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1
Starting this a little while after it was recommended to me. More than anything starting it now because on a practical level I have a lot more time, now that the house is empty and all the faff around dying is done with, and I do not share all my meals, or even most of them. The logorithm that controls my phone also keeps showing me videos about grief mostly of people who do not speak to me or any reality as far as I see it, but occasionally someone will say something a little bit meaningful. Anyway one of them who was a bit meaningful was talking about this diary Sarah keeps recommending gently. The way she says it is ridiculous, like I’m her son who plays too many video games she’s trying to get off screens. Anyway as I say need to pass the time and honestly it’ll be a relief to have all the things I want to tell you about in a day put down and out of my head somewhere, especially somewhere I can keep them for remembering and looking at.
I'll start with some of the things I thought on my walk today.
Nice pretty flowers coming up with spring you always yelped at your first yearly sight of a daffodil.
Sky bright you'd have remembered my sunglasses I never do.
You kept playing tennis to keep yourself fit until the end. Do you remember how I would watch you play? Trying to memorise your parries. haha. I didn't used to like it when I saw you playing on the hill courts back when I hated you. I felt like it was just like all those vitamins you took bloody ridiculous modern attempts to stave off wrinkles and ageing. I used to wonder about the money you wasted on creams like they advertise on the telly with smiling women always in white. Funny those vitamins and creams they filled up our bedside table eventually.
2
Tried to get round to the wardrobe again today
3
From having you to remembering you a very strange and painful process well actually I told Thom it was like peeling my own skin off.
Being lonely and old apparently goes hand in hand it doesn't feel right. Feels actually very wrong.
What good am I now? I keep coming back to that question. Sarah says it’s 'adaptational' or 'conditioning' that I feel the need to serve a function for everyone. Really I just feel like those words are trying to colonise me. You'd laugh at that! You’re the only person who never reduced me to words like that — God how I refused you use in the first place, and how I got in your way at the beginning, and still we kept colliding until you helped pull me out from where I tumbled over so embarrassingly. Then, I wanted to be your equal, and nothing more, and nothing less, and I suppose that’s it — I had it: that perfect understanding at last, having been treated (of all things) as a whole. Then at the end had gladly had settled into being your sentinel. I am sorry you did not come through the way I came through my own hospital beds to find you in the waiting rooms. I cannot help it feeling like a personal failure, as much as you urged me yourself not to feel that way — yes, you know me very well and will always. I think I will go on that walk now.
I am glad that something which started so warm and unexpected between us — hardly made of words, until that dam broke and became a steady stream of expressions and names, ended in our bedroom, and not under hospice lights. So mournful and not at all like you.
4
Grand time with Thom he came round. Had a good laugh as haven’t had in a long time. I wore that moth bitten scarf you always stole how wonderful a thing it is for once having kept you warm. Still haven’t gotten to the wardrobe but Blanky says I shouldn’t worry and there’s no rush. Sarah says it’ll be the next big milestone and there’s no time limit but it does loom over me.
5
Had a horrible dream, in which I was folded over you heavily and I asked if you were real, and I squeezed your arms, and you asked me — tell me, I am real, but can you feel me? And I swear that I could, so I said yes, I feel you.
So little happened, but I woke and it seemed like I had been transported to summer for just a moment only to be sent back to winter without understanding what I was feeling was sun. It was unhappy this morning here in our home, James.
When I woke up from this I picked a book of poetry you kept off the shelf because I’d never read it before and christ james were you liberal with your page-markers! You kept Ryman’s in business i hardly know what they’d do without you. Anyway i came here to our coffee table because I read one of the poems you marked and it was the speaker about a woman who he loved and had lost, and it really did speak to me James, that you might have understood so much what you would leave behind, and that this poet a long time ago had felt the way I do. I liked very much of it but I felt immediately that one part: ‘this was a dream; the flowers were not true,’ he came back to reality at the end of the poem, and she was ‘gone like a never perfectly recalled air.’ It was like I felt. Like I said I still felt very lonely but I also felt webbed somewhat in some big human net, with you there somewhere far away from me.
