Standing on My Brother's Shoulders

by Tara J Lal

The three of us talked about Oxford, about why Jess wanted it so much and why I didn’t. I told them what I had written in the exam. We talked about Adam and wished that he was with us. We planned a visit to Oxford to see him the following weekend. We’d go for a piss-up and cheer him up.

  I said goodbye to my friends and wandered back along the road toward home. I opened the door. All was quiet and dark. I walked slowly up the stairs to my mattress on the floor (because that was the cool way to have it). I closed my eyes and slept.

  Balliol College, 22 November 1988, 1.30am

  Dear Teej,

  Cheers for the letter. Don’t know what is happening, can’t even write any more. Want to die now. Well, I don’t really but at least it might give me something of a solid decision …

  Fear … mind racing … chemistry equations, images battering from every direction. Confusion, panic … no way out … no way out … scrawling things on paper … what’s happening … what’s happening …?

  To my dear family,

  What I have done is because ….

  All I want to say to all my family is that I love them more than I could ever love anybody. My mind is hardly functioning so if I can just relate the last vestiges of humanity that remain within me, let me do so.

  To Ta, I have done this because I am selfish. If I hadn’t, I would remain this soft negative sponge that I have been over the past year. Ta, just think that this is what I wanted to do. Give me that. I have few feelings left. This is one of them.

  To Jo, all my admiration and love. You are a person I wish I could have been.

  To Dad, I’m sorry, Father; I didn’t have the guts to stay with it.

  To Mags, how could I have let everyone down?

  You all thought I am something which I am not. I hope you will forgive me. I just couldn’t be bothered any more, because I cannot be bothered with anything.

  NOTHING I HAVE EVER DONE …

  I want to be with Mum …

  The window … open it … climb through it … over … head-first … end the pain …

  Black.

  CHAPTER 13

  The phone ringing intruded into my dreams. I stirred, vaguely wondering who could be calling at this time. Then I heard the familiar trudge of my dad’s heavy footsteps as he climbed the stairs. He knocked on my bedroom door. I glanced at the clock. It was 2.16am.

  ‘Uh … uh …Tara,’ he spoke through the doorway.

  ‘Yes, Dad, what is it? Who was on the phone?’

  ‘It’s Adam … He’s had an accident.’ His voice stuttered; the words came in disjointed pieces. ‘He’s in hospital … I … I … ha—have to go to Oxford.’

  He wasn’t making sense.

  My body froze. ‘What do you mean, he’s had an accident? Is he okay?’

  ‘I don’t know … I have to go.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘No, stay here … This had better not be some bloody hoax.’

  I heard the anger in his voice.

  That’s how it was: the instant that changed my life forever. There is a reason they call it the dead of night. Four years earlier I had been thirteen when I had woken in the middle of the night needing to say goodbye to my mother. Now I was seventeen and it was Adam.

  Nobody knew what had happened: Dad didn’t, nor did the police. I knew, though. My body was screaming the truth at me, great waves of repulsion sweeping through it. And, as hard as my body screamed, my head fought against what was utterly inconceivable.

  I lay in bed, my body convulsed with fear while my mind went through different scenarios endlessly.

  2.30am: Had he had a car accident?

  3am: Overwhelming fear. Nothing could happen to him.

  3.30am: Panic. I should be with him.

  4am: Maybe he’s okay?

  4.30am: What’s happening?

  5am: Crushing, frightening loneliness.

  5.30am: Please, God. Let this night end.

  6am: All-consuming dread enveloping every cell in my body.

  6.30am: Morning at last, and a phone call from a neighbour.

  ‘Adam’s in hospital. Your dad’s there.’

  ‘I want to go. I want to be with Adam.’

  ‘No, Tara. Dad wants you to go to school, take the exam. Wait for your sister to get here.’

  I want to be with Adam. Why won’t anyone let me get to him?

  I could see his face. He needed me. Even if he was unconscious, he’d know I was there. He’d wake up for me. I knew he would. I could not bear the thought that he would wake and I would not be there.

