UBIETY

Eight.

I am young, and I am drawing, because I don’t want to climb.

This morning we met his friend at the rugby field in the village, and drove the winding lane along the valley bottom. We parked outside the pub, and walked up the well-worn path to the foot of the crag, where the pair of them set about a day spent clinging to its side, spidery movements tracing lines from the guide book onto its weathered face.

My younger brother is here too.

A spare helmet which has sat propped by the rucksacks gets knocked, and rolls off the edge of the small cliff in front of us and into the stand of trees below. Dad goes and fetches it. Later on, it happens again. He’s not annoyed, just amused. It gets put somewhere more secure.

I have brought my sketchbook and my pencils with me to pass the time. It is a typical Lakeland day; overcast, a little chilly, a little sunny; ‘can’t make up its mind’ weather. The side of the fell opposite is in the midst of turning from winter browns to spring greens, making my sketch of it a patchwork of coloured squiggles. It’s not a very good drawing, and I don’t care much. Mostly I am cold from sitting around, and I am ready to go home.

‘Just one more route!’ dad promises us, handling the rope.

One of his arteries is mostly closed, and it’s putting strain on his heart. Maybe that’s putting strain on his body, which is why a good climber would fall from an easy climb. Maybe it’s putting strain on his mind, which is why a good climber would place his gear in a way that meant, as he fell, it fails. Or maybe this person falls from the side of this mountain because that is just sometimes what happens when people climb mountains.

He shouts, as he falls.

‘SHIT!’

And then he dies, because he hits the hard ground, and we are just people, and we break easily.

His friend is shouting too, now, shouting at me to bring him the phone. But I don’t know where the phone is.

‘In the top pocket! The rucksack, the pocket!’ he’s shouting at me.

I can’t find it. In amongst my panicked tears, and my fumbles with the zip, and my confusion, I can’t find it.

‘MOUNTAIN RESCUE!’ he screams out into the valley, twice, three times maybe.

He will tell us, later, that as he looks up to the sky, a shaft of sunlight comes down from a gap in the clouds, like a soul being called up to heaven. That’s because he believes in God, and that my father has departed this life, to live on in another place.

But the dead are nowhere.

Other people come from other crags. The mountain rescue comes from the village. One of them is told by the others to take me and my brother down to their Land Rover. He is quite overweight, and seems a bit anxious, and I wonder whether this is why he has been told to walk us down, instead of carrying the body. He keeps telling us to watch our step. I wonder why he thinks he needs to tell us this. We walked up without being told it, so we can walk down too. In the car, he is telling us we can have a drink and something to eat at the Mountain Rescue base. I tell him my brother can’t have wheat, and can’t have dairy, because he is intolerant to them. That’s what my mum told me, and told him, and what everyone agreed to abide by until he was old enough to try them himself and decide that in fact, he wasn’t.

We are at the Mountain Rescue base, and there is rugby on the television. My little brother is quite excited to have been given biscuits, and to have lots of people there keen to explain rugby to him.

Now we are at home, and the policemen are telling my mother that my father is dead.

My mum is telling my sister.

My mum is telling me.

She’s staring at the full moon outside the window while she hugs the three of us in her bed, as we cry ourselves into exhausted sleep.

A few weeks, or months, or years later – I don’t know when – the young police officer who delivered the final word of dad’s death to my mum in the hallway of our home, comes round to the house. I think he is here to see how we are. We are children, same as before. As he drives away from the house he puts on his flashing blue lights, as we’d specially requested, just for our entertainment.

My mum gives me a notebook to write memories in. I cover two pages with the words

WHY
WHY
WHY
WHY
WHY

I think I know that that is the kind of thing somebody with that kind of notebook would write. But that is not really my own grief. I don’t actually have any questions, because it is clear to me what happened, because I saw it happen. I was there, anyway. I have that memory.

But was I looking at the crag as he fell? No. I don’t think so.

I don’t know.

I can see him falling in my mind’s eye, but from a different angle, where I am sat in the background. So that is not my memory. Maybe it’s the memory of a blackbird, perched higher on the crag, staring down at the mortal scene below. But not mine.

No memories can be trusted anyway, not even the blackbird’s.

I am overwhelmed by loss and pain, for a while, some weeks, or months, or years. And then I am mostly fine. 

