The Dark Sacred Night

The dying didn’t happen overnight. Nor the grieving after. In the first weeks, after she left me, I wouldn’t have even called it grief. How can you tether so much airless emptiness to something as binding as one brief word?

The death itself, that moment my wife became only what I already knew of her, I felt a lot. Relief, a breathing out, like I had been holding breath for her to use all those months. Regret that she would miss the daffodils, which were still long yellowish buds and just a sunny afternoon from blooming. Terror, that without her, I might not know how to see yellow, or green, or anything but grey. That I might never feel my lungs sated again. And that there would be no one to tell, and no one who would ever see me, ever again.

And then nothing. Do you know how painful nothing is? To not be able to feel the edges of yourself moving in the vacuum of space? How can you bind a wound that is everywhere at once? Or pour ointment on skin that has become exospheric?

I forgot that our friends had lost her too. Their grief was nothing to me, and they, oh Lord, they, in their kindness, held it between themselves and I never said thank you, or its okay, or I know, you, too, have lost. And still, they came every day. Nola and Emma, who sat next to me on a pale green couch and told me the simple coffin would be enough, or better, in fact. Caroline, who didn’t bring me stew, or soup, or a moussaka, but fed me chocolate mousse from plastic pots until my stomach remembered how to eat. Farah, who moved in with her own pillow and her own duvet without asking me, and was up before I woke and awake when I fell to sleep, until the daffodils were stooped and brown and I only had to remember again two or three times each day that she was gone. They came, and they came, and they came. Until, one day, when I lifted my face to a pale autumn sun, I saw them still there, Farah, and Nola. Caroline. Emma. And I felt a real, true pain that twisted in my chest and strangled my throat and I recognised my feet on the ground and that I could see gold in the treetops and smell the earth on the air that filled my lungs.

By mid-winter, I was cooking again. It was a small thing. Slicing onions and carrots and fresh green leaves while the radio murmured of life beyond these walls. A small thing, but we had always done it together. I favoured the news programmes. “It’s important”, I told her, “to stay abreast.” But she loved to sing. She would put on records, relishing the slipping of the disc from its sleeve, the delicate weighing of this object between two middle fingers, the magic of setting the needle to conjure life from inanimacy. And as the music began, she would sway and chop and swing and slice and sing. Whatever the song, she would sing it. Elvis and Ella, Melissa, Mick, Tracy, Dusty, Nina and Aretha, She just loved to sing. Even once she became too weak to lift herself from the bed without my arm behind her back, she still sang, and when I took her to the garden, holding what was left of her weight against my body, lowering her into the summer chair I had pulled from the shed so that she could feel the first real sun of the year, she, pale and hollowed in the shallow day, sang in full praise of the wonderful world she was leaving. She sang for me.

“I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do? They’re really saying…”

And so I played the radio while I cooked. Broadcasts in which homely voices spoke about birds or gardening or heritage dairy farming in Somerset, so that I didn’t have to hear the songs she wasn’t singing.

It got better. People said it would. No one told me I would get over it, and I was grateful for that. But after a year, when the daffodils returned and I knew I had passed all the way around the sun without her, I was able to see it had got better. Christmas had come and gone. I had spent it with Emma and her children, and Boxing Day with Farah, who said she would be alone otherwise and I was doing her a favour. On my birthday, which had gone unmarked in amongst pain medications and nurse visits the previous year, the four of them arrived unannounced with wine and cake and a wall calendar with glowering garden gnomes in saucy states of undress on each page, and beneath, a circled day, one each month, with something written under the number, starting with that day, my birthday. “Birthday Party!”

In February, we went to the theatre. I don’t recall what we saw. A musical. It was frilly and light and afterwards, when I said I didn’t feel up to cocktails, Caroline drove me home and came inside with me and made a cup of tea before I could feel the quiet hit me all in one blow. March we went to the priory where she loved to walk, and we talked about her, but also about children and partners and work and books and foreign policy and aging, and we laughed when Nola slipped in the mud, knowing how she would have laughed. In April we stayed in a B&B on the coast and for the first time in two years I lay my head on a pillow that was not my own and was too tired to notice the milestone. In May there was a famous garden and in June we giggled through a sound bath until we left before we were asked to.

In July, I woke up one morning to a squirrel trying to get out of my window, having found his way in through another. It was an hour, that morning, before I thought of her, and when I did it came with guilt at forgetting.

“You’ll never forget, you know.” Farah said from my phone. But I am, I thought. I am forgetting her.

That month, we went to a music festival. Not a big one. Not one with tents and three stages and coverage on the radio. But big enough for stalls and food trucks and queues for beer and toilets. Big enough for bag checks and colour coded entrance gates. It was a singer Emma liked. Blue tips to her pigtails and a summery demeanour. It seemed so neutral, so un-emotive, I didn’t brace myself for trouble.

The crowd was dense. Even as far from the stage as we were people jostled to get a better view, and when she skipped on from the wings, this woman with unworn face and taut belly, there was a cheer and a surge and I felt myself pressed from behind to press into those in front, a wave pushing forward to ebb again, just a short way back as people filled in from the rear. And then the band started to play, simple and breezy on the air, pulsing deep through the earth at our feet, and the people began to move all around me, twisting hips and shoulders with the music, lifting arms above their heads, opening their mouths to sing, turning their voices to the stage, to the sky, to one another, and I felt the joy of them like an arrhythmia in my chest. Next to me, Nola and Emma were dancing, shouting words over the heads of the crowd in front, and on my other side, Farah and Caroline were smiling at the stage, swaying in undulous synchronicity and amongst ten thousand people, as the swell of the chorus lifted us high, I felt her absence and her presence as if they were the same thing.

And then it happened. Not straight away. The girl, this slip of a thing commanding a collective soul, had worked her way through enough songs that the sun had disappeared from view and the stage lights had plunged us into contrasting darkness. I had known two or three, in the end, and surprised myself in knowing them. I had surrendered to a comradely membership of this gathering. I had let my heart be unguarded in this throng where guarding seemed gauche. And so when those opening chords asked for calm, I was carried into calm, and when she sang, that sweet, young voice so pure and full of hope, I continued through into something past calm, where truth is no longer fought, and as she sang trees of green into my vision, my legs lost their willingness to hold me up, and I sat, amidst a sea of legs, and began to cry.

Around me, then, amidst the shuffle of twenty thousand feet, eight legs stood still. Two in front, two behind, two to either side, and I cried undisturbed, while ten thousand voices sang of friends shaking hands, saying how do you do, ten thousand voices - her voice - saying I love you. And I think to myself. What a wonderful world.

A cheer, a shift, a fresh rhythm and the bounce of rested feet and the moment had passed.

“You want to go?” Farah shouted, and on my feet again, I shook my head. Four faces turned back to the stage.

Later, on the train home, I saw the tell-tale signs. Who had been there. Groups of girls, mostly, a few men, here and there. They didn’t pay me any mind. Why would they? They chatted or scrolled on phones or sat in quiet satiety. But I saw them. And I felt, on that train, that I loved each of them dearly. To the right of me, and across from me, sat our friends, hers and mine, who had not helped me to my feet, but had sheltered me until I could rise. And I loved each of them, too.