click (part 1)
The old adage “As long as someone remembers you, you aren’t really dead” feels, to me, like a horror story. I thought her death would end her influence, but all it did was magnify it. I thought that her cremation would bring some closure, but it only focused and condensed her essence. We had all hoped that scattering her ashes in her favourite spot would finally silence her disappointment, when in fact all that we did was release that condensed disappointment into the world.
At least when she was in a box, we knew where she was. We had a very definite understanding of where she could be found. What was left of her, anyway.
But now…
Who knows?
I have never told anyone this. I doubt that I will tell anyone else except you. But I still hear her. I know that she is just behind me all the time. I hear the click of her solitary crutch and the heavy rasp of her breath, dry and stuck in her mouth as she struggles to keep pace with me. I hear her still trying to form those same phrases she kept for me in life.
“Wait…”
...click...
“Come back…”
...click...
“Don’t leave me on my own…”
--x--x--
She died in her bed, alone, of a pulmonary embolism. The TV was still on. Old episodes of Law and Order had been the only witness to her final moments. She was discovered the next morning by my sister in law, twisted to one side, reaching over to embrace the ghost of her husband who had passed ten years since. He left behind a grieving wife, two barely grown up sons and a shrine to a dead boy that would be continuously tended by his widow. This last and youngest son was to become a shining example of humanity in the newly bereft household. He was perfect and eternal in all the best ways. Eternally young, eternally smiling and eternally silent.
The family of shrank to four and then to three and then two over the course of little more than a decade. In the time it took for the household to diminish between the first death and the third, the house itself became a sacred space, populated with relics and icons of the the father and the son. Bookmarks that had been abandoned between the pages of dusty, curling books. VHS tapes kept at favourite positions. Fossilized batteries that had been left corroding in old Walkmans and TV remotes. Clocks and watches stopped where they had ticked their last tick from the final winding of the great and powerful patriarch, he who controls time and without whom time cannot continue. These items stood in their places and guarded the memories to which they were attached. Even when the council had come in to modernise and refurbish the house, the items had been carefully and delicately stored, and then replaced a month later with immaculate attention to detail.
--x--x--
The family began to drift apart after that. Mum retreated into her timeless, unchanging world of relics and repeats. The sons found lives of their own. And then, one night in January, the day before the anniversary of her son’s death, she passed away.
The funeral was sparse. Supporters and well wishers came to give a sad smile and a hearty shrug to me and my brother. A single friend was present. An old school friend that she had reconnected with in recent months. Words were exchanged with hesitancy. Drinks were thrown back with vigour. There was some laughter and a few tears. And whilst we were in the pub down the road, she sat on her burning coffin, alone, and felt happy. She thought about how much happier she would be now that she could be reunited with the heroes that she had been waiting to meet once again. They would arrive and take her to the next place where she would be able to live in peace with the ones she loved.
Only they weren’t there. No-one was. No bright lights. No booming voice. No harps or chorus lines. No glowing path leading to eternal peace.
Just her.
In an empty crematorium.
Alone.
Burning.