Every morning my older daughter calls from London. “What are you doing today?” Erm… she is the most caring. She really checks in to make sure I don’t check out – that I haven’t woken up dead or had a stroke or a vertigo or fallen down some stairs or otherwise passed out. That I’m still above ground and that the many pills I’m forced to take to stave off annihilation keep kicking in. “So what are you doing today?”
Erm… do? To? It’s a little too chirpy. Active. Aspiration. I’m 79. I was lucky: I’m still here, a lucky boomer with privilege and a triple-lock pension. A war baby with free orange juice, free milk and a free education for life. They paid me. I even passed the 11-plus. It was alright. It was more than all right. Then it wasn’t. My wife, Jill, is dead. Cancer in a time of plague.
We were both English teachers in West London for nearly 40 years. It was mostly exciting. Then we moved to the sea at the edge of the world for almost 10 years – wild, empty, elemental. We have just planned one last big trip, a long-awaited trip to the heart of the American South, the rock’n’roll South, the haunted, gothic South. The time of our lives. Then blame, we ran out of time.
We never reached the voodoo cemeteries of New Orleans. We just got to Yeovil’s Covid crematorium. Three of us – me and our two daughters – stand uselessly in the rain, dragging a basket case. A miserable trinity – and quite unseen.
I went through a few therapists and believers. It didn’t take. I was immune to the online grief industry. Grief doesn’t go through phases, doesn’t have tickboxes, rather it’s a perpetual cosmic vertigo. And I opposed all religions. Jill does not “pass”, she is not elsewhere, she is not slumbering in a cemetery. She is dead. Extinct
So I’m alone at the edge of this world. Sometimes I’m fine. Other times I’m all over the place, pulling through the wreckage. My moods are very varied.
I have some good chums, though they tend to keep coming out too. I suppose I should look for distractions, fun group activities like Zumba or the Quakers or quilting or bell ringers or Morris dancing or walking around. But collectives just get on my nerves. I give the piano a bit of a bash. I grow a garden. Well, Jill’s. Her flowers are riotous. I went all out to banish any nagging self-pity and egocentricity. I walk a lot. I swim a lot, miles out to sea. I have epiphanies in sunblind waves.
But the decisive source of solace is poetry and music, blues and rock’n’roll. It just works. Stuff I thought I’d forgotten can pop up at any time. I am overwhelmed by quotes, killer lines. They fly up like butterflies. They fall like confetti. They connect me to time passing. They give worthy things. They give them grace.
After great pain comes a formal feeling.
The Nerves sit ceremoniously, like Graves.
[…] A quartz contentment, like a stone.
Wow! Emily knows. When I’m feeling a bit mortal or melancholic or the whisper of mortality, lines like these almost make things right.
“I’m not afraid of death, it’s the ‘precursors,'” said the patron saint of gloom, Leonard Cohen. Gloom is necessary. Gloomy is good. When things start to fall off, fall out, fall in, fade, crack, crack, tear, or blow up, it helps. When I lose meaning or relevance, when things occur to me. And lately things have been coming together. I just had eye surgery on the epiretinal membrane. I’m panicking. Things become irretrievably duller. Am I going blind?
My only companion, Dolly the cat, gave the spirit. The assisted dying was more than Dignitas, so I dug her grave – too shallow – and dragons destroyed her limbs.
“So what’s happening today?”
Erm… same as yesterday, same as tomorrow. Quotidic repetition. A Sisyphean activity. A day will go like this, it will go like this: I drag myself out of bed to a broken slumber, with podcasts about inner peace, cosmic harmony, satori, bliss. Zen calm, the spheres ring, quack gurus preside. I am encouraged to be “mindful” of mindlessness. I am encouraged to cultivate “an empty mind.” It looks quite empty enough. These podcasts are not working. Oblivion does not occur. I just get the giggles. I stand up. I stagger in the murky darkness to the bathroom, unable to catch my ruined face in a mirror. My goodness those bags under the eyes are hugely full (the grandchild calls them “plums”).
“It’s a funeral in the mirror and it stops at your face.” Shut up Leonard!
