Funeral thoughts

My grandmother is dead.

That’s not her there,  not her, not lying there so still. The centre of attention at a family gathering like this. Only that instead of sitting back and opening that smile, she lies there in a stillness that can only mean she is not here. That smile is gone, that smile that we all wanted, the smile that somehow was meant completely for you in that moment.

I sit in a line of my relatives, men in dark suits and black ties, the women in sober colours. I am the eldest grandson but tonight as never before I want to be somebody else. I do not want to be here to bear witness, not to this. And I am glad that no matter what art the mortician possessed he could not make her hands look as they did in life. They lie there, bloodless and empty, not folded into each other as she often laid them in her lap, but cold and terribly large, flattened by the absence of the woman who used them for so long.

I feel some sadness now but my body holds itself in. I wear grief, I am shaved and clean, I have watched the razor draw itself across my face as my thoughts have wandered back along her life. I wear black and it armours me against the tightness in the back of the throat and the sting in the eye. I know that they will come again and again, that they will come at inappropriate moments, when I watch my children perform some unrehearsed scene in the play of life, from the same script that I once half knew and played. They will come when I watch some sentimental moment in a film, an artificial emotion will let me let go and I will follow the rule of my body as it will do what my brain will not, as it takes tribute for the time that cannot be again. For there will be no more conversations where I can make her laugh, no more stories to listen to. I will cry, but I will cry for myself, for like all those present I am left behind.

I know that the more unmoved I am now the more terrible will be the later, the time when I will lie in bed and feel grief grow through me and individual cells will turn with their realisation of what my mind already knows. That she is gone, that there will be no more stiffness when she rises from her chair, that I will never again adjust her seat belt, that I will never again let her transport me back twenty, thirty, fifty years with a memory that she slipped into conversation, a paragraph of the history of our family made real. The wave will come and it will wash towards me from within, as if claiming the sand of my emotions and smoothing them into sorrow.

I watch my uncles, my aunts, my mother and father, cousins, stronger than me, watch them move in a place where their souls are naked and soft skinned and I envy the ones who let their sorrow crease their faces and redden their skin like a storm.

There is a photograph in my grandmother’s house. It is in black and white and from a more formal time, when photographs were purchased and the preserve of professionals. When you went to the studio dressed in your best and held a pose. The woman in the photograph is dressed in a tailored jacket, well fitted to her. She sits and her body is erect and proud and her head is held back with no trace of haughtiness and she is alive and smiling and beautiful and she will hold that for all the time I know her and I will know her until I too lose memory.

Reference points

Driving through the night city, gliding between the darkness and light. The street lamps super 8 clicking through the windows. He liked to drive at night, the streets emptier and somehow purer than during the day.

She was everywhere. Every street corner seemed to have been a way point in their story. Every turn, no matter how smoothly or gracefully executed had a jarring moment where he remembered what he had not forgotten. He had moved back to the city only to find it wasn’t the place that he had once lived in. She had changed the map, the centre of the city was no longer downtown but where she was, and everything radiated out from that. Every reference point took its position from her and every landmark was measured and sighted at an angle to her. The city looked the same, but scraping away the top layer revealed a brighter more glorious place, the archaeology of the soul brought artefacts to light that should not lie buried.

There wasn’t a bar in the city he could go to now without remembering her or wishing her there. She had turned his world upside down and thrown away the figures on the board and he liked the new arrangement. The world seemed to be right now and the old one already forgotten, its internal structure somehow wrong and hard to retain. How could he drive knowing what he knew ? How could all these other vehicles move around his in the choreography of the night traffic, ignoring what had happened, carrying on as if everything was the same ?

The city wasn’t the problem. The fact that every action he now took was a partial gesture, a constant practising without the main actor. He could leave the city but she was on his skin, she was on his hair, her taste was in his mouth and his ears contained a tantalising distant echo of her voice. His nose was filled with her scent. Depth within he knew she had changed him and in the marrow of his bones where new cells were produced that remembered her, it continued. How long did it take the body to complete replace itself ? He could spend the rest of his life changing, replacing the dead cells, sloughing off the skin and each new generation would bring the same feeling to his fingertips, the moment when touch and thought became one and love became a physical constant.

