I Can't Go On, I'll Go On.
Losing M, most beloved
Less than three weeks ago I wrote about ‘beautiful, erudite, encouraging M’, who I explained: ‘was and remains my teacher, mentor and beloved friend. It’s one of those trite sayings - ‘I’m a better person for knowing you’ - but it’s true. Without that connection, without her wisdom radiating across the dining room table for two hours a week, I’d have achieved less and would be striving for less.’
Two weeks and one day ago, I saw my beloved M for the final time.
One week ago, she died.
I can hardly begin to articulate how devastated I am by the loss of her.
One part of me wants to pour onto the page every single moment together and smallest detail of her - a record immortalised - birthing her being in to the world anew, static but safe. Another part wants to hoard each cherished memory to my chest as my own special secret. Possessive, greedy, grasping. Gutted.
She instructed: ‘Cry. Then move on.’ Crying I am proving most adept at. Heaving snotty sobs as well as silent rolling drops. Gasping and keening and juddering. I have quite the repertoire. Soirée musicale. But the next? I can barely fathom how to proceed without her. How will I judge anything? Draw any conclusions? She was my go-to soundboard and the only opinion that really mattered to me. I would use her views to inform my own, could hang entire arguments on a throwaway comment from her ‘fine mind’ (someone once told her she had a ‘nice’ mind, but that hardly does it justice). If she is not my audience, who am I writing for? How can it matter? Who does anything I create belong to? Not me. There must be a recipient. She was it.
And what a gift that was. To watch her read something I'd written and consider it a serious business. An activity deserving quiet and focus, a cup of tea, a pencil. We all deserve to have someone treat our inner thoughts with such reverence, at least sometimes. It is an act of respect, but also of love. Often she’d read something of mine with a satisfied little smile, slightly smug with - I like to think - self congratulation. I hope she knew that every worthy thing I do bears her hand, the signature of her fingerprint, the resonance of her teachings. She would say ‘it’s all you’, but that’s just not true. From the first day we met, she revolutionised my way of thinking before I even realised that there were different ways of doing it. She showed me pictures: duck/ rabbit, young woman / old crone, flip-flop. Perspective, ambiguity. She placed Brueghel’s Landscape in front of me - What do you think this might be called? A Farmer Ploughing by the Sea. Harvest time. Then in she slid the ekphrasis of William Carlos Williams -
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning.
This latest death by the sea. New fall of divinity. Not ‘unsignificant’, not unnoticed.
I am utterly bereft. The gap is huge.
I should not feel so shocked. We knew this was coming. She said so. The decline has felt both slow and swift, has probably been steadier than it seemed. But I lulled myself into false thinking. She once sent me a copy of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking with a post-it: ‘language issues… around death and illness.’ It’s right up my theoretical street, which I failed to recognise as her physical one. I’ve been employing some magical thinking of my own… convinced myself that these issues of language and death and illness were confined to a different street to the one M inhabited, a few rows over at least. Those problems belonged in the blocks of Didion’s LA and New York, in texts and past tense, not the sprawling coastline of M’s England. I knew that she was waiting for me to produce something, to write. And somehow I conned myself into the belief that if I did not write, she could not die. She would have to stay, waiting, forever. Waiting for Godot, Waiting for Dot-oh.
The ugly truth of it is that I have failed to do the one thing she asked of me, the one gift she wanted. I have let the clock run down with little to show for it. She used to say ‘completion is all’, and I’ve let her leave with so much unfinished.
Flickers of guilt kindle regret / For all that was left unsaid or undone. - from For Grief by John O’Donohue.
I must learn to trust that late truly is better than never. I don’t yet know how the moving on works, and I’m not ready to leave the crying behind. Pain demands to be felt. Some pain cannot be killed, it must simply be endured for as long as it endures. McEwan’s Enduring Love was another early text. How do we see? Through the frames of science, religion, literature? Description governs perception. The ambiguity: to suffer love, to survive it. Love that endures adversity, love as adversity. Either, both, all.
My phone screen displays one of the very few photos I have. Us together at my first graduation, in front of the portico steps, each pointing a finger at the other to say ‘check out this legend’. The symmetry makes it look like an E.T. poster. Light could spark where our finger tips join. My otherworldly friend who has been called home.
So few photos of this central, self-effacing woman. But the triggers are everywhere. Books. Books. Pamphlets, theatre programmes, DVDs, even a CD. But mostly books. Ones she sent me, ones I bought or borrowed. Primary, secondary, all genres, all periods, all authors and languages, new and old and pristine and annotated and venerated and obscure. The ones with dashes of highlighter, a penned-in star, pencil in the margins - these are my favourite. Her script seems sacred now.
They don’t have to have a direct link. The fact that we discussed something of it, or else that we never will, is sufficient. I well up. There’s that book I kept from the school library that might have saved my life (I later fessed up and replaced it with a newer edition). That one I stole from the bookshelf of a hospital dayroom and wrote a dissertation about. That one I acquired from a bar sat in my TBR pile.
