Standing on My Brother's Shoulders

by Tara J Lal

  After a while, I started to see a pattern: the build-up of heaviness and tension, followed by the inevitable eruption and release. The intensity of grief remained, but there were brief periods of dormancy that followed each explosion and I became thankful for that respite, even if it only lasted a few hours. I told myself over and over that if I could get through this, I could handle anything. What I didn’t know was that surviving came at a cost, and it would be many years before I realized how my pathological fear of loss would manifest itself in my behaviour and relationships.†

  I’ll always be here for you, Ta, Ad had scribbled in his note to me. With the knowledge that he wasn’t, came the soul-crushing reality that no one could ever make that guarantee.

  With time, I started to recognize that the only person I could depend on for comfort was me.

  During my moments of respite I tried to study, for the only glimmer of light I could see in the darkness that otherwise consumed me was the possibility of my going to Zimbabwe with Operation Raleigh, and to do that I needed to pass my exams. After that, I would go to Edinburgh University, just as Adam had wished for me. The place he should have gone to himself.

  Adam’s chemistry teacher, Doc Woolley, offered to tutor me as I had missed so much of my final year. Adam’s death had affected him deeply and he was aware of some of the conflict in my brother’s mind since our mother’s death.

  I didn’t understand chemistry. My teacher, thinking that I would surely fail the exam, had told me that I should wait a year. The thought of spending another year at home in London was intolerable, so every week I went to the chemistry lab at my brother’s old school and Doc would stay back to tutor me. I was painfully aware of how I was no Adam, either academically or personally. I felt inadequate and unable to live up to Adam’s abilities, intellect or compassion. A chemistry essay had been sitting on his desk at Balliol the night he ended his own life. The teacher had scrawled on the front, ‘This is possibly one of the finest essays written by a first-year student at Oxford that I have ever read.’

  I sat at my desk, hour after hour, staring blankly at the files in front of me full of meaningless words and equations.

  Please make the pain better – please.

  What did I do to deserve this?

  Why, Ad? Why? Why did you do this to me? I loved you with all my heart and it wasn’t enough.

  Oh, Mum – I wish you could just give me a big, big hug and tell me everything’s going to be all right. I wish I was still that little five-year-old that used to hide behind your skirt.

  I wish none of this had ever happened.

  I just want my family back.

  I want to feel loved.

  I want to feel safe.

  I want to be protected, cared for and looked after.

  But I also want to be strong.

  Six months and it’s still here – all the pain, all the hurt.

  In June, nine long months after Adam’s death, I stepped out of my A-level chemistry exam. Jess and Dan came to pick me up in the old Mini Cooper Jess and I shared. Their faces beamed at me. ‘Look, Teej! Dan performed a high-speed 360-degree turn, missing a bench by inches. He’d been perfecting the manoeuvre while they had been waiting, as a sort of fanfare for me. We laughed gleefully and I looked to the heavens.

  ‘I survived! I’m free!’

  Pain passes, grief passes, fear passes, panic passes.

  They can also return.

  The phone rang and I ran to it. I was so happy to have finished my exams.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, could I speak to Adam Lal, please?’

  ‘Sorry?’ I faltered.

  ‘Is that the number for Adam Lal? It’s the police here. We need to interview him as a witness.’

  ‘Adam’s dead.’ I shook as I said the words.

  ‘Oh, oh, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry to upset you.’

  I put the phone down and I was there, in it again. Just like that. I started going through old papers and found a letter from the coroner who had returned various scraps of paper bearing my brother’s familiar scrawl, his unfinished letters and his suicide note. The last few days of my brother’s life, and his death, held together with a staple.

  The one thing that I held on to was that Adam had wanted to die. But the notion that maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t was unacceptable to me. His words rang in my head: Want to die now. Well, I don’t really …

  Hesitantly, I asked questions. Would he be alive if that old woman in the street had not said those thoughtless words? Would he be alive had he not been strip-searched at the airport? Would he be alive if I’d had more understanding, more insight? Would he be alive if his ex-girlfriends had not hurt him? Would he be alive if Dad had been able to be a father? Would he be alive if he’d never smoked pot or taken drugs? Would he be alive if Mum had not died? Did he die just because he was in the middle of a panic attack? The endless unanswered questions of suicide …

  The only way to have any peace, so that I could live, was to tell myself that he had wanted to die.

