I love looking at him, wondering what else he carries. Has he inherited my father’s talent for music, his singing voice? His father’s passion for discovering what things are made of and how they fit together? My grandmother’s charm and steely, unflappable digestive constitution?

And the other things too of course. The dangerous, treacherous ones. Hypertension, heart disease, aneurysms. And the other ones, that are even harder to decipher. The hungers, the anxieties, the memories of loss and shadows of burden. My father’s sadness. My grandmother’s craving. The memories of being wronged and hating. The corrosive toxic feeling of never being right, or wanted, or good enough. Ticking bombs. Cracks in the ice.

The ancestors live in us. They rule from shadow. Like characters in fairytales, they gather to bestow gifts upon babes. (But there is always an other. The uninvited fairy who is nonetheless a part of the story). The ancestors may find death restful, but they are no good at being inconscpicuous. They still hunger to live, to be remembered, to be heard, to tell their stories.

The ones who died, or fled, or lived. The ones who were dragged from their houses to be shot, the ones who hid in other people’s houses, who survived in cellars and cupboards and loosely bricked up walls. The ones who fought in wars, and the ones who waited for them, and the ones who never came back. The ones who were hungry, and cold, and poor. The ones who rose like firebirds. The ones who sang, or painted, or saw beautiful things. The ones who loved,fiercely and sometimes secretly. The ones who adopted children, the ones who were adopted.

Each generation carries the others. Remembers their stories. Passes them on. We are one whole. The lost children, and the living ones. Saying: you are ours, and you will never be lost. Also: remember us and sometimes when making salad, add dill and sugar to taste.

Mine has always been a restless family. We are obsessed with other pastures and what lies beyond horizons. The sort of people who take Here be dragons as an invitation and go Well let’s go have a look then. We belong to no place, but we are bonded to one another, with sacrifice and tears and blood. But mostly love.

The ancestors inhabit the light and air. Bodiless, they cartwheel in space. They leave no traces in mirrors, no prints on the carpet, no dent in the bed. They are a fabric of every room – like wallpaper.

Your bones are our bones. Your son is our son too. Our dreams are the foundations upon which your dreams were built.

We are here. We are here. We are always here.

Wakes up in someone. The sirensong in the blood. The yearning for oblivion. The long sleep.

On particularly bad nights I am right back to where I was years ago during the worst of it.

I think of him often, my Georgian cousin who killed himself a couple of weeks ago. Remember the way we were as children (me 2, him 11 or so) digging our fingers into wet sand, playing on the beach. The white horse he had. The tales of their adolescence his twin sister told me the first time I visited Georgia. And the sorrow for his reason for ending it- that he decided at 37 that he had achieved nothing in his life and there was no point in carrying on.

I feel torn, buckling under the crushing weight of double-grief – I am suffocating under the weight of it. I can’t sleep after settling the baby down because I’m too angry and sad so I stay up to cry. Or go to the living room to curl up with Third Cat who nestles herself against my abdomen and purrs and purrs and purrs (she’s lonely now that the baby is here and she’s not allowed in the bedroom, and delights at any opportunity to be given attention).

Realise that I’m cracking inside like the glaciers, breaking down piece by piece.

At the time of the diagnosis Z’s sister had flown out to be in Belgrade but Z was in the UK and about to submit his application for a British passport with the intention of going over to Yugoslavia in mid-September. On the phone his sister has told us to ‘prepare ourselves for the worst’ and we came to terms with the idea that she was going to die but thought we had a couple of months at least. As it happens, we were wrong.

Four weeks ago, at 12:55 pm, Z’s mother passed away, reinforcing all I’d had cause to learn about the suddeness of loss. She was 59 years old.

Thankfully her death was a relatively peaceful one. Due to the low oxygen in the blood she fell asleep and then into a coma, and then she died. We had been preparing ourselves for the end, but not the suddeness of it. Post-mortem revealed that the suspected early stage malignancy was in fact a very late one, and that likely she had had it for years.

