A Story that Doesn't Matter

This morning, I’m going to tell you a story that doesn’t matter just as I do every day. I’m going to write about things that happened so long ago I can barely remember what they were like. I’m going to speak about sex, love, and kitchen sinks. I’m going to write about anything except my mother, whose death was a welcome full stop for a sentence full of suffering. I’d tell you how many years she was too agoraphobic to leave her own suburb, but then I’d have to think about the post-chemotherapy hours we spent walking the bird sanctuary watching her skin turn grey. If you don’t mind, I’ll tell you about restaurant bills and miniature golf instead.

Like Emily Dickinson’s hope, grief is a thing with feathers that sits on the soul and sings the song without words and doesn’t stop at all. Unlike hope, the feathers are ripped from the wing and stuffed down your throat.

Grief does not breathe. It’s beyond breathing.

It is so desolate that desolation heaved it up.

This is how you stay alive: You tell stories about sex, love, and kitchen sinks. You think about this weekend’s game, about your friend, Steve’s new romance, about the fact that you need to buy a new toothbrush. You realise that fighting the feelings only puts your grief in stasis, and so, occasionally, you let a few tears eke through.

The trouble is that tears don’t come in bite-sized packages. They flood. They leave you on the side of some old street at midnight trying to think of sex, love, and kitchen sinks while your friends wait inside. Tears don’t arrive, conveniently, between 14:00 and 14: 25, so you’ve got to stop this, dammit. You still have an ordinary life to attend to.

And so you attend to that life as though charred remains are not falling from your eyelashes.