Author: Ellen Bell

She told me that she died last Wednesday. It wasn’t a gentle end. She’d had no water for thirteen days and no food for months. She wanted to die but it took seemingly forever. What a will, what resolution. Poor love. She told me that she’d found notes all around her house saying how she wanted to die. Wanted it, so much. The end wasn’t a gentle one. She told me that she was fitting and her mouth was parched. Poor love. Such effort to come into the world and such effort to leave it. For some, that is, not all. May she rest in peace.

We don’t see he and his sister very often. They live so far away. And yet the thought of him touches me, still. Last time we stayed with them he got upset over some homework that he’d missed. I felt his anxiety and recognised that need to keep going over and over it both in his mind and verbally at the dinner table, in an attempt to make it all right. A gentle boy and kind. I am glad he is part of my life, however distant.

Mostly I have decided on what I want to right before I come to this screen, but today when I sat down at my desk there was nothing. Nothing to say. And that’s ok, isn’t it? I could talk about the weather or the news but perhaps I will just savour the nothing, the empty space…..

I like being a flat-dweller, I always have. Yes, one’s privacy can be impacted on but there’s something about living in our own separate boxes while belonging to a larger whole. I enjoy the sounds of others waking, seeing the lights on in other windows during the hot nights, the smells of food cooking and being part of that pulse of humanity.

I saw him from our top floor window. I thought at first that he was delivering a pizza or something but after watching for some minutes he didn’t come out of the building. He looked so world weary as he humped his bike and back pannier up the stairs. He clearly lives in one of the flats over there. Poor love. What a job. I hope has other things that promise joy.

He rang me yesterday morning from the coffee shop to tell me that he’d seen her daughter and she’d told him that she’d died last Saturday. From a blockage. It was very painful, she told him. She died in pain. There was no relief until the end. She was a tiny creature. An open woman, generous, kind and good. I liked her very much. May she rest in peace now.

It was biblical in its force, taking so many lives, so many of which were children. The grief of it, their grief, our collective grief, travels across oceans. I hope the deaths were quick, momentary, no time to think about drowning, just gone. Rest in peace and may those you leave behind heal.

It is still niggling. Still not better. I am not quite myself. And yet, have I ever been? It is a nothing in the whole scheme of things, particularly in the light of today’s 20th anniversary of the bombings in London. Why can I not properly recall the details? It shames me that I cannot. We talk about it over breakfast and then it begins to come back to me. So much horror in one day. And then we talked of Gaza and the horrors they are currently going through. What is my back in comparison? Nothing.

It a lovely word – succinct, clipped, adept. And with many meanings from fast cars to fast women to holding fast. For me it means purging, cleansing and denial. Just rice. No tea. That’s the worst bit. As is the withdrawals, though they are nothing compared to ones I had with coffee once. Three days to heal. Let’s hope.

Does any of it really matter? My PhD, the fact that it steals my sleep and invades my dreams, L. and her silence, my continuing sore lower back, and all those other more important bigger things like wars and people going hungry – are they but a blink of an eye in the larger scheme of things? I don’t know. Shouldn’t we still care, do our best? Yes, I believe so, but detachment is good to. I am a worrier about the small things, always have been. Let it be and then just do what you can. That’s all.