  I read all of Adam’s diaries. Among the excerpts he had transcribed from DH Lawrence’s books a sentence caught my eye: TJ ‘he put his hope in her’. TJ was the name he often used for me. I seized Adam’s words, threading them into my soul. I told myself that my brother had passed me a cup, full of his hopes. I grasped it eagerly. I had found my answer, my reason to live. I would live the life he could not. I would lead a useful, caring life just as Mum had wished. I would do it for Adam and myself. This is what carried me forward.

  I didn’t know when I grasped it, how heavy the cup would be.

  * The greatest gift that anyone can offer a grieving person is a safe space to express their pain. To listen, to care, to not judge, and to recognize and put aside their own discomfort. There is no right or wrong way to grieve.

  * Bereavement by suicide is a form of trauma. Whilst it may manifest as post-traumatic stress disorder, it more commonly results in anxiety and/or depression. Panic attacks are intimately related to anxiety.

  † The negative effect on behaviour and relationships is a common reaction to a traumatic event because it can shatter our inherent sense of safety in the world, as well as our belief in the way we think the world should work. It makes forming healthy relationships based on secure attachment very difficult.

  PART TWO

  Building a New Life

  CHAPTER 15

  Heathrow Airport, 3 October 1989

  I stood in among the chaos of young exuberant travellers about to embark on their journeys, their families fussing attentively around them, surrounded by an army of backpacks. Anxiously, I looked around me, clinging to my own carefully packed rucksack as if it were a safety blanket. I was thankful my aunt had come to see me off, for I was eighteen years old and painfully shy, about to embark on an expedition to Zimbabwe. There was no one here that I knew.

  It was almost exactly a year since I’d written so fervently to Adam at Oxford describing every last detail of my selection weekend. I knew he would have wanted me to do this. As the departure date had neared, however, I’d started to question myself. What if seeing all the poverty in Africa affected me as it had done Adam? What if I had a panic attack while I was away? It had been eleven months since Adam had died. What if I wasn’t ready? The doubts nagged at me incessantly.

  Yet as soon as I set eyes on the plains of Africa, something shifted in me. I felt a sense of awe, some sort of release from deep within me. We began setting up camp, building shacks and digging long-drop toilets, sleeping under our own hand-made shelters, just as Adam had. He had written:

  There is something holy and comfortable and precious about sheltering under canvas while storms rage upon open hillsides, and here in the Himalayas of India there is definitely no exception to this idyll.

  It did seem holy, for I felt a completeness I had not experienced before. When eight of us climbed into an inflatable dinghy embarking on three days of wild-water rafting, I looked up at t
he black jagged rocks of the Zambezi valley as they towered above us and I felt their dominance, aware of our own insignificant mortality. The water swelled around us, angrily crashing off the rocks, relentlessly immersing us in the raging torrent of water. Adam had written in his diary:

  To see nature harness nature with such unbelievable force; rocks as if slain lie moist and greasy on the sponge-like earth. The streams appear to revel in the tempestuous air, seemingly to swell and rage in greater fury, daunting and menacing.

  The very force of it seemed to free me from the mental anguish that had restrained me over the past months. Like Adam, I felt the power of nature. I began talking to people, engaging with them, even laughing.

  I was posted to Chisuma, a remote village in the northwest of the country, composed primarily of mud huts with perfectly manicured roofs made of straw. It was an arid region marked by dry grassy plains, the occasional cactus and sparse shrubs that looked desperate to hold on to their few remaining leaves. We set about working with the local villagers to build a school block. Every morning I’d greet the locals with ‘Mangwanani!’ and we’d do the African handshake. I felt completely at ease, as if this was a part of me. A smiling black face with gleaming white teeth leant out of a rickety old bus.