But I become a person who is sometimes sad about existing. I don’t think that is because my father died, it’s probably just because humanity is often painful. But I don’t know about that, either.

__________

Nine.

I am at my best friend’s house.

Back at home, my mum had led me from my bedroom where I was sitting, listening to an audiobook, to her room, and took my hands, and told me that his father had died in a skiing accident.

I have brought my best friend a notebook, to write memories in.

I first met him years before, in the kindergarten classroom. I had been making an artistic mess of glue, string and cotton wool when he arrived, peering out from behind his mum and dad’s legs, a new pupil in the class.

‘Hello, I’m Bobby!’ I had probably said loudly, ‘Let me show you what to do’.

He was an only child, so I was his brother. I would often go to his house for the weekend and his mum and dad would take us canoeing on the lake, or give us 50p to buy bags of penny sweets at the Post Office in the village.

Now both of our dads are dead.

I thought somehow that it would just be the two of us here at his house, but when we arrived, it was full of people. His family, his friends, his family friends, all here to support him and his mum. It feels like a party. 

He seems fine.

‘Thanks Bobs!’ he says, taking the notebook distractedly while booting up the family computer to play games on, ‘This is cool, maybe we can use it to write down rules for our club?’

We have an exclusive club of two members, he and I.

Some time after – weeks, months – His mum clears out the garden shed so we can have a clubhouse to call our own. We stash jokebooks and toys in there, and mess around in the garden and the woods nearby. When we go to bed, she brings us up an old Quality Streets tin with a note on the top saying MIDNIGHT FEAST: Strictly not to be opened until midnight, just like they used to do when his dad was alive. Inside are honey waffles and chocolate and toffees and other marvels of precious childhood delight. We scoff it all down and somehow, in spite of the sugar rush, fall asleep.

I don’t know if he has any questions. I don’t know if he writes the words 

WHY
WHY
WHY
WHY
WHY

in a notebook. I imagine he doesn’t have many questions, because it is clear to him what happened, because he saw it happen. He was there, anyway. He has that memory.

__________

Thirteen.

I get a job in the village bookshop, and for a few years I spend my weekend afternoons gazing idly at maps hung in frames on the wall behind the counter. Names of places that I have never been too, or can no longer remember going to, even though they are all crammed into the confines of this Cumbrian homeland of mine. Brain-like contour lines and dense colour keys promising soaring ridges and deep lush green troughs of natural splendour.

I decide that it is time I got to know the place where I live. And I am adamant that I want to go alone. It seems like an adventurous thing to do, and I want to be adventurous, even though I do not seem to enjoy adventures a whole lot.

On the morning of my departure my mum descends the stairs and suggests that I add some more padding to my rucksack shoulder straps.

We eat breakfast, I put my new boots on, and we set off through the woods. Mum walks with me for a while, until it seems to her like a good place to stop. She gives me a tiny velvet pouch, with a feather, a pebble, a seashell, a match, an enamel heart, a knot of tie-dye cloth, a safety pin, and a little burnished zip-pull in it. It is a charm, each thing representing something she wants me to take with me as I walk, and as I grow up. She is keen on ceremony, and significance. I am less bothered about ceremony, but also keen on significance. We are both always doing things for reasons. We hug goodbye, and I walk on. I turn to give her another wave, then crest the rise of the hill, and am off, whistling my travelling freedoms to the winding road.

After a few hours of getting lost and tramping through head-high bracken, I reach a tarn, my first stop. The air is cool but the sun is shining, and a lizard skitters off the path in front of me as I approach. I dump my pack down by a tree trunk, tear off my boots and t-shirt, and go for a paddle in the shallows, as I ponder with glee whether to eat my tuna sandwich, my apple, or my chocolate bar first.

For the next three weeks I wander about the county, in a stressed kind of way. I often worry about where I will sleep for the night, despite never being more than a couple of hours drive from home. I take trains and buses, camp in the gardens of kind people, and eat pork pies from village shops. I stuff sheep’s wool into my socks, because my boss back at the bookshop had informed me that it would help soothe aching feet. Her son is a shepherd, so I think he ought to know. I’m not sure if it does or not, but it covers all of my socks in little white hairs for months afterwards. I walk along country lanes. It usually rains. I try to write up my experiences into a detailed journal in the style of Bill Bryson, who I like to read. I hitch a lift with a vet on his way to rescue a dog that is stuck at the top of a spiral staircase: ‘This isn’t even the first time it’s happened’ he says exasperatedly ‘and it’s not as if I can drug the damned thing, cos I’d never get it back down the stairs.’ It is a very big dog, and he is not a very big man. I stay in hostels, eat snickers bars from vending machines, cook spaghetti, and feel like a king. I listen to people’s snores in dormatory rooms.