She moved when he moved and his actions were informed by her presence, like a move trained a thousand, a hundred thousand times and each repetition etches the movement a little deeper into your consciousness and even as the move becomes familiar and known it opens itself up to become new and strange and fascinating again. A never-ending process of discovery and learning.

He would forget her when he forgot himself. Would no longer know her when he no longer knew himself.

Remembering

I want to remember.

Not later, when it rained. We were beyond the rain by then. Not later when we kissed. I have that somewhere within. I want to remember what happened at the edge of my vision. Somewhere beyond where I was looking at. I want to remember getting there.

There was nothing I hadn’t done before. I wore the same clothes. I took a path through the heart of the city as easy to follow as a favourite argument. We left the city behind us and I pointed us towards old haunts, where I once lived. The route so familiar that I could sing it but not know the words. A road song playing, half real, half remembered. Movements so practised that they were forgotten, remembered only in their enactment.

But everything was different.

Waiting for you on the street, the sudden fear leaking into my bones. Of not recognizing you. Of walking past and betraying the importance of the moment. Not knowing where to put my hands or how to stand. Making a natural impression because I couldn’t decide which unnatural one was best.

Waiting for you. Knowing that meeting you would fulfil the promise of our conversations. Because if it did not what did that say about what we had spoken about? Could writing conceal the truth so well that I could fool myself ?

Getting on the bike. Feeling it settle under my weight. The suspension compressing as if gathering itself. The sudden prickling on my skin as you climbed on the back. My new awareness of weight and balance and touch. Holding that instance of stability as you arranged yourself. Feeling you behind me.

Pressing the starter. Wanting to do everything right. Controlling myself so as not to let the joy I felt be named. Trying to act as if this was just another bike ride on just another day. The engine rumbling below us. Moving off into the traffic. Stopping at the lights and taking the weight of you and me and the bike on one leg. You and me, a physical unit for the first time. Even if only because of the vehicle we were using. But still. Joined in a conspiracy against gravity and friction. The lights green and turning now into the street as if to really begin the evening.

Accelerating down the street. The city scrolling past, the traffic now more than ever a backdrop. A private adventure, in the middle of a city full of private people. The traffic no longer an obstacle. The cars extras in the film that wrapped itself around my helmet. You settled closer into the seat and tightened your grip around my waist. More than necessary. But just enough.

The bike makes the road your own and you made me my own again. I swam effortlessly through the traffic. The buildings peeled off to the right and the left. Somewhere in my head a map rotated as a thick line marked our route. Does everybody do this? Do we all star in the films of our lives? Or is it only the generations that have given themselves wholly to the flickering realities, the dreams of anonymous storytellers that we watch in darkened rooms?

I redrew the city that night, I changed the topography. I placed another layer on the map, referenced to you. There are bike rides where the road is an unmemorable meal eaten in preoccupation, that leaves no trace except the fact of its completion. There are bike rides where an almost accident thumb tacks the tarmac in your memory. Nights when the bone-shaking tiredness is the only evidence of the miles left behind. But not this night.

That is not what I want to remember.

There are other nights, when the new and the now are on the same page. I couldn’t see you, only sense you behind me, the closeness sharpening the experience. Every corner turned was a witness to our passing, as I wanted to be. Where we were going was unimportant. The road was all that we needed for the moment. We slid along it, leaving no marks but memory. Judging the gaps in the traffic, reading the road for the smoothest path. Each car passed leaving me more alive. Using the power of the machine to take us further, stealing time, playing with the street while others only went somewhere.

Is the attraction the knowledge of being watched and physically observed? I knew you were behind me, a captive audience, sharing one of my passions. Sharing the reasons why I enjoy the road so much. Learning more about me, without words, leaving space for more words to form. Making time for later.

