April 25th, 2020.
It is that twilight moment. The children are now asleep. I am taking the dog out for her last pee. Foxes are abroad, their stilled alertness a pointy eared spot in the middle of the quiet road and then a line from nose to tail, with the swiftness of a wild beast, following a well-trodden path along the fence, up over the gate and into the dark. The dog, wining, yanks the lead.
Every night at half past nine two teenage boys, well-mannered and groomed meet on skateboards in the street outside our house. These days there is no breeze, and the scraping, slapping, banging sound of the boards and the wheels on concrete carries through the neighbourhood and sounds like a summer a long time ago, when all of us were young. And Cedar stays awake for it, for their voices, the way they lift themselves and the boards clean up into the air from a standstill. I know she sits on her windowsill, between the break in the curtains and watches and listens. She is not yet a teenager but she will be one day soon. And it is sweet, this hope, at this time, sweet and bitter.
April 26th, 2020
My father is not well. He has gone into hospital. He has an adhesion in his intestines which they hope to release with drugs in the next couple of days. He may have to have an operation but this will be dependent on his heart condition. The last time I saw him was on his birthday in early March. No one is able to visit him in hospital.
April 27th, 2020
We’ve found some horses for Iris! Joel’s colleague is happy for us to cycle out to visit her horses. Iris’ body changes when she hears this. Happiness and love flow from her uncontrolled, unabashed. They make her bold, pushy, tremendous, like a fire ball. She’s in front of me on her bike, the hair flowing out the side of her bright green helmet curls back in ringlets that catch the sunlight. Shirley Temple on the stage, tap-dancing her heart out, ahead of the game. And when we get there, Iris throws her bike down, takes off through the overgrown, nettlely gully, through the gap in the barbed wire fence, into the field, to the huge animals, their breath pungently green, the buttercups, high. She slows, she spreads her arms out, her voice takes on an other worldly edge, and she goes forth, somewhere between heaven and earth, horse and human. She leans into them, her body finding itself there, in the dusty hair, in the warmth.
April 28th, 2020
My father’s adhesion has cleared with drugs. There will be no need for an operation and he can be discharged as soon as he seems well enough, this evening hopefully. Three days in hospital have made him confused. He cannot remember why no one is visiting. My mother and sister finally speak to him, after hours of trying to make contact (the hospital communication system is down) and reassure him.
It is evening. The moment before the twilight dog walk. I have hoovered the downstairs while Joel got the children ready for bed. I am thinking about mopping. But I will go and help with bedtime first. The phone rings. It will be Mum telling me Papa is home from the hospital. As I reach for the phone I feel the worry, for the moment, can stop.
He has suffered a cardiac arrest. They are trying to stabilize him.
The light is fading. I do not draw the curtains. The mop sits in the bucket by my feet. I should light a candle but I cannot move.
The phone rings again. It is my sister. My father has just died.
Someone is shouting, no, no, no, no, over and over again. I think it might be me. But who am I? Joel is there and he looks at me and I know it is me that is shouting.
Upstairs the children are all in our bed, weeping. They look at me and weep more. I must be weeping, shaking, coming from another place, the place of adults. We hold each other. We sway.
Some indistinct time later I go back downstairs. The mop is still in the bucket. Outside I can hear the scrape, bang, slap of the skateboard. It must be half past nine. The dog looks at me.
April 29th, 2020
On the road to my mother and sister. I look into the back seat. The children are smiling. They are delighted to be going somewhere they love, to see those they have been missing. It is a holiday to them. Its tragic edge only the taste of the times. Nothing is normal anymore.
Wren has fallen asleep. When he wakes he stares out the window through squinty eyes and says, loud enough to be heard but to no one in particular, “It is different in Oxford without Pops.” As if he had just been there in his sleep, ahead of us all, to check it out, to see what it was like, this place without Pops.
After weeks we are united, my mother, my sister, her family and mine. United across a space so wide, a hole that will never be filled.
Now darkness is here, and a constriction in my throat. The first day after his passing has passed. It will be no longer, just as he is no longer here. Across the valley little lights twinkle in the abyss, like light houses, suggesting a direction that someone else might take.
April 30th, 2020
I’ve just had a realization. There will never be an end to this. What thing am I working towards? What time is there? What is time when he is gone forever, and before that, he was here forever? What is time now?
The waves come, sometimes ripples, other times crashing, foaming, with no notice, no wind to stir them, and no air to breath as I go under.
May 1st, 2020
Wren (3 years old): Pops knows that I know that he is coming back.
May 2nd, 2020
Iris (7 years old): Do you know, Mummy, I believe that when someone dies they don’t really die, they just come back as something else. And if there will be babies being born there have to be people dying otherwise who would the babies be? But we don’t know what he will be. Maybe a horse, or a baby, or a mountain. We don’t know yet.
May 9th, 2020
Cedar (11 years old): I think I am in a dream. And one day when coronavirus is over and the school opens and everything is normal again, I will be awake. But Pops won’t be here. He’ll still be dead. And so I don’t know if I want that time to come. I don’t know now what I want. I don’t know who I am or what I should be doing.
May 10th, 2020
We are back home. The skate-boarding boys no longer visit our corner. I wonder where they have gone.
The children have the hose on in the garden. Joel has made them a water slide. It is sweltering.
Me: Apparently it will be much colder tomorrow. It will drop 12 degrees.
(Cedar, dripping in her bathing suit, stares at me.)
Cedar: I do not understand anything.
Me: Neither do I. Happy fourth of July.
Cedar: Merry Christmas.
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