When she died the shock of it was so tangible that it occupied the room with us, had its own seat at the table. Z and I walked out of work a couple of minutes after we’d heard and walked into a special, relentless kind of living hell that only administration can create and only walked out of it when we left the airport in Belgrade, only to encounter subtler kinds of drawn-out hellishness that bore into us like a dentist’s drill.

The first hell was the oft-tasted limbo of the Home Office in which we learned that Z’s passport application might be approved in 24 hours on compassionate grounds, and everyone got involved in a madcap race to find right documents and translate them and fax them over. All the usual things went wrong – the needed people were not to be found, documents were mislaid or filled out erroneously, and we all counted the cadence of our heartbeats and our breaths as the only thing in the current world which could be relied upon.

My head was just a series of echoes, while in Z’s head history was repeating itself. He was thinking of his father who had died of cancer ten years before at a time when Z’s immigration status was Unsorted and going back to visit his father or attend the funarel meant never coming back to the UK again, which in turn raised other questions such as ‘What Am I really doing here anyway?’. The difference between the right thing and the desired thing is something we all encounter, sooner or later. And the ability to withstand it is the cruel but effective way of learning how to be an adult.

This time though things were slightly more favourable – the funarel could be delayed up to about a week, giving us a small window of time, which we focused upon as the only thing that made sense. Home Office was its usual hell when we showed up on Monday, involving wrong forms and rushing across London to get them re-filled, and waiting, and explaining, and pleading and begging and essays. We then spent one of the most torturous afternoons of my life sitting in a cafe in Victoria, phoning up airlines, speaking to bored people who didn’t give a shit and wanted to charge us £700 per ticket, per capita. Then, just for a change, we’d be phoned by Z’s sister who’d have hysterics at us to tell us that arrival on Wednesday was just not good enough because it meant that she couldn’t fly out to England until Saturday and she wanted to see her children. The emotions of understanding for the immense stress she had been under and the intense desire to punch her in the eye for making a stressful situation ten times worse fought in me, with the latter winning and lingering in some form to this day. Perhaps because charity can be a strenuous act, while bitch-slapping never loses its satisfaction.

By 4pm however, there were a measure of mercies. Yugoslav Airlines had shown themselves to have a heart somewhere by finding us some tickets that we could actually afford, and saying they’d hold them in store until we let them know on which day we could fly. It turned out that someone in the Home Office had a heart too because we walked away with Z’s passport that same day, our nervous breakdown tipped itself over for a second into joy, and he knelt down on the pavement and asked me to marry him in the legally binding manner, and I accepted.

The next day we were on the plane to Yugoslavia, in Z’s case for the first time in fourteen years, and in some ways the really tough part began (although he didn’t get arrested at the airport or anything by the military police, so it’s not as tough as it could have been).

At the funarel the sight of the coffin was a shock, and the grief slid home like an arrow. The sight of Z’s hand caressing the wood and the sorrow for his sorrow tipped me over the edge, but it was all right because I was a girl and allowed to cry.

The rest of the funarel and the days that followed was like a long dive, a disconnected dream. Where you just have to hold your breath and push through, and when you think you cannot hold on anymore, you just do.

Mostly, it was all surrreal. The feeling of moving through a dream never quite faded. Families and friends were seen, city streets re-visited, bars encountered- but through it all sorrow walked a step behind. Not the raging grief I’d felt for my own father’s death as a child – a subtler thing, that quietens every conversation, that dwells like a shadow in the corner of each room.

Try being sick for a year,
then having that year turn into two,
until the memory of your health is like an island
going out of sight behind you

and you sail on in twilight,
with the sound of waves.
It’s not a dream. You pass
through waiting rooms and clinics

until the very sky seems pharmaceutical,
and the faces of the doctors are your stars
whose smile or frown
means to hurry and get well

or die.
And because illness feels like punishment,
an enormous effort to be good
comes out of you –
like the good behavior of a child

desperate to appease
the invisible parents of this world.
And when that fails,
there is an orb of anger

rising like the sun above
the mind afraid of death,
and then a lake of grief, staining everything below,
and then a holding action of neurotic vigilance

and then a recitation of the history
of second chances.
And the illusions keep on coming,
and fading out, and coming on again

while your skin turns yellow from the medicine,
your ankles swell like dough above your shoes,
and you stop wanting to make love
because there is no love in you,

only a desire to be done.
But you’re not done.
Your bags are packed
and you are traveling.

