by Denise Riley
It still seems ludicrous to decide, finally, that I shall not see that face on this earth. What would be ‘natural’ would be his beaming reappearance, a bit sheepish at having been away from home for so long. More limp puns abound: you conceived the child, but you can’t conceive of its death.
The persisting impression of the living-on of the dead child as your mind ploughs on along its familiar cognitive furrows. It’s like that cartoon image of Donald Duck running straight off the edge of a cliff, his webbed feet going on paddling wildly in the air – until he looks down. He’ll only plummet once he’s put together what he’s just glimpsed, the ground far below, with his realization of his mid-air state.
Wherever can you find written accounts of this lived time without consequence? It’s rare. Here, though, is Emily Dickinson’s quatrain, relentlessly to the point:
The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence raveled out of sound
Like balls upon a floor.
‘Sequence raveled out of sound’, indeed. One note no longer implies another’s coming. You watch the water cascading from the tap to splash into the basin. Yet noting small events and their effects doesn’t revive your former impression of moving inside time. The tap turns, water pours. You can observe sequence. Nothing, though, follows from this observation to propel you, too, onward into the old world of consequences.
Not that your sense of time is ‘distorted’. What’s changed is more radical than that. Simply, you are no longer in time. Only from your freshly removed perspective can you fully understand how our habitual intuitions of time are not without their limits, and can falter.
To tell someone with a dead child, ‘You should move on,’ is doubly thoughtless, because there’s no medium left through which to move anywhere. We were drifting through our former time like underwater creatures furnished with gills that they didn’t notice they had, until they were fished up out of their element and their breathing apparatus failed.
If there is ever to be any movement again, that moving will not be ‘on’. It will be ‘with’. With the carried-again child.
Your old stance is changed – not by melancholy, but by the shattering of that underlying intuition of moving in time, an intuition which you can’t register until it’s collapsed. If time was once flowing, extended, elongated – a river, a road, a ribbon – now the river is dammed, the road blocked, the ribbon slashed. Well-worn metaphors all shot to pieces.
He is not dead to me.
Two years after:
You live under the sign of the provisional. Often with faint amusement over little debates: do you unpack this coral dress from storage as if, when the summer arrives in a few months, you’ll still be alive to wear it? Yes – but purely because you enjoy the zing of its colour today.
Two and a half years later:
Time arrested, as the triumph of metaphor, or so it would seem at first. Perhaps, though, it’s more a crisscrossing and slippage of emotion, which you can only recount through descriptions which serve the dead and the living indiscriminately. So if this inability to grasp the fact of the death is my own lot, the dead themselves may well share it. All those many faiths in which the freshly and suddenly dead don’t yet realize that they’re dead, and so have to be placated, or to have novenas held for them, or their corpses sat up with, all night long, at wakes, now make perfect sense; those left behind need to keep a wary eye on their dead who can’t be trusted not to reappear. And why wouldn’t they be shocked and furious at being ousted from life?
Analogies ramify. Plunged in some florid jungle of ‘as ifs’, you sense them roaming everywhere, blossoming like bindweed, tying everything together then spiralling upward, entwining you and the dead in conjoined experience.
In how many ways this folded-together state appears. You already share the ‘timeless time’ of the dead child. As if you’d died too, or had lost the greater part of your own life. As if a new no-time stands still in your veins. That’s the overarching ‘as if’. Then there’s an ‘as if’ of uttering, when the speech of the one left behind can turn staccato. That first day afterwards, speaking by phone to the funeral director, I needed to yet could not get the word ‘ashes’ out of my mouth without a strenuous physical struggle. ‘Aa-aassh-aashhes,’ came a dry stammer. As if uttered through sawdust. It wasn’t any conscious repugnance at having to say that word only hours after my last glimpse of the living person. But something bodily felt. A cut fell between the thought and its voicing. My jaw must have worked over the word ‘ashes’ like that of a dying fish. Or it must have been as slack as J’s own mouth once the rigor mortis had worn off; but that analogy only comes to me now, well over two years later. Immediately after the death, my firm intention to speak the needed words ‘disposal of his ashes’ would not be carried out, physically. I’d believed that thought is made in the mouth, and is often discovered only through speaking aloud. Now on the contrary, to my own astonishment and embarrassment, my mouth was bluntly refusing to pronounce the phrase that waited clearly if silently voiced in my head. Previously I hadn’t believed that speech is simply the translation of something already formulated in thought. Now I was faced with the evidence that sometimes it is, but that the translation can fail. No passage across the lips. The brain could calmly entertain the word. The mouth would not. ‘Aaah-sssh . . .’ it went. As if it had itself become sifted up thickly with ashes.