Further. I brush the meager bangs, adjust the sexy dentures – not always the right way up. Dear me Time for the medicine. I get out a shoebox of pills – bendroflumethiazide, ramipril, atorvastatin, omeprazole, hemlock. You are only as good as your last pill.
Then it’s time for the multiple eye drops: Maxidex; chloramphenicol; iodine. They are meant to bring my sight back. They don’t. Things are still a bit foggy. Then it’s time for the daily cardio blood pressure monitor, a non-invasive sphygmomanometer. It monitors anxiety. It can make you more anxious than you have ever been. It monitors whether you will live longer than the next few minutes. If the batteries are dead, you might be dead. This is no way to pass the time. This is no life for an old man. Then I leave water for Dolly. Then remember she is dead. Then I consider Jill’s as on the piano. I hear her healthy and sunny voice.
“Everything alright?”
“Only.”
“Then what are you doing today?” she asked.
Um… looks like she still has my back. Then, wired with caffeine, I’ll try to reproduce Dylan’s verbatim Underground Homesick Blues as reassurance that small strokes did not destroy the memory. “Johnny’s in the basement…” Yep. It done. The destiny. So far so good. Then I will check the online Guardian headlines. Then I feel like eating my gums.
Further. The day starts properly. Vertical. I go to the hills, fields and forests, fluffed with bluebells, I look at the glow from the waves, “whose dwelling is the light of setting suns”. I’m gone Oh William!
But it’s not all transcendence. I can get quite bored by all this useless beauty. Samuel Beckett pops up. “The sun shone, without an alternative, on the nothing new.”
The afternoons are a highlight. Then it’s time for the music. Ah, the healing power of rock’n’roll! I play it loud. Very hard. With bone rattling volume. Howlin’ Wolf does Goin’ Down Slow.
I had my fun
If I never get well, no more
[…] Wow, my health is fading
Oh yes, I’m going down slowly
“This is where the soul of man never dies,” said genius Sun Records producer Sam Phillips. Rather.
“Awopbamaloobopawopbamboom!” shouted Little Richard. The quasar of rock. One can only agree. I first heard it when I was 12. It never let me down. It destroys all seedy morbidity. It cancels all sorrow. Sometimes I put on the flashy 40s suit and dance very badly as if no one is there. They’re not – even though the postman was surprised when I walked up to the door. Sometimes I pretend I’m in the Village Vanguard club to check out Billie and Lester or in the Mean Fiddler get wrecked with Shane and the Pogues or in the 100 Club check out Jill Lindy Hopping. There she goes. There she went. Further.
A little daytime TV? Nope. It’s emetic, especially those happy shiny people who scourge care homes, twilight zones, eternal youth, cheap crematoria, cheap funerals, erectile dysfunction, fjords. That stroke ad is very disturbing, that melting water coil can give you one.
There are minimal variations on this day. My moods can include fleeting, disappearing, bored, lonely, absurd, blissed out, angry, fed up, fatalistic, scared, haunted, amused, blessed, bereft, tough, gloomy. Call back. There is a current fashion to deny these things. I am encouraged to go on journeys, to seek graceful closures, to embrace positivity. It all seems doomed. Merciful. Morris dancing is not going to solve anything. I need stronger stuff, more nourishing – like poetry, blues, rock’n’roll and the old wisdoms. These voices may just be in the ascendant. They may just trump the quotidian carnage. The panic subsided. I feel more calm, more quiet. Even, it whispers, a little Zen. What is the word we are looking for? “Knock”? That’s it. Kerouac. Foolish, immature, sentimental Jack. On The Road was another early passion. Kerouac enjoyed them “burning, burning, burning like wonderful yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars”.
I hear Jill giggle. Lord, I miss your giggle. “Terrible stuff. Pure self-respecting male bollix.” Well, there it is. Jill was more of a Jane Austen fan. Oh well, back to bed and peaceful slumber. Back to version in Subterranean Home Sick Blues. There we go… the phone rings. “How are you?”
Jill? Of course it isn’t. That’s my younger daughter. Every night she calls from New York. “So what did you do today?” Erm…