  ‘Yo there, black seeestar, we luuuuurve you!’ he hollered at me.

  I smiled. At last I belonged.

  *

  There were no machines here. We had only our bodies and some basic tools to rely on. Even the sand and gravel we needed to mix with the cement we sourced from local riverbeds and sifted by hand. I grasped the sand, feeling it run through my fingers, as if physically touching the earth was grounding me. I basked in the manual toil, the sweat and the sun. Digging trenches and making bricks became strangely soothing. It felt almost as if, in laying the foundations of the school block, I was also starting to rebuild the foundations of my life. I scribbled in my journal:

  I just can’t get over how relaxed I feel. I haven’t felt this at ease or happy in years, perhaps ever. It feels like I’m doing everything I’ve always wanted to do. I’m outdoors, using my body, exercising and doing adventurous things. I’m surrounded by great people, part of a team and we all have a laugh. I’m away from the rat race and the pressures of home and London. It’s great. My only regret is that Ad can’t see all this. He’d have loved it here. I want to share it all with him, show him how good life can be, let him know that I’m happy and I love him.

  We set out on a three-week trek across the Mavuradonha Mountains and the Zambezi escarpment, following elephant tracks. At night, we merely laid down a tarp and slept under the watchful eye of the stars. Unknowingly, I walked in Adam’s footsteps, for he had written:

  We sat around the flickering flames enjoying the warmth of the group circle. The light enlivened laughter, the sanguinity of the red embers and the happiness in shared experience made it a wonderful evening so carefree and blissful …

  We carried our food supplies with us and relied on rivers for water. One evening I sat washing my dirt-caked clothes in a stream, just as Adam had done, smiling as I thought of my brother and his words:

  There I sat, bum perched on a bumpy rock beside a miserable trickle of a stream. Soak the socks, sprinkle a few valuable grains of travel wash on them and slap them against a flat rock. It followed like a recipe – true Indian style minus the soap powder. It was incredible how pleasant it was. I could have sat there for hours in the fresh morning sun.

  I learned to use a compass to navigate the peaks and valleys of the terrain, or perhaps I was learning to navigate life. We took it in turns to lead, searching always for a trough where we might find water. The sun beat down relentlessly as we battled though the vegetation, ambushed by wild shrubs that seemed to be intent on leaving their itchy mark on us, smiling as they injected their poison. Our legs gave way beneath us as we lumbered on clumsily, just as Adam had written:

  Again we panted, sweated and wheezed our way up tortuously steep slopes that wove onward and onward toward the summit.

  My two water bottles ran dry, as did those of the others in the group. I was buoyed only by the knowledge of an impending river as we began to descend.

  The descent is slow and tricky through the valleys of sun-parched rock. The skin on your feet blisters against your permanently angled shoes, all the while fighting off the savage rays of the scorching sun.

  We neared the base of the valley, watching as it stared back at us in arid defiance, as parched as our mouths. I looked up at the steep ascent ahead of us, my skin inflamed and red, mouth as dry as the ground on which I stood. Fear began to rumble within me. We discussed, and rejected, drinking our own urine. Instead we began to dig for water, deeper and deeper, eventually watching the dark liquid ooze from the earth. We sifted the muddy silt-ridden water through a cloth, putting a few drops of iodine in it. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and drank. In that brown murky water I tasted life. I became stripped of everything, all the grief, the despair, the hopelessness; everything that I needed was in that water. On we hiked …

  We slipped and slid our way across the snow mounds in the usual silence that always accompanies a group while it walks. It is a highly personal silence in which thoughts wander with blissful fluidity. Time appears to evaporate rather than pass. It is a contented peace that rests upon a worry-free brain. No fear, no anxiety, no schedule to meet. The big city seems so far away as if, locked in this distant dream, lie all your troubles. Your heart and mind are truly tranquil. How far away did London anxiety seem from me now? Peace and calm prevailed, soothing and pleasant.