Whatever’s the name for this transfer of affect? It’s rather like that blurring of physical edges that happens between lovers: you become the other one, you can feel as if through their skin.
All this entangling with your dead child, though, becomes evident in thought only as you look back. At the time, you’re naturally and easily inside several states. Or inside two lives. For if timelessness is the time of your dead, then you will go with them into their timelessness. Here you can live mundanely, indeed brightly. You’re fused with the dead, as if to animate them. They draw you across to their side, while you incorporate them on your side.
Inside your sheltering thicket of branching ‘as ifs’, it’s not only as if the ashes of your child had blocked your own mouth, but as if your own future is as neatly guillotined; as if you wipe away the physical traces of the dead as cleanly as that life itself was wiped away; as if in the same breath as the flow of time halts, your old sense of your innerness drops into pure exteriority; as if these are sensations of being with our dead while they can no longer sense time nor have any interior sense of themselves; as if, yet without actually believing this, you’ll be with the dead when you die; as if now both of you inhabit a companionate exile rather than being two parallel units of loneliness; as if, as you’d carried the unborn child inside you, so again you carry its lively memory; as if you need to die yourself to continue that long habit of attentiveness which can’t immediately be resiled from the dead. As if care will not give up its affectionate task.
Later, I’m struck by the force of so much being with the dead. I hear it constantly in other mothers of dead children. Such imagined empathy seals your sense of stopped time. Like one of those dogged pursuers in classical mythology, you’ve followed your dead into the underworld, one foot in either realm like Orpheus turning back on the threshold to check that Eurydice was still following behind him, almost safely retrieved. If your feeling of arrested time were indeed the time shared with your dead, then your unwanted re-entry to the usual flow of the world’s time would mean that, like poor Orpheus, you’d come back alone. Is the force of this story that we can only stay in the company of our dead for as long as we don’t notice them as really separate from us, caught in their different realm? Although that fierce Demeter contrived a better deal: to fetch her daughter Persephone back from Pluto’s darkness for half of each year at a time. Shared custody.
These skeins of ‘as ifs’ don’t arrive as considered comparisons, though, but as direct feelings. In fact ‘as if’ scarcely applies here, although you’re
forced to use it in retrospect to try to convey this many-layered impression. Something more intimate’s in play than straightforward analogy. Yet it’s also something removed from any direct ‘identification’. It’s neither your sameness with your dead, nor your full separateness from them. And I’d fight shy of considering it magic to fight off the fact of the death. It’s not fanciful bewitchment. It feels fleshly, and solidly true to this fresh world of feeling. Once you can no longer experience any flow of time, any sequence, or any induction, then sensations that once would have been incommensurable can now flourish side by side. What then do we call this multiplied perception? Liminal?
Not only will ‘as ifs’ flourish, but also the more familiar and expected ‘what ifs’, whose prickings, like showers of arrows, torment those in the aftermath of a sudden death. They position you imaginatively before it happened, so that now you’re in a position to have prevented it.
How tactful we become in avoiding all and any expressed measurements of loss. Never would I compare my state with that of, say, a widow’s. Never would I lay claim to ‘the worst grief of all’. And, among my own kind, never would I compare my own infinitely lighter lot with that of the parent of a murdered or a tortured child, or a suicidal child, or one killed in a stupid accident, or one very young, dying painfully slowly.