6
It is so very strange to go back to how I was before you James, a way that I had truly believed I would be for the rest of my life. Though — it is not the same as it was, when a lifelong loneliness whistled through me and I spent all my years doing my best to grow everything else like moss on dry stone. It is very different now, better for having changed, but this loneliness is a bad one of a different breed.
You remember that they told us even when it got hard seeing you waste away and all, it gave me time to prepare by degrees. I keep thinking about that because it really did not prepare me at all for living now again. There was nothing that I would have wanted more than to have your blood on our pillows, even then, so I think it is hard to think of it that way — there wasn’t any preparing to be done, only each day to take as it was.
7
I was just thinking about the times you’d talk about when we got married and you’d like me to tell it again and again like I was the only bard in a medieval village.
‘You’ve heard this so many times’ I’d say
‘Tell me about it again anyway,’ you said. ‘I like to hear it.’
‘Well I'd given up on ever getting married,’ I said. ‘I was always old before my time and so would satisfy myself to warm my hands by other people’s fires. Then I hated you then I loved you. There, are you satisfied?’
Some days you would tell me off for not putting any detail in but most of the time you would sigh and say ‘how could I complain?’
One time you said it was a perfect story, you sweet liar — it was late spring, and your body so lithe and beautiful looked like a deer or some similarly downy creature on the grass. We were someplace or another green.
I'm writing this in the evenings which is when I cry mostly, but this is nice to linger on. I suppose that is age, you get to nicely linger.
8
Sarah says I could try to stop addressing these to you because between this and the wardrobe I might be delaying my acceptance of the way things have changed — but why? I don’t think I’d write this at all if it wasn’t somewhere to put the things I’d tell you.
Henry gave me a call today. God how that would have made you laugh to read, we were always on either side of you, but he did always make me smile the way you laughed together. It is good and a funny thing too, speaking with him who knows (perhaps the only other person in this world) what these first months have been like for me.
‘It’s strange,’ he told me, ‘some days I can picture him so clearly but others it’s like I’m looking through a veil.’
I could not quite relate because I have been thinking of you so often, this very morning I was thinking of how your large hands made your wrists so very dainty and how nicely all that fit together with your nature. I said — ‘I’m worried about that starting, soon,’ though, because I am a little. My memory has always been good, in my mind and body both, but I am old and things do fade.
‘I try and draw him when it gets rather too frightening,’ said Henry, ‘that helps. I can see him then, very clearly, before me. I do remember. And modern tech — though I haven’t been able to look at any videos or anything yet.’
‘Christ alive,’ I said, ‘me neither. Pictures do nicely though — can’t escape those, living here.’ We both laughed a little at that. ‘No, no, I wouldn’t want to,’ I said.
Will and Liz are still away with the kids. I get texts though, it seems they are getting on however any of us are.
9
That day towards the end when I think you could see that I was scared, at last faced with the reality of it all, as much as I tried to not have you see it, and you apologised to me — that you could not stop the impact of it, that you worried so much about what you would leave behind. I tried to stop you. I was thinking about it today. You got so fiercely selfless around me I cannot think why.
10
Just sitting here going through that letter you wrote me a couple years back, the one you let me read at last just before.
You wrote after your first remission: ‘I am coming back to life, and need to write. Everything seems sort of romantic and sad, especially the views of all the varied ceilings and lampshades in other people's homes from the street.’ I remember that time so well. You were so thawed-out and grateful for every moment, and all over me. It was a very beautiful time, and our joy was contagious. I can only remember smiling with all our friends all the time throughout that winter. I was thinking about that and looking at these old writings of yours and they made me feel selfish. You are the one who had to die, and so say goodbye to your life, which you loved so dearly, and everybody. Your coming to terms with the lights going out for you, when you basked in them so much, is a depth and kind of suffering, kind of experience, too great for any healthy person to comprehend — but my heart makes a go of it.
It does try!
11
I’ve been working too much. Not true actually I've been at work too much making myself absolutely useless. Jim says he’s glad to have me about even if I know he doesn’t mean it, or means it selfishly, as we are by now nothing but old inhabitants who will leave what we have built for those who come after us. I don’t do much but busywork — not useful, you know how hopeless I am with emails — just filing really. I don’t know it’s good to have something to leave the house for. I feel stronger that way.
I do actually feel stronger lately. I know all strength is built only to come down again but I do feel a bit stronger in some things.