My friend Rose agrees to come and meet me for a part of the walk. She takes a tortuous series of buses from her house to the town I’m waiting in, and it is a relief to have a familiar face to chatter to about this and that as we walk. Later, in the hostel where we are staying, she rummages around in her bags and produces a crumpled cutting from NME magazine, with tour dates for our favourite band on it.

‘I really want to go’ she says, ‘do you want to come with me?’. I tell her that yes, I would. We will end up going, and I will end up telling her than I fancy her, and after some years of dramatic teenage complexity, we will get together and stay together.

The next day we are lost in the mist on the high fells, examining the map and peering into the clag to try and make out where we are, and where we are going. We descend to what we think is a path, but is just a beck. So we walk down the beck in the grey gloom, and arrive in the valley soaking wet from head to toe.

‘Oh!… uh, are you ok?’

I hear Rose’s voice, and look up from my trudging, to see a man in a blue raincoat walking swiftly and unsteadily down the fellside towards us. He is walking as though drunk, and clutching something to his head. Blood is dripping down his face and off his nose. As he draws closer we stop him, make him sit down, and I take out my first aid kit. He seems ok, but there is a long, deep gash across his brow, and the blood is pooling out of it faster than I can soak it up. I hastily prepare a bandage, and haphazardly wrap it around his head with as much pressure as I can manage. Then we set off with him towards the camping hut that we know is somewhere nearby, in the hope of a phone for transport to the hospital.

I am fine. And then, after a few steps, I burst into sobs.

I suppose it is because this middle aged man has short grey hair and a wide brow, and he had cut open his head on a rock, and was bleeding. And my dad was the same, and had done the same, but he had died, and this man was alive.

At the hut, the few people there tell us that there is no warden coming until later that day, so I call 999 and try to explain that a man has been injured, but he seems ok, but he needs to go to the hospital to have it looked at, and we are all walkers with no car. The man just sits in the hut and smiles and thanks us all, and has his bandage re-dressed by somebody else. Rose gives me a hug, and I stand and drip raindrops and a few more salty tears into my mug of tea. 

The warden arrives, and takes the man away to hospital. He gets stitches, and is fine.

__________

Seventeen.

I have run away from home.

I wrote a long letter to my mum, telling her not to worry, but that I was leaving and might not be back for a while. I state that this is not a case of teenage angst. I state that I am not running away.

But then, because she is a good mother, and doesn’t deserve to worry, I took the letter through to where she was sitting at the kitchen table, and explained to her that I would be leaving for Europe in the morning. And then, because she is a good mother in her own way, she offered to drive me to the train station.

I bought a ticket to London, and sat staring out of the window for four hours.

At St.Pancras station, I stood looking up at the international departures board. The first train was going to Brussels, so I bought a ticket to Brussels, and I took the train to Belgium.

And now I am here, wandering the city streets, looking for things to know about reality. Most of the adults in my life seem well-adjusted to the incongruity of existence, but I don’t want to settle for that same abdication of purpose. I want some sort of reconciliation with meaning.

I smoke my way through a pack of cigarettes that I bought, because it seems to me that is the kind of thing someone in my position would do.

At the hostel where I am staying, I befriend a an Irish couple, and a group of American girls being chatted up by the hostel bar staff, and we all pile out into the city for a night of drinking in bars. You can order beer in Belgium at age sixteen, and I like beer. Or at least, I like getting drunk, in the teenage kind of way.

The next morning, I am hungover. Or at least, what passes for a hangover at seventeen. I go for a walk around, and I find myself at an intersection where two streets head off at an acute angle from one another, slicing the tall rows buildings into a sharp wedge. At the pointy end of the wedge, there is a café. A bold red Jupiler sign sticks out from above the door, and ornate black railings frame the three storeys of balcony flats perched above it.

I go in for a coffee, and sit and sip, and look out through the window onto the street, and sip, and sit, and watch people pass by.

I leave, and walk the broad avenue lined with old, white, regal stone buildings.

