Labyrinth

She finishes the glass of wine. Faster than usual. Still needing, wanting, desiring, keening for more.

Already? How has it happened already? Of course, she has known it was coming. They both have. For 14 months now. Yet still, still it seems too sudden, too abrupt. She wanders in this maze of uncertainty. How is this done?

For a moment she is distracted, wondering how it is for those experiencing a sudden death of a loved one. Harder for the shock factor, easier for the absolution? At least it is impossible to prepare - or to fail to prepare - for the unexpected death. She can imagine the horror at the abruptness but also the sweetness at the lack of guilt. Guilt for failing to have quite made the most of the slipping away months, weeks, seconds. Guilt at still not being ready.

Exhausted, she beats down the urge for more wine. Distracts herself with a square of dark chocolate. Fenella’s favourite. Deep, mellow, just a hint of cardamon. From somewhere tropical, exotic, mystic.

Somehow, she drags herself upstairs, back to their bedroom. Sod the toothbrushing. This is no kind of a day for dental hygiene.

She keels over into the bed, pulling the stiff white sheets over her aching body. Old fashioned cotton, Fenella used to say. The kind you have to iron to coax any kind of softness from its feisty fibres. The kind that decides if it will wrap you in its folds. But when it does, when it finds you worthy, it cossets you like fierce mother love.

Sighing she stretches the sides of her neck, cranks her creaking hips, and rolls, from decades of muscle memory, onto her right side. Flinging her extra arm over Fenella.

She – Fenella - feels, almost imperceptibly, the same. The bulk of her shoulders, that deep chest, the stiff muscles across her shoulder blades. Only the chill of her body, the absence of the rise and fall of her ribcage, give cause to question. Is she there? Is she there in any way at all?

Now that the last breath has left her body, what is this mass of cells? It feels like her. It really does still feel like her. She runs a hand over her lover’s crown, stroking the short silvered hair into the nape of her neck. Groaning with yearning and loss and loneliness. Dying with her in a way. Dying for her to be alive again. Desperate and tender in an unholy mess. Deeply touched by the feel of her lover’s body as she holds her close – reckless and wounded by the leaden response of Fenella’s spent shell.

“Where are you?” she cries out. “How could you leave me here? Like this? Lost in the maze of our life together. I have no idea… no fucking idea how to do this! How could you? How can I? How can this possibly work?”

Hours later, exhausted by grief and love, she rests her cheek against Fenella’s stiffening back. There is a comfort in this. A specialness, an intimacy in knowing that they are still the only two people in the entire world who hold this secret. Her death is not yet a public event of undertakers and well-meaning neighbours and anxious friends and unwanted casseroles. It is not yet the event-planning of the funeral, the bureaucracy of the death certificate or the swelling current of other people’s ideas about what has happened. It is just the two of them. She and her.

In a way it has always been that. Theirs was a love that few understood. Such different personalities. “Incompatible values and no shared life objectives,” Claude had declared. He’d meant well, bless him. A little clouded for sure, by being enchanted by her, by not wanting Fenella to be The One at his expense. Even while knowing deep down, that were it not Fenella, it would still not be him.

“She seems so strong,” her niece Caroline had observed, as though that were a dangerous disease, unlikely to be sexually transmitted. “It’s one of the things I love about her,” she had replied, “Her steel-strength brings out my gossamer-strength. We find each other in our differences.”

Where would she find herself now? She can almost hear the echoes of Fenella’s response in the room. No self-pity. No playing the victim. They had discussed the funeral arrangements months ago.

“No wallowing!” Fenella had insisted. “I had a bloody amazing life and I’m not having that eclipsed by fake sentimentality and learned responses. Be true! To me, to you, to us! You can make my death into anything you want. For god’s sake make it into something that gives you more future. Not less!”

She sighs, nestling into the familiar body, now unfamiliar in its cooling temperature and unyielding solidity. Yet still she is partly holding the Fenella she has loved. She feels energy in the room and knows it is not only her. She breathes, sighs, breathes again. This will be her cruellest test. And maybe her most glorious. Give me strength, she whispers into her lover’s back. Give me the strength to give you peace. To let you go. To allow your distancing, disappearing, dissolving. Knowing I have to let you be gone, so I can still be. For the sake of all the days I have yet to be.

Maybe tomorrow I can tell the world. But not yet. Now is our particular time. Our time to say goodbye.