited. Despite being laced with humour, there’s a gentle thread of profound sadness running through the first two-thirds of this book – Sacha is adrift in her own life, no longer sure of who she is or what she wants.