I am not thinking, just walking. 

Walking.

And now I am seeing.

Seeing.

Seeing that being is the only reality to be had; just, being. There are no answers here, for me, nor anywhere else, for anyone else. Things just are.

A revelation. The world painted in all new shades of colour.

I turn into the park, and sit down on a bench. I stay on the bench for a long time, absorbing the enormous way that my moment of acceptance feels. And then I leave the park, and I go and get my bags, and I go home, and carry on living.

__________

Eighteen.

I move to Norway.

I have been learning Norwegian in a smug, ineffectually self-directed fashion for a few years, and have a pen-pal who works as a teacher in a school is Oslo, and who has agreed to help me find my way there for a little while before I go to university.

I stay with him for a few weeks, then he finds me a flat in a colleague’s basement that I can move into. I vaguely assist him and the other English teachers at the high school with their classes, but in truth none of these students need much teaching, because their English is already as fluent as I can imagine anyone needing to be in any language that isn’t their own.

I begin to write about my experiences. One line reads ‘the highest form of politeness one can display in public in Norway is to make everyone around you feel as though you are completely and utterly ignorant of their existence’. I like that line. 

So I spend a lot of time alone. 

I live on the very fringe of the city, dipping between the seemingly endless mosses of the Scandinavian forest – the Marka - on one side, and the seemingly endless peri-urban sprawl of Oslofjord on the other. My only possessions in the basement flat are from the suitcase I brought with me, spread thinly throughout place. My living room is empty, except a laptop on the desk, a map of the city on the wall behind it, and an armchair.

It is an understated city. Not outstanding, but nice, as they go. It’s got its rubbishy bits, and its sparkly bits, its busy bits and its quiet bits, but overall, it’s just quite straightforward. Lived in. From the highest lookout point (the top of the ski jump at Holmenkollen) you can see the town’s blurred edges, where the houses and the trees slowly merge into one another, leaving trailing strands in each other’s territory as one makes way for the other.

I enjoy the way the autumn leaves turn in shades, day by day, until they drop by their stems as the frost begins to bite. And the way that lichen drapes everything along the damp conifer paths that I go for a run on at the end of my lane. I like the Norwegian waffles in their distinctive flower shape, eaten with sour cream and jam, folded in half like a delicious sandwich, and the warm lefsepølse at the ice hockey game, wolfed down in seconds. I like the coffee bars in Grünnerløkka, and the granite sculptures of human bodies in Frognerparken, and I like the cloudberries and ice cream for pudding.

But I am lonely. I sit on the bus and watch the city slide by the window, day after day. So after a couple of months, I am ready to leave, to do some other things.

__________

Twenty-four.

A friend has died. Not a close friend, just someone I knew, and liked. He was a young man, like me. 

We have travelled half way across the world, Rose and I, and begun to make a new life out here – a temporary one, just a couple of years – far away from everyone we ever knew. But now one of them has died, and someone has sent me a message on my phone to tell me. I am in the pub, trying to make new friends, but I can only sit, numbly.

A few days later, I wake up from a dream in which my father was speaking to me. I haven’t heard his voice in fifteen years, and it has long since faded from my waking memories. But now I can hear it as clearly as I ever did, right here. But… it slipping slowly away, as the dream pales. It’s presence was an intrusion on the normality that is him not being here. Not that he ever was here, this distant place that I have come to.

It is New Years’ Eve, so I go out with new friends, to a big party in some block of flats. We drink, we dance, we stagger through hallways full of strangers off their face on different things. We leave to walk home through the snow-packed streets, and I find myself in a fight with a stranger. I said something he didn’t like, I don’t remember what. He shoves me to the ground, I push him against a wall. It’s a stupid little scuffle, and it is over before it begins, and then we leave. We stomp up the hill to the apartment block where we live, but I stay outside in the cold night while my friends go inside. I kneel in the snow, and sob. I am overwhelmed by loss and pain, broken open by the dying.

And then I go to bed, and in the morning, I am fine.

I write my friends’ family a letter. I tell them that I didn’t know him very well, and that I would have liked to know him better. That I have been thinking about them, and him. I describe him as I saw him, with a light-hearted smile, an easy-going stroll, and plenty of time to talk. I describe the day back in the spring when I was taking a lunch break in the shade, after a morning working in their garden, and nobody was home except me and him, and the world seemed quiet and calm. He came and sat with me, and we fell into easy conversation about this and that, and must have talked for nearly an hour. We discussed our plans and ideas for the future, and the future of our little corner of the world, and our roles in it.