Still, you needn’t have erected some dubious hierarchy of grief in order to wonder what’s particular to losing a child, of any age, and why this loss feels so different in kind from your experience of other deaths. And this question demands more than the obvious observation that the stronger the love for the dead, the sharper the loss. Perhaps what’s specific is this: that with the death of your child, your own experience of time may be especially prone to disturbance because the lost life had, so to speak, previously unfurled itself inside your own life.
If you had once sensed the time of your child as quietly uncoiling inside your own, then when that child is cut away by its death, your doubled inner time is also ‘untimely ripped’. Yours, and the child’s. The severance of the child’s life makes a cut through your own. You as its mother can no longer be present to yourself in the old temporal way. A sculptural imagination rises to grip you; the hollow of the old shelter for the living child has now been gouged out of you. It was the space of the child’s past, which used to lie like an inner shell enveloped by your own time. That child you had, alone, when you were young yourself, a child you grew up with, nested like a Russian doll whose shorter years sat within yours, gave you a time that was always layered. Then you held times, in the plural.
Yet after this scooping-out by the death, a fresh incorporation arrives: the child gets reanimated in your effort to embody its qualities and carry them onwards. Perhaps this is the peculiar fate of mothers of dead children: still to contain that other life, and to shelter it twice over. Once before the child’s birth, and once after the death when you’re left with an impression of a spirit internalized. This partial rebirth can be exhaustingly preoccupying; much like a pregnancy run in reverse, spooling back from the point of the child’s death to its incorporated life in you. And this exerts itself in the pressure of your forceful but not especially disconcerting sensation of living outside time.
I dread forgetting his odd blend of being quietly wry and yet completely without guile. My mind figures, ‘Well, if J hasn’t called me for such an unprecedentedly long time, then maybe it’s true after all that he died.’ Then I’m embarrassed but amused to overhear this silly calculus totting itself up in me.
Whenever I need to mention to someone that ‘my son died’, it still sounds to me like a self-dramatizing lie. Tasteless. Or it’s an act of disloyalty to him. For I don’t experience him as in the least dead, but simply as ‘away’. Even if he’ll be away for my remaining lifetime. My best hope’s to have a hallucination of his presence when I’m dying myself.
Perhaps only through forgetting the dead could it become possible to allow them to become dead. To finally be dead. And that could only follow – once time itself had taken the initiative here – from consigning them to a time that had decided to resume its old flow. Of its own accord. When or if this may ever happen, I can’t know. And can’t want it.
Time ‘is’ the person. You’re soaked through with it. This enormous lurch into arrested time isn’t some philosophical brooding about life’s fragility. It’s not the same ‘I’ who lives in her altered sense of no-time, but a reshaped person. And I don’t know how she’ll turn out. If writing had once been a modest work of shaping and correcting, now all your small mastery has been smashed by the fact of your child’s death. That you can’t edit.
You find yourself noting this, but without ever needing or even wanting to have recourse to words like sorrow, grief, mourning. As if all those are too familiar, too sepia, and almost decorative, blandly containing. You entertain no reflections, either, that a life will leave its reverberations hanging in the air like a passage of music – nothing so sweetly melancholic. Instead, your living in this instant, this thinnest imaginable sliver of being, turns out to be hard-edged. Side views are occluded without any softening penumbra. Your sight is pared down like tunnel vision. Yet to your narrowed focus, the dead of this entire city are present all at once, elbowing in the streets. Silhouettes stream everywhere: horses, carriages, cars. Traffic ghosts smash right through you whenever you cross a road. Grey ribbons of painless collisions. But these aren’t misty or violet-tinted, are nothing to do with ‘mourning’ as you might once have fancied it. This is sharp and harshly clear. Your surrounding fluid of intuitive time had abruptly drained away. Now you live in an unshaded clarity of dry air. Its translucent simplicity buoys you up.