During The Awful Wait of wanting and not wanting news that began my year, I went to a production of Michael Morpurgo’s I Believe in Unicorns at the little theatre of a private school. MM is of course a staunch advocate for the power of libraries. Here, the stage became a library, stacks of books with magical secrets inside - ladders and kites and a tent and a story that leads to another story and on and on and on. Children were invited to take part in a book swap: bring one, take another. I watched the audience as much as the stage. Children laughed and gasped and shouted out. I watched them fall under a spell, fall a little bit in love. Danyah Miller, as book-loving oracle, was weaving that web for them, and I couldn’t help but feel overcome with love for the woman who facilitated the same for me - opened up infinite worlds just when my own was collapsing ever smaller.
On the day M died, I took a young person (of around the age I was when M came into my life) to open a library account. Such a small thing, the work of 5 minutes, but when I learned the news it felt fitting. With library card in hand, we stopped to observe the sunset. It was a good one, and that felt fitting too.
Yesterday, a crossword clue on the ‘arms of Morpheus’ jolted me. The embrace she was headed for after my final departure. And something before… what were we talking about that day at the old charm table? Chaucer’s dream poetry? De Quincey’s confessions? Is that the day she also told me about Plato’s allegory of the cave? Turn around and step into the light…
She’d pick up copies of Emily Dickinson, a cheap Everyman paperback, whenever she saw it - to give away. 96:
Parting is all we know of Heaven, / And all we need of hell.
Samuel Beckett was a dear friend. ‘Brief Dream’:
go end there / one fine day / where never till then / til as much as to say / no matter where / no matter when
We read Things like Heaney and Auden and Gillian Clarke, Shakespeare and Austen and Krapp’s Last Tape (upset not to have nabbed a ticket for it just now), Denise Levertov’s ‘What Were They Like?’ was one we read together. Applied STILT (structure, theme, imagery, language, tone). Tick off your GCSE with that. Easy. The final stanza through the threat of tears:
There is an echo yet
of their speech which was like a song.
It was reported their singing resembled
the flight of moths in moonlight.
Who can say? It is silent now.
Her voice echoes in my mind. Long may it. She was not a moth in moonlight but a butterfly in sunshine. Ectothermic. She could bask in front of her sea-front window from dawn to dusk, watch the arc of right, up, left, down. Absorbing energy from the world around her and returning it ten-fold.
And what was she like?
There’s so much I don’t know. Her age and exact birthday. Only - a summer baby. Most of what came before we met, almost half my life ago. Snapshots would sneak through - privileged moments of intimacy. But we don’t always need the details; the subliminal is sufficient, even sublime. I doubt anybody really knows exactly what Beckett means, but they know how he makes them feel. Instagram might call it the ‘vibe’, I would call it the essence. Her essence was something like this - I once commissioned a bouquet of flowers for her, with the style to be somewhere between Audrey Hepburn and Frida Kahlo. Elegant and vibrant. They gave me sunflowers and orange roses and purple lisianthus and Inca lilies and foliage. Leafy greens - iron strong foundations and a bright siren exterior. Sounds about right.
‘You’re all over this flat’ she said. I do like to send little tokens. It’s mutual. Nuggets of wisdom scrawled on postcards cover my wall. Patterns and portraits and covers and artworks and idols, with little gems like -
We need all the angels at our back… the power! Mx
The reconstruction is like a resurrection. I collect every slip, screenshot the best messages, dig out the rolls of wallpaper from under my bed with mind-maps about form and voice and the will to power. I kept it all. Coleridge and Blake, Neitzsche and Bakhtin, duck and rabbit and rabbit and duck. I will recreate this voice using all the voices that have built it. A glorious heteroglossia. I desperately want a chat. One about solutions to world problems and linguistic nuances and frippery and what good shows she’s been watching. When I read, I can almost hear her smile at a particularly acerbic sentence from Angela Carter. Finally turning to the very last book she sent me - Anne Enright - I find at least three deep resonances in the first 5 pages: structuralism and empathy, the problem of qualia, women and pain. Why did I delay? Was the other stuff really so important? We could have talked about it, when she had the energy. When she was here. She’d say ‘Good, isn’t it?’
Eventually, I will truly become that person she saw, ‘the girl who has found her voice and will be heard’. I will breathe life into the M-shaped hole in the fabric of my life. The world at large might not notice the lack it now suffers, but it’s there. She isn’t only in the things around me. She’s in my head, the very tracts of my neural pathways, my writer’s muscle, my heart. She’s in every page, paragraph, line and word that I ever have or ever will send into the world - and all the blank space between.
She made me feel seen and heard and understood. Capable, clever, cool. Just now, everything feels pointless. The Lewis Capaldi song of that name was on the radio when we drove home that last time. I once strode on past him giving an impromptu public performance on Buchanan Street, on the steps outside the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. This was before his voice was so easily identifiable, when I still had my London gait. My ears pricked, but I had somewhere to be and Moira’s voice in my head: ‘Just do the thing’.
As we were leaving two weeks and one day ago, I envisaged her as she always was: upright bearing wearing Mrs Thatcher’s coat, lipstick pristine and long red nails hooking a tote strap over one shoulder, saying - ‘I’m going now’.
She is gone.
Past tense. No more ellipses… full stop.
I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
Dearest M,
Thank you. I miss you. I love you.
I will write.
More Anon. xx
I couldn't stop reading this. Absolutely beautiful and so real. I'm sorry you have lost M but I'd happily read more of your memories x
Beautiful thoughts.