Taught

The best teacher I have ever had was not very interested in sticking to the notes he would have received from the government, in the form of dry instructions.

He interested himself for everything else and a day in his class could range from the introduction of electricity in our home town, through the best places for trout fishing to how bank loans actually work. I’m sure that his class was the first where I would raise questions about subjects that I already knew well , and in my seeming discovery of the answer appear more interested than I was in school. I had a habit of reading through the textbooks at the start of the year and picking out the best parts. Unfortunately I then had to wait until the interesting sections turned up in class again. I often read anything else rather than read the sections we were actually supposed to. A habit which I have only solved by reading everything

He knew most of our parents well enough to establish a personal relationship with us and to make jokes about their jobs or hobbies. I don’t think I ever saw him push this humour too far with anyone that couldn’t deal with it. His delight at his own jokes was apparent and infectious and the air of mischief about him made each class new. We engaged in constant struggles to pose some question that would engage him and lead to an interesting talk, not part of the curriculum but probably just as good for us. An ideal time was 20 to 25 minutes before break, lunch or the end of the class. Like old friends engaged in a poker game both parties knew what the other was trying to achieve but still played the game. His interest in local history and his obvious enthusiasm for storytelling led me to finding out a lot about my local town and these nuggets of information were often the reports that got back to my parents, especially my father, who was also a history fan.

We learned why certain streets were so named, what civil engineering bench marks signified and where they were to be found, what legends or myths were attached to local landmarks, why certain trees grew in some parts of the national park which semi-surrounded the town, and not in other parts. We heard of abandoned roads and the reasons why they were no longer used. In time we hiked these old tracks into the mountains, our footsteps echoing the daily traffic of 200 years before and imagined the power of a landowner who could shut down a public thoroughfare to make a hunting preserve. We knew why the bridges had been demolished and were able to date the potato ridges in the abandoned farms that marked the desolate hills, natural foolscap pages of agricultural and social history. In a rocky gully we searched in vain for the carved graffiti of a British soldier, who had served at a time when cavalry still rode horses and Ireland was not counted as a easy posting. We never did find the inscription but I had found something more interesting and longer lasting, The realisation that every place is saturated with history and this history can be read by those who are interested enough to gaze beyond the everyday and look for the faded pages and yellowed notes that those who have gone before have left behind. To this day I take great delight in knowing things, to walk down a street and know why it takes a hard curve at the end, why certain older buildings stand as they do and why others are new and foreign to the neighbourhood. Why the street has changed names, why the official name has never been accepted and the more popular unofficial nomenclature has lasted longer. He told us of recovering old bottles, abandoned in the lakes before a local hotel, whose pointed bases led back to a time when they had to be stored flat for the cork to remain wet, swelled and airtight.

This type of information is now not as important as it used to be. In a broader sense our ancestors, whether hunters, farmers, tradesmen or traders, had to have an intimate knowledge of their surroundings. They needed to know where roads went, how long they took to traverse, whether a horse could negotiate them with a heavy load or in the dark. Where did the weather for the fields come from, which signs could not be ignored, when was what to be planted and when to be harvested ? How did local conditions affect what people bought and how much were they prepared to pay for it ? I no longer need this level of information and so my interaction with me environment has become limited. I must master the artificial surroundings of public transport and tax, traffic regulations and special offers. However to know about where I live and why certain events occur when they do or why certain landscape features look as they do links me to the earth in a fundamental way and anchors me somewhat. As modern life creates more and more situations where we drift and float on the cluttered surface of the day it is a comfort to know how far beneath your feet the seabed starts and what it is made of. This is his legacy and of greater worth than anything else he taught us.

How must it be for a good teacher to look back at a life spent educating and to hope that at least some of those pupils took some lesson for life, some lesson that went beyond mere grammar or mathematics ? Did any of us thank him for doing more than his job ? We should have and now it is too late. Perhaps if we can pass on this interest in the world to others it will be some small token of repayment.