I tell them that I know that they are grieving, and that I am grieving too. 

Perhaps I am trying to write my way out of my grief, or to write my way into theirs.

__________

Twenty-five.

I am pulling CD cases out of plastic boxes. Two years and two weeks since they went in, since we left to live on another continent, we’re back. We have a found a flat, and moved all our things, and now we must re-create our lives, again.

Back in the same kind of place, but in a new version of it. Scotland, not Cumbria.

This town is alright, I suppose. It not ancient and gnarled, nor hard and gritty. It’s just sort of… here. We live in a ground floor flat in a harsh concrete block at the back of the village, away from the main road. It is not pretty, but because it has been cast to the edges, it also backs straight on to the hillside behind, which I like. The southwest aspect of this small fault line of mountains gives its slopes stunning autumn colours at sunset, glowing orange and grey as though its lumps and troughs were backlit.

Inside, we have a home. A former council flat, nothing special, but the rent is cheap, and the landlord is extremely efficient. These things, and the hills, and the fact that we are here together for a reason – for Rose to go back to university, and re-direct her working life – mean that we can tolerate the less fine aspects, such as the smoker who sets off the stairwell fire alarm several times every day and night.

Beeep. Beeep. Beeep.

And the woman upstairs who screams at her boyfriend at 5am. 

Beeep. Beeep. Beeep.

And the person (possibly the alarm-setter, possibly the screamer), who throws their leftovers out of the kitchen window onto the grass in front of our window. I look out each morning to see what’s new. Half an onion. Three corn-on-the-cobs. The remains of a fajita. I can only assume that this is either out of some misplaced desire the feed the birds (which it does, the pigeons are obese), or out of a notion that it is easier to open the window and fling them out than to open the bin and drop them in.

Beeep. Beeep. Beeep. 

And the person (possibly the alarm setter, possibly the screamer, possibly the food thrower) who gets a dog, and doesn’t train it, and leaves it alone in the flat all day to bark and whine and bark and whine, until they come back and shout something at it that sounds – through the layers of ceiling – like ‘Shut up, fucker’. We imagine that they’ve called the dog fucker. We make cups of tea, and listen to the barking, and mutter under our breath; ‘shut up, fucker’.

Beeep. Beeep. Beeep.

Some months later, a fresh batch of chips scattered over the grass attracts a flock of seagulls, who divebomb each other in violent competition for the little fingers of starch. Once they depart, one is left behind, it’s wing bent impossibly sideways, hopping and flapping and screeching in bewildered pain. After a few attempts to take off, the bone emerges at the elbow and stains the wing red, and it continues to hop around, effort giving way to shock, eventually pressing itself against the building and staring out bleakly at the world. I wonder if it knows it’s going to die. We call the animal rescue people and it is taken away in a white van. Presumably it is killed, to put it out of its misery.

I hope those cunts upstairs are happy with themselves.

Beeep. Beeep. Beeep.

__________

Twenty-six.

There is a phone call. It is my mother. She tells me that her husband has died.

At the moment of being told, there is aways a reprieve. We are permitted to break with the ordinary human world, permitted to shout and cry and wail, to be as detached from normality as our bodies demand. For those who don’t seize this moment, it will haunt them. It will follow them around and scream at them in their steadfastness, until it comes roaring out at some other moment, perhaps with no warning, perhaps surrounded by people who will not know what it is that is happening. But I know now how to seize it right away. How to rage openly against the bitter violation, as an animal in distress, fighting and thrashing against the inevitable decay of its life.

And then, once the immediate pool of terror has been drained, there is an allowance made for the emptiness of shock. People expect nothing of you at all, for a few brief, merciful heartbeats.

Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.

But soon, stunningly soon, the world begins to re-assert itself. You need to go to the toilet. The postman arrives. Someone puts the kettle on. Normality gathers around you like a swarm and pushes relentlessly back in. The moment of absolute grief is as fleeting as that. And from then on, it is only ever invited to re-emerge in the most particular of circumstances.

I never called him my step-dad when he was alive, because he did not try and be a father to me, and I appreciated that. But he was a nice man, and a friend, and for some reason, it no longer feels important what to call him, so I casually begin to use that term, step-dad.

