Category: Writings

He reads newspaper articles to me while I prepare the supper. It, like the crosswords we do at the table, has become a daily tradition. I like it, and I believe he does too. Yesterday was a tough session. The journalist was writing about morality and how it isn’t the same across the board, that there is no absolute given as to what is right and wrong. He wrote of the 62 conflicts that are going on at this moment, involving the killing, abuse and brutalisation of innocents. He seemed to imply that in our inaction we are all responsible. I cried then. For I agree with him. We are. And yet I don’t know what to do. All those dead, killed while queuing for food. What can we do? Show us. Show me.

I’m not sure what it was or what it meant but it kept running round and round inside my dream. Something to do with this box. A white one, inside and out. Small and empty. A nothing sort of a dream or not. Who can tell? The news brings more evidence of cruelty of hate. What are we doing as a race? What can’t we be kind to each other? We are the same, after all. Show us. Please.

She told me that she had fifteen cans of baked beans in her box room along with 6 unopened bottles of Estee Lauder’s White Linen. It was the only perfume she wore, apparently, and when, a few days after she died she smelt it on her clothes she told me that she burst into tears. When her sister-in-law, and daughter of the deceased, saw her cry, she looked surprised, and asked, “You alright?”

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.