  Like Adam, I found peace in the mountains. I found the methodical rhythm of it soothing, climbing for hours, winding our way through the bush … cocooned in silence gazing at the spectacular scenery in a satisfied contented temper. No words spoken, trudging, aching, yet bathed in an extraordinary calmness. I came to value the silence, to treasure it, just as my brother had done.

  Then of course there was the silence: sweet, beautiful peace. To sit there thinking of freedom with the ‘eloquence of silence’.

  In Zimbabwe I found peace in the simplicity of life. I found liberation in the knowledge that everything I needed was on my back or in the earth on which I stood. I gained a sense of standing on solid ground once more. At last a light shone on my path, allowing me a different vantage point. I could see my life before me with genuine enthusiasm and passion, for Adam and I were walking our paths together.

  I have often thought that my life has travelled not from birth toward death but from death toward life. It is as if my journey started beneath the ground in darkness, without air to breathe, blindly clawing through the soil toward the quicksand, crawling toward life on hands and knees. I’ve fallen into wild rivers, I’ve trudged through forests and moorland, clambered over ridges and up to peaks, only to stumble over cliffs and into crevasses. At times I’ve travelled a well-defined path, at others the path is steep and unclear and I am easily lost. On occasion, a bridge has appeared as a welcome gift; at other times cloud has obscured all that lies before me. Zimbabwe lit my way, enabling me to take a step up out of the morass.

  CHAPTER 16

  My return to London began with a classic ‘Dad episode’. Jo had driven my father to Heathrow airport in my beaten-up old Mini Cooper. She was flying out to the States that day to see her American boyfriend and she warned me at the airport that I would have to push-start the car.

  I piled my backpack stuffed full of African mementos into the car, placing my treasured soapstone elephant carefully under the seat. A wooden giraffe head peered out of my pack, grinning at me from the back seat. Dad hadn’t driven since Mum banned him after he nearly killed my sister all those years ago so I explained to him how he would have to push the car while I steered.

  I sat in the driver’s seat, assuming my father would position himself at the back of the car.

  ‘Okay, go, Dad,’ I said.

  I waited.

  ‘Go, Dad,’ I repeate
d.

  I heard a grunt, just as I began to feel the car rocking beneath me, side to side. I turned my head, my jaw dropping as I was greeted by the sight of my father standing at the side of the car, rocking it, with his entire might.

  ‘Dad, Dad … the wheels go that way, as in forward and back, not sideways!’ I took a deep breath. ‘You have to push from behind,’ I said, exasperated.

  ‘Ah … I see, I see,’ Dad muttered.

  Here we go, I thought trying to hold the peace I had in Zimbabwe, just as Adam had done on his return.

  Well, I’m back in London. Gone is the sense of freedom and in place are the social rules of heart and mind.

  I got a job waiting tables at a restaurant. Given my clumsy penchant for smashing plates, it was never going to be a smooth journey. After several mishaps involving the tipping of red wine onto white designer jackets and hot coffee poured into an unassuming young gentleman’s lap, the owners politely suggested I might like to work in their delicatessen instead. So I ate my way through my days in the deli and forced myself to stick at waiting tables there.

  I was determined to hold on to some of the confidence I had built in Zimbabwe. I made myself interact with people, to look them in the eye and make conversation. I started ever so slowly to connect with people at a very basic level. It felt as if I was peeling away just a tiny part of the layer that shielded me, and that made me happy because I liked people. I just didn’t know how to let them see ‘me’, but maybe I didn’t know who ‘me’ was.

  I saved money and travelled to Indonesia and Japan on my own, determined to prove my independence, which I did, all the while craving company. I used to look wistfully at all the groups of young friends travelling together, having fun. I wanted to be like them, to be a part of it. I was so happy to return home in June 1990 in time for Jo’s wedding. The ceremony was held in the same church that Mum and Dad had been married in, the same church where I’d stood staring at my mum’s coffin as a thirteen-year-old, and the same church that had overflowed with grief at Adam’s funeral. At last we smiled and shed tears of joy in that church. After the wedding Jo moved to the United States. Once again, it was just me and Dad.