Sometimes when I think about him memories, fragments of memories surface for me.
An image of a visit to the cemetery some 15 years or so ago, when my mum and I came to lay fresh flowers because it was Dad’s birthday and we ran into my little half-brother with his mum. He was three years old, and all dressed up in neat little outfit completed with a little red bow-tie. He reminded me so much of a teddy bear in his toddlerhood my brother – he was all wide-blue-eyed and open-smiled and utterly, incorrigibly huggable. He was so sweet-tempered, so trusting, so ready to take your hand and follow you home that it constricts my heart to remember it.*

There are other memories, more torturous. Like the memories of my stepdad trying really hard to cheer me up with presents and a trip to the circus. My stepdad who was always courteous and dignified bringing me small gifts of various kinds of stationery (pink pens, I remember, a tiny notebook festooned with white hearts, and a little cardboard box shaped like a house whose roof lifted up)**; knowing in that moment that this was a man who would work hard on being part of my life and that I would need for my part to work on loving him, even though back then I wasn’t ready to love anyone again and I just wanted to unexist.

Remembering my stepdad (in suit, and tie, and polished shoes – a man dignified to a fault) coming to take me to the circus where we sat on roughhewn benches, with our feet on a popcorn-sprinkled sawdust floor). We sat side by side in this awkwardness of him trying very hard to make me happy and me knowing he was making this huge effort and wanting to make an effort ot be happy for him – the whole thing made ever more painful by the presence of the spectre that followed me always and shared the bench with us – the wormhole , the odd-shaped hole that held The Absence of Father In the known Universe.

* Hahaha, please note the extensive use of the past sense in that sentence – he is actually pretty sweet-tempered still for a badass, bitch! young man (I judge him not for I know not to what extremes then enforced wearing of red bow ties in childhood would have driven me.)

**Can I remember where I put my keys? No. Can I remember down to the last detail images of stationery from 20 years ago? Why yes, naturally.

crossposted from typepad until I figure out how to do a feed thing

Death was something that shaped the fabric of my family long before my father had died. It affected all our lives, from even before he was born. In the house where I grew up there were always so many more pictures of the dead than of the living [the dead needing remembering whereas the living were tiresome and under your feet all the time I suppose] .

Grief skips not generations. It gets handed down, like any other legacy. In Eastern Europe we are born with war and grief, and our losses form the fabric of our lives. They trail us like puppies and kittens.
In Eastern Europe life is often cheap and never safe. Fire and brimstone rains down from the sky at regular intervals and one loss begets another until they form a chain stretching all the way back past all love and memory and regret so that it’s hard to say where it all ends or starts.

Perhaps it starts with the boy who died, age 9 and never aged or angered anybody or did anything bad. Whose ghost broke with its nearness, its earnestness.
Don’t cry, the ghost child always said to those who heard it, please don’t cry.

The last time he appears is in a dream. In my grandmother’s dream she wakes up and sees her son playing with a toy truck.
The toy is for my brother, he says for when he’s born. And then though she tries to call him back and stop him he says goodbye and he leaves. In her dream she hears his footsteps across the floor, and then a door opens and shuts, and is gone.

In the morning when she wakes up there is indeed a child’s wooden toy by the bed, and some months later she discovers she is pregnant and in March 1946 she gives birth to another boy and gives him the same name, Giorgi and that is where another grief story starts.

I don’t know what’s the saddest thing. That my father was born and conceived to replace someone, or that he was told throughout his whole life from it’s very beginning how inadequate and second-best and what a failure at it he was. Or that my grandmother was never a whole person after that and could never love anyone [except perhaps the dog] for who they were again.

