Missing

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

– W.S. Merwin

A stainless steel needle, leaving tiny perforations, linking us together with a whisper-thin cord of loss. The imagery of grieving is painfully apt, isn’t it? It’s always amazing how one less person can change your whole point of view.

A bit ominous to start off with a poem about loss, but, that One Thing We Dreaded happening has happened. We are Here — six thousand miles from home — and someone we loved was There — six thousand miles too far away — and now they are not.

Since time seems to run strangely here, in this endless round of waking and sleeping and studying, it felt like we had just seen him a minute ago — yesterday — and it was briefly incomprehensible that he should be so ill when we just saw him, and he was, okay, not fine (you’re just not ever fine with cancer), but …passable. Doing okay. We thought… we thought we had more time. Maybe ’til next summer. Maybe ’til next Christmas. We made appointments that were half promises to ourselves, have bargains with each other. See you next time. See you later. See you, we’ll see you, we’ll look for you.

And don’t we always try to make deals? Such greedy babies we are, human beings, always reaching out a grabby hand, wanting one more day.

Four years was a long time, though, for someone with pancreatic cancer. It was a miraculously long time, and now that the time is over, we acknowledge that we are grateful for what we had, and celebrate the end of pain.

The whole month of December, we realize now, was a singularly perfect, shining gift. We were unaware of how close we stood to the end of things, so we turned our backs on the sheer drop, and baked and cooked and laughed and argued about everything and nothing in particular. We’re pretty sure we both put on at least ten pounds each just from trying a new take on Pineapple Upside-down Cake or Guinness Cake or brownies or Vietnamese spring rolls or matzo balls or Bananas Foster or lemon curd every day. And the ice cream every night — wow. We knew we would have to work off every single pound, but for six solid weeks, we made the choice not to worry about any of it.

And it turns out we were right to set that aside.

“In the midst of life, we are in death.” – John Rutter’s Requiem, Agnus Dei

One of the strange benefits of being so far away from home right now is that we can sort of delay grieving. Psychologists are likely even now standing by on the periphery of our imagination, screeching about the unhealthiness of this, but not dealing with things is a way of dealing with something difficult sometimes — you take it in little bits, as you can. It’s not like we don’t know the truth. It’s just that there are different ways of knowing things. We prefer not to take this one head-on.

Of course, when we go back home, then the loss will be inescapable, as we count on everyone being where they are supposed to be when we go home. Strange how we can be away and change, but everyone at home is supposed to stay static, because Home, to the human psyche, seems to be a static concept. Hm. Perhaps by the time we get home again, we will be more easily reconciled to the truth. At any rate, we’ll deal with that later, when we have to. Grief is a strange, slow process anyway, so this is all going to take time.

To wrap this up: don’t worry, Mom. We’re fine.

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Because the world deals constantly in irony, as soon as we successfully launched our expedition to the Baths, the plumber — a different plumber than the first three — has come along to fix the boiler once and for all.

Theoretically.

As we are solidly now two months and two weeks into having no central heat or hot water in the flat, we are …ambivalent. Seriously. It’s horrifying, but we’ve actually gotten used to trekking two blocks to shower, and we expect cold water to come out of all taps. It’s now second nature to put the kettle on to sluice down the counter top after food prep. At the Baths, there’s a room filled with nothing but bathtubs. We were informed that they’re …for bathing. In the olden days, many people used to trek a couple of blocks for a bath. Since only about three quarters of the flats in the city had individual bathrooms by 1984 (we learned that handy little fact The People’s Palace Social History Museum), the whole communal bathing thing was routine for a number of people.

Still, we’ll be excited if the boiler is actually fixed today… but we’ll believe it when we see it. We are now working directly with the owner of the flat, though, so hopefully progress will come more easily. Hopefully.

T. is still knee-deep in a major overhaul of her latest work in progress, while her editor patiently (!) waits. She has been rapidly researching lampworking, and is glad to introduce another hobby into her character’s life… but remains a little grumpy about having to rewrite her cello-playing character. Apparently there are lately too many string-instrument playing girls in young adult literature. (Too many cellists. Who knew!?) Meanwhile, D. is being published in the Kelvingrove Review next month, a University journal dedicated to “critical analysis of recent scholarly work in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and education.” He’s been offered a copy editing position on the journal, which he could obviously do in his copious free time. Not. In a losing effort to retain some free time for him, T. is being a teensy bit pushy about D. not accepting any more little jobs. No more baking birthday cakes for random small children, no more tutoring gigs, and no more making people’s webpages (except for the last one he agreed to do). The guy’s got to sleep some time.

We are really enjoying the Baths. We are indeed the youngest people swimming laps at seven in the morning (actually, aside from the half-asleep guy handing out towels, we’re the youngest in the whole building, period), and some of the few who use the sauna, and it’s very peaceful. No one really speaks to each other, aside from saying “Good morning,” and when we’re done, we’re actually very relaxed, but wide awake. Aside from the mammal-sized spider T. found in the shower one morning, we have encountered nothing unpleasant. T. has even become shockingly immune to the cold, and tends to leave the building carrying her sweatshirt, and wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt. Maybe that’s the secret to the myriad Glaswegians who run around in shirtsleeves in thirty degree weather. They’ve all just come from the gym.

Elsewhere, we hear of spring actually spring-ing, but it’s not really happening yet here. Every morning we laugh as we pass frozen puddles on the way home (in shirtsleeves, it’s just a weird juxtaposition. It’s surreal not to feel it so much). Still we have snowdrops growing up through the gravel at the back gate, we have partially sunny, though freezing, days, and the trees in the garden across the oval are budding. Against the backdrop of a leaden gray sky, the birds are returning. Light is dawning sooner and lingering later in the day. The Earth’s slow pulse is beating, as “the Spring comes slowly up this way.” And not a moment too soon.