By what means are we ever to become re-attached to the world?
Two years and ten months later:
No time at all. No time.
Three years after:
And by now I’ve stopped making these notes.
What follows is a postscript, drawing on them, about what I’ve had to learn about living in arrested time.
Postscript
What can we do with such solitary experiences of violently new and hitherto unsuspected states of temporal perception; what sense can we try to make of them? To show what I mean about ‘time lived but without its flow’, I’d have needed to do yet more reporting on the visceral state of being thrown outside time for a period of years. That state may sound unreal, implausible. Our customary intuitions of time strongly suggest that it would be both perceptually impossible and practically unliveable. Yet it’s surely a state that’s common enough, and is indeed manageable. Inside their senses of arrested time, millions must live today, and have lived. The deaths of their children are apt to induce profound dislocation in the experienced time of those left alive. They are thrown into ‘timeless time’. However, despite the fact that such human losses occur constantly, this ensuing state of a-temporality seems largely to escape recorded notice.
For to outlive a sudden death makes it evident that your ordinary time, which had once ‘flowed’, had never been much like a clear stream, or a fluid held in glass. That old kind of lived time was no simple medium, and nothing finely transcendent. It had always been thick. It must have been another aspect of ‘the flesh of the world’; active, changeable, and formative.2 Now, though, your distinct sensation of a newly halted time – or rather, of a non-time – has blown away that unremarked thickness, and instead has dropped you down in its own still landscape of brilliant clarity. Perhaps yours might be cited as a version of akinetopsia, that rare condition in which you mislay your perception of motion, like the patient who found pouring a cup of tea difficult ‘because the fluid appeared to be frozen, like a glacier’.3 Nevertheless you find that you survive perfectly well in this new non-time of sheer stasis. Rather than being just a temporal swerve, it’s more of a stepping-outside the entire sheltering sky of temporality itself – into a not unpleasant state of tremendous simplicity, of easy candour and bright emptiness.
&nb
sp; You’ve slipped into a state of a-chronicity. From its serene perspective you realize, to your astonishment, that to dwell inside a time that had the property of ‘flowing’ was merely one of a range of possible temporal perceptions. For your time can pause, and you with it – though you’re left sharply alive within its stopping. Your apprehension of sequence itself is halted. Where you have no impression of any succession of events, there is no linkage between them, and no cause. Anything at all might follow on from any one instant. You are tensed for anything – or, equally, are poised for nothing. No plans can be entertained seriously, although you keep up an outward show of doing so. Where induction itself has failed, so does your capacity for confident anticipation. So your task now is to inhabit the only place left to you – the present instant – with equanimity, and in as much good heart as you can contrive. For one moment will not, now, carry you onward to the next.
This vivid new sensation of a-temporality differs from some more readily comprehended ‘distorting’ of time, for it has no traces of the old familiar temporal shapes, and it resists intelligible description. Sharply different, it’s a physical perception. Not a reflective state of mind, or an act of introspection leaning on an exhausted figure of speech, but a perception as bodily immediate, as inescapable, as a feeling of thirst. The irony is that this strong experience resurrects the life in the dead metaphor of ‘time stopped’ – while the occasion for this linguistic reanimation, the formerly living child, stays stubbornly dead.
*
Still, I find myself wanting to claim time’s standstill as an ordinary enough phenomenon – if not inevitable, then perfectly to be expected in the wake of a sudden death. As a condition not to be quickly categorized as ‘pathological’ and then consigned to an isolating silence, but rather to be recognized as common enough and capable of being openly discussed. How, then, can I struggle to convey this distinctive experience of living inside a new non-time – while in the same breath I want to save it from being treated as unapproachable, and exceptional? That, straightforwardly enough, might be a matter of allowing the myriad specificities of different losses their differing temporal impacts. A chronic or a terminal illness, for example, may force on its sufferer a vehemently transformed kind of time. That will possess its own particular charge, not to be flattened into a false equivalence with other kinds of changed temporalities.