My own grief stories are different. Most begin with the sudden death of a man whom I loved above all others but never got to say goodbye to.

I was not yet 9 when my father died, but I had no sense at all of myself as a child. No sense either of how someone could simply Stop Being, vanish like water down a plughole.

In the days that followed, my father’s absence got hammered into me continuously with how nice everyone was being. How they went out of their way to show kindness. As though I had suddenly been replaced by a little girl all made of glass. And the long torturous consolation sessions in which my teachers took me out of the classroom and had long chats about what a wonderful man my father was and how we’d all miss him and that if crying would bring him back we’d all cry but crying wouldn’t. I remember that if I concentrated hard enough on the mouth shapes the moving lips of my teachers made then I could block out the sounds of the words themselves and at home I practiced with my mother saying “My father has died” until I could utter it without tears.

I remember crying only once. Sitting in my grandmother’s lap and wailing – just… screaming and sobbing for hours until I nearly drowned in my own pool of tears. She just rocked me and held me in silence. All of our grief was so big it needed a lot of space to show itself. It was no good at sharing.

When I go to the cemetary now, my heart tells me that my father is not there. That I’m just standing on a square of empty earth and that he inhabits the snow and silence and air. But back then, and for a long, long time the graveyard was my black hole. The space I could not go near unless I wanted it to suck me in and crush my bones.

And memory has places which are jagged and raw and lead like nerves straight to the heart. When struck they emit aching and there is one memory which gets me every time:

a green square of paper sellotaped to a gravestone, with a child’s scribble on it, fluttering in the snow and the wind.

And in those moments, I think I would give away years of my own life, just to have him back for ten minutes. Just to be able to hold him again, and be held. To feel my body crushed in my father’s powerful arms, to be hugged tightly, tightly, to hug him. To see the colour of his eyes again – the real colour not just my photograph memory of it- to hear the sound of my father’s laugh, and voice, and song. To smell the aftershave that he wore.

To be able to say goodbye properly.

The surface stillness may go on for days or weeks or months. And then sometimes, something happens a fragment of thought or feeling or memory erupts from the depths like a leaping marlin.

Today, I was shopping for my Secret Santa present for a collegaue at work, and trying to figure out the maximum amount of chocolate my £3 budget would stretch to, when someone jostled me and the Kinder Egg I had been holding fell. It dropped like a penny, and in that instant of its fall the fragments of memory resurfaced and I understood why it is I had avoided buying Kinder Eggs for well over a decade.

The autumn of 1989. On the eve of my Dad’s brain surgery, my mom was going to the hospital to see him. When he’d spoken to my mother he’d requested something of mine to take with him, so I gave her to take him a small thing. Small enough to be smuggled into theatre in a man’s clutched hand. A tiny plastic trinket really. A Kinder Egg toy.

And then he died. He suffered a massive haemorrhage in the brain, and he went into a coma, and he never woke up. And the impact of it hit the most in little ways.

Like the day after the day after he’d died. And there were quiet, somber people in the living room. My aunt dressed in black. And I was not sure that I could control my voice or my face, so I didn’t want to speak, but I had to come and say hello anyway. My aunt, wordless, offering me two Kinder Eggs. Me, wordless, taking them, and knowing in that fraction of an instant some of the enormity of what had happened. That my aunt who was always so aganst me eating sweets, who censored my consumption of chocolate should be giving me treats now. Not one Kinder egg. But two.

They are not a treat or a distraction, so much as a different kind of sadness. They turn to cardboard and ash in my mouth.

And later still, days or weeks, or months perhaps, for I have barely any recollections of that first year, I was at a friend’s house and he was attempting to cheer me up by showing me his Kinder Egg toy collection. But I don’t ever feel like I summon up the expected admiration.

The lined up toys struck me as something immesurably sad. Like rows of broken eggs. Or lines of corpses on an empty field.