  Go to school to sit the second Oxford exam … ironic, impossible, ridiculous. Were they all mad? Someone, please let me get to Oxford …

  I went to school. I didn’t take the exam. I waited for Jo. Please hurry …

  That afternoon, Jo drove us to Oxford. All we knew was that Adam had ‘fallen’ from his window and hit his head.

  Please get there. Please get there … Lost … Which way to the Radcliffe Infirmary? The intensive care unit … A nurse explaining:

  ‘Adam is on life support. There are tubes attached to him to help him breathe. You can talk to him. He might be able to hear you.’

  I walked into the room. Adam’s words flashed before me: There before me lay the scaffold of my soul, the support upon which my own life had grown. I sat with Adam, holding his hand. It was limp and cold. His eyes were swollen, oozing, eerily open just a slit, glistening. Were they tears? Tubes pulled at the side of his mouth. I watched as his body jerked and the monitors made a beeping sound, lines zigzagging up and down on a screen.

  He’s choking. Do something. Help him.

  ‘Just a cough,’ the nurse explained when she saw the panic in my face.

  I wanted to be alone with Adam. Just me and him. Only I understood. Only me and my brother. Go away, everyone. Leave me alone with my brother.

  Then, at last, a little time alone with him.

  ‘It’s okay, Ad, I understand,’ I whispered. I needed him to know that it was okay, he was not alone, and I forgave him.

  I laid my head on his hand, just wanting to be close, just me and my brother touching each other’s souls. At last some time, a stolen moment, just me and him …

  ‘Are you okay?’ The voice of my dad’s well-meaning friend sliced murderously between Adam and me, robbing me of my one last moment of connectedness with my beautiful sacred brother.

  ‘Piss off!’ I wanted to yell. ‘Fuck off! You don’t belong here.’ But once again no sound came and I swallowed my anger and my resentment.

  They told me that if Adam woke he might never be the same again. I said I knew, but I didn’t. I didn’t care: I just wanted him back at any cost. This couldn’t happen. I couldn’t lose him.

  The days ticked by. I existed, somehow, surviving one second to the next. Friends arrived one by one as the news spread. I remember their faces, grey and strained. Then, one day, it might have been day three or four, or perhaps it was day six or seven, or eight, I don’t know, I was sitting in the waiting area outside the intensive care unit with my aunt Margaret when the heaviness that I had carried with me since the night of the phone call began to morph into an immense crushing vice, clamped across my chest, strangling me. I could not breathe, I could not cry, I could not move. It was as if I was crammed into a one-foot-square transparent box that was slowly filling with water.

  I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t survive, I needed a pill, and I needed it to go away, I was going mad.

  Someone help me breathe. Please give me something, anything to take it away. Please put me to sleep …

  I went over to my aunt and knelt on the floor at her feet, my hands on her lap. ‘I need help. I need them to give me something. I can’t breathe.’

  Then, as I said the words, a dam burst inside me, releasing an unstoppable tsunami of grief. Pulsating howls. Raw pain.

  Just as words cannot adequately describe love, so they cannot adequately convey unimaginable pain.

  In the years th
at followed, I would have many such tidal waves of emotion, but never one as hauntingly intense as that. I often wonder how it must have been for my aunt Margaret to live that moment with me, while she was also immersed in her own grief. There have been few people in my life that have been able to take the weight of such emotion. My aunt was the first, and it bound me to her. Without her, I do not believe I would have survived. She shared my pain then, as she does to this day.

  I wanted to see Adam’s room as he had left it. I needed to understand. Then Jo told me that she had gone to Adam’s room in Balliol in the middle of the night. She had moved things and cleared his desk. I was furious. Perhaps she’d had a moment in the darkness where she’d needed to say goodbye, as I had with Mum, but I didn’t care. What about me? What about what I needed? Why hadn’t she asked me?

  How could I say goodbye, how could I understand, if I couldn’t see Adam’s room as he’d left it? He would have left me a clue. I knew he would. He would have left something for me, something I could hold on to. I needed to be able to piece together his final moments. Jo had taken that from me.