12
I got into the wardrobe at last.
It took me through the things you put, then all the rest obviously on top was the rest of it.
What I kep t:
Your favourite dress
Your favourite shirt the purple one
Your gold talk bracelet and ring obviously
All your books notebooks etc these largely live in the house generally anyway but the ones left in the wardrobe I wanted to keep too
What I didn't keep:
All your old hospital stuff
A lot of clothes mostly gone to Henry (more metrosexual than Will)
That cowboy hat
Your real housewives memorabilia as (per your request gone to little Lizzie jr.)
Your work stuff also as per your request
13
In some ways, opening the wardrobe at last feels a little bit like a regression because it has made me feel a little bit mad with proof that you were here recently enough for your things to still smell like you.
14
I know you worried about how you would be remembered and you thought perhaps people would remember what you did, not who you were — on days when you felt you had words for what that was, or what you felt it to be, or wherever the truth is between these things. I wish I could tell you it wasn’t worth your worry. Everybody who has come to me has been missing you as much as your jokes, what I mean by that is they miss all your territory; your uniqueness, the sentences you strung and the little glimpses they got of your world. Those little things never made you entirely, they were impressions — but your roots were what were rich and nutritious. It’s just so much easier to admire blooms that everybody does it. I wish I could have given you those words, but I am sure that I said something not dissimilar when you’d bring these concerns to me, if not put in my dribbling attempts at poetry and metaphor.
Oh James — these shirts aren’t you . Else I could put one on a pillow and be done. Hope you like that joker, you probably would have made it debonair and dirty.
If I’m joking now I think it was the right time.
15
Phantom-like in your last days, you would smile at me through your hollow cheeks and though you barely have the strength to lift your head, a lot of energy was still in your eyes. You missed running a lot, I remember, when you couldn't run anymore. Then later, you missed walking, and you missed having sex. Do you remember that funny conversation we had once?
You lay back on the sofa and said 'God I miss when you could properly fuck me!'
And I laughed and you laughed and then when we died down I got a little sad because making love to you always was the sweetest and most intensive thing in my life, when I felt most possessed by love. So I went to sit with you and you watched me, so piercing in your way, and said ‘oh Francis don't cry I'm not that good in bed,’ and that made me laugh again but I already had shed a tear so another came. ‘Alright,’ you said gently, still trying to make me laugh. ‘Maybe I am!’
Oh James all these things I miss. Even when you lost things and you couldn't go on in the same way, we lost them together and you never lost yourself . I miss you in every rich way I knew you: Ill, healthy, angry with me for forgetting to tidy up or lay the table when we had friends coming over. Sorry for me and patient on my bad days. Sorry for yourself and curling towards me on yours. You coughing and laughing and blinking and proud of yourself. Ever since I opened the wardrobe and went through it I have these nights when it's like a zoetrope of memory showing me all these things against the silence of our bedroom.
I think maybe Sarah is right, maybe I am living a little too entrenched in the past. I am trying.
16
I don't think Will had ever hugged me properly before, not the way that he did today.
‘Don't be a stranger,’ he said, ‘this loss has hit us as a family. You were at the centre of his life, so we're keeping you the centre of the family, Frank.’
I didn't know what to say. ‘Thank you,’ I said. I hope that encompassed what I meant. Liz hugged me then, and then the kids who were being very brave but I could tell were upset seeing our home for the first time without you in it, and knowing you weren't coming back.
‘It's okay’ I told them, ‘you can cry, I'm very sad too.’ They did then a little bit and we comforted each other me and your family. Then I took them upstairs and gave them all the bits you wanted them to have.
You'd have been proud of me James. You know I always found them very easy to look after and be around, but I also made sure Will Liz and the kids all knew I would be alright. There have been times when I caused many loved ones not insignificant worry that I would not be, you most of all, and I wanted them to know that while these last six months I have not been certain always, I know now I will continue however different and more solitary my life will be.
It made me realise too, however, that I would not become again as hardened and grotesque and bloodless as I was before I knew you. You pulled back the curtain on all that. It can’t fall again now all that illusion of dark magic is gone with it.
I will stop writing to you for a little while now and settle myself in. They're coming back next week.