  Adam was mine, not hers. I was closest to him. She had hurt him. He didn’t want her, he wanted me.

  I wanted to lash out, to scream and shout, but I didn’t. I never voiced my anger or my needs.

  Dad was adamant that someone had to be held accountable. Someone had done this to Adam.

  They did an electro-encephalogram of my brother’s brain. There was no sign of life. Only the tubes kept him breathing. Dad didn’t believe the doctors; he thought they were corrupt.

  ‘Do another one.’ Nothing.

  ‘And another one.’

  He’s gone, Dad, he’s gone.

  I understand why people in this position cannot comprehend that their beloved is dead. The machines lie, imitating life, allowing you to believe what you yearn to believe. Why would you choose to terminate that hope? Switching off the life support feels like driving a suicide bomb into your family home. I wanted to cling to my brother’s beating heart, and so did my father.

  The machine kept Adam breathing, kept his heart beating, for nine interminably long days, days that remain in my memory as a continuous dull gnawing emptiness interspersed by lightning strikes of terrifying clarity. I understand why doctors give sedatives to people in grief yet I am glad I didn’t have any. I believe that I had to live through those days, feeling the pain, in order to start the healing. That way, I could begin a fragile and tenuous reconnection to life. I had to know absolutely and completely how it felt to be in the quicksand, beneath the earth at the very base of my mountain. Only then could I begin my slow crawl out of it.

  CHAPTER 14

  After Adam died, Dad and I lived on in the house. It was a shell now, no longer a family home, and I hated it. I looked at photographs of the five of us and I could only see that half were gone. I thought of Adam’s words:

  As for myself, I am so terribly sad again. I wonder to myself what is there in this world that I can want, or desire to do. I flash pictures through my head of home, of places all over the world, and yet all seems bland and without interest. What is worse, is that it makes me quiet and resentful of everything around me.

  Inside the house, Dad and I lived separately, individual bodies of pain. We never touched; we never shared our grief with one another. It was simply too painful.

  My father never returned to the psychiatric hospital. He didn’t, couldn’t process the pain of it all. Full awareness would have killed him.

  Much later, Dad told me that if it hadn’t been for me and Jo, he would have slit his throat. In the years that followed the deaths of Mum and Adam, he lived out his pain in the cruellest of ways, full of anger, regret and blame. There is a quiet rage within him that I see when he talks of the past, of Mum and Adam. It is a passive anger, more powerful in many ways than any overt display of aggression.

  A year after Adam’s death my father moved to the country, to a house in the middle of nowhere. He gave Adam’s life insurance money to charity. He gave his television and video to a taxi driver in lieu of payment for a ride. He shunned all his friends so that he could live alone with his pain.

  I started having panic attacks, although initially I didn’t know what they were. They would leap out at me unexpectedly, and it was as if a blanket had been thrown over my head. My heart raced, a cold sweat erupted from my skin. What’s happening? That’s what Ad wrote … Am I going mad? That’s what Ad had said … Dad’s been in a psychiatric hospital, Adam killed himself. What if it’s me next? What if I’m not normal? What if I scream? Then they’ll think I’m mad. What if I go crazy? One fear fuelled another until the terror consumed me. It was as if I had taken on all the anxieties and fears that Adam had borne.

  I believe that Adam suffered similarly from panic attacks. In the months after his death, as I found myself living through so much of the same confusion and fear that he had written about in his final days, I thought I had an inkling of what he had gone through. He had probably thought about taking his own life many times, but it was panic that drove those final moments, before he climbed out of his window at Balliol. Adam had given us the answer when he wrote: In sudden breaths of reality, the present engulfs me. On 22 November 1988 at 1.30am the present moment finally swallowed him up.

  Had it not been for Margaret I would not have survived. I went to Edinburgh and stayed in her home. I sat on her beanbag and we talked. She had lost her husband, my mother’s brother, very suddenly, just two years before, but still she managed to be a rock for me, for all of us.

  Margaret had been one of the very few who had recognized Adam’s inner turmoil in the months before his death, and she had written to my father outlining her concerns. Ad always spoke fondly of her.

  I just got a letter from Mags, which was cool; the old stomper is a great old dongo really. Using all her hip and trendy London lingo such as ‘wicked’ and ‘Hi’ … She thought this a Hampstead colloquial phrase for beginning a letter. I wouldn’t like to mention that half the people in this bloody country use it. But no matter. She’s becoming ever more trendy every day!

  Margaret had tried to persuade Adam to go and see a counsellor but his pride had stood in the way. Adam’s death devastated her as much as it did me, and it bound us together. She loved him deeply and I know that she has battled with guilt, and the ‘what ifs’, ever since.

  She wasn’t able to save Adam but she saved me.

  When I was okay, we did normal things. I drove her car and helped with the shopping. When the sadness overwhelmed me, Margaret sat with me. She allowed me to live my grief in whatever form it came, whenever it came. She lived it with me as she lived her own sadness. She sat with me hour after hour, allowed me to ‘be’ in all my agony and fear, so real that I had to touch it. In doing so, Margaret gave me the greatest gift. I ricocheted between London and Edinburgh, but the pain followed me. It hunted me down wherever I went, my constant predator.

  Back in London, friends and neighbours smothered me with love and offers of help, yet I felt suffocated, as if they were projecting their own fear on to me, the fear that I would do to myself what Adam had done to himself. It felt that no one could handle my grief.* Their fear fuelled my own.

  What if what happened to Ad happened to me?

  I could not yet see clearly that I had a choice: that suicide is an act of will, and that even in the darkest of moments I did not possess that wish to die. I wrote a letter to my friend in Japan

  ‘I don’t want to die but I don’t know how to live …’

  The first Christmas without Adam was horrific. I felt the heaviness build up within me, layers of sodden earth swamping my soul. It was Christmas Eve, barely five weeks since that cold dark night of hell. I looked at my father crumpled in his chair. I knew I couldn’t show him my pain. I couldn’t do it to him. I had to get out, so I rang Jess and arranged to meet her and Dan at the pub. I just want to be normal, I thought, just a normal teenager.

  At the pub I wa
tched the air-kissing and the merriness and I wanted to vomit. The Christmas cheer there was even more suffocating than being at home in the grief-soaked silence with Dad. What made it worse was that I felt everyone looking at me, wondering what I was doing there, staring at me with pity. I wanted to scream, ‘You have no fucking idea, so don’t even pretend that you do, and don’t come near me!’

  ‘Dan, I have to get out.’

  ‘Whatever you want, Teej.’

  I led him to Hampstead Heath, where I had so often walked with Adam. We all knew never to go there alone at night for several women had been raped. Even outside, in the open space, claustrophobia still boxed me in. It was 1.30am. We walked and walked, off the path, into tall grass, and trees. I dropped to my knees; my face crumpled and contorted, the tears within fighting to erupt. The tears morphed into a howl and finally into an earth-shattering scream that emanated from every cell in my body.

  Whhhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy????

  The ear-curdling shrieks reverberated into the silence. When my breath ran out I slumped into a pile on my knees, head and hands in the grass, feeling the damp coldness of the earth at my fingertips, and the word hung in the emptiness.

  Dan sat quietly next to me. Someone in the distance stopped and turned. Should they help? Was another woman being raped? No, just a teenager caught in a tornado of grief.

  I was a seventeen-year-old girl who did not yet know her own mind. I needed someone I could trust to tell me that I was normal, that I wasn’t going mad. A friend’s mum referred me to Dr Katzman. I don’t know what he was – a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a psychoanalyst? I dreaded going to see him. If I was having a good day I didn’t want to take myself there, to that place again. I felt uncomfortable, painfully so. Can’t you just say something? I thought. Just tell me I’m not mad and make it better? I was racked with normal teenage insecurities, but grief amplified them.

  While I hated seeing Dr Katzman, he did reassure me that I was not going mad. That everything I was feeling was normal, even the panic.* I needed that to get me through.