Years ago, as I left for Brussels, he gave me a card with a poem inside. He liked poetry.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

We bury him in a wicker coffin, in a woodland burial ground. Funerals are not for the sake of the dead, they are for the sake of the living. To try and find a moment when we can all agree that the letting go may begin. Many feel like they cannot. But I feel like I can.

So he begins to dissolve.
 

__________

Twenty-seven.

I am sorting through boxes of old notes and diaries. One of those jobs that never rises to the top of the to do list, so it just sort of happens one day, on a day when a thousand other things where more urgent.

I have always been a look-backer and look-forwarder. Nostalgic about what happened, nostalgic about what will happen, wrong-footed by uncertainty; an obsessive clicker of the save-button of life. Maybe that was born out of a fear that things disappear, like my father did, or maybe it is just in my temperament anyway. 

Piles and piles of thoughts, desperately recorded, saved, written for whom, and to what end, I don’t know… questions, questions, attempts to answer, important revelations, scraps and fragments, just written, written, written. The same themes again and again, arcing around in broad sweeps, eventually forming circles. Every time I start looking for things to know, I find truths that were already there, and settle on them for a while, until the next time I go looking, and find the same things again, still there. An excessively ruminatory mind, verbosely smashing its head against the fucking wall of existence.

__________

Twenty-eight.

It is twenty years since my father died.

The mountain did not kill him. Mountains are not people, and they do not do things. They just are.

When we blame the cold for chilling us to the bone, blame the sky for striking us with lightning, blame the ocean for suffocating us with its swell, we are pretending that there is more here than the fact that we are small things in big places, and we cannot help but die. It is as normal as tree roots pushing through the earth, as rain falling from the sky, as laughter, as crying. The world is not an uncaring thing, just as it is not a caring thing. It just is.

I am at the memorial he inadvertently built for himself. 

It is a small stone enclosure, a circular wall no more than five feet across, with two window-like openings on opposite sides, so that you can stand on the north side and look south through both windows at the view down the lake.

He liked to build natural artworks, inspired by the sculptures in the woods where we lived. When he built this one, it was surrounded by trees. Some days we joined him here, me and my little brother. Less interested in moving stone than in wondering among the pines, poking things with sticks, bouncing on moss, imagining kingdoms and goblins and potions made of leaves. I found a photo of us up here, and it occurred to me for the first time the influence that he might have had on me becoming a waller. And then it occurred to me how strange it was that I had never thought of that before.

At his funeral, mum asked people not to bring flowers, but stones instead. Hundreds were brought. We put them all in a van, drove them up the forest tracks, and carried them into the woods, to arrange them around the base of this sculpture. In the years between then and now, they have all grown over with moss, and the woods around them have been felled. Not surprising: it is a working forest, all planted to be harvested, and now the harvest has passed through, and stripped the land. There are still a few scattered trees left, but the overall effect has changed. The sculpture seems more precarious now, uncacooned by greenness.

Truth be told, the stonework itself always seemed improbable. It looks rough and haphazard to my eyes: every stone seeming to have been delicately balanced, in the way that people imagine wallers build walls, when in fact we are doing everything possible to make sure that they are not balanced at all, but fully locked in place, unshakable and impervious to relentless clawing of gravity. But after two decades, here it still stands, not a single stone out of place. All of my walls still have that longevity to prove.

Gone but not forgotten, they say.

We suspend the preferences of the dead in time, to try and honour the person by honouring their last selection of life, surrounding their name with the masks and props that they chose for their part in the play. As though any one of those things really mattered. As though if they were different, that person would not have been themselves. I picture my father, there, on a fellside, sheep watching him cautiously from the bracken beneath woolly skies, wearing an old worn fleece and running leggings, canvas backpack on his shoulders, eating honey and cheese sandwiches, sipping lemon tea from a battered artillery-shell looking flask. That picture never fades.

But the more precious things begin to slip away. The music of their presence: the way they moved in the daylight, the sound of their voice speaking next to us, their smell in a hug, the subtle twists of their way of thinking, the minutia of their personhood, by which you would know instantly it was them. Those things slacken and fray, abraded away by the ever-pouring grains of our own passing lives. Brought back in fragments of dreams, in searing moments of recollection, but less, and less.

Sometimes, in the absence of their song, we try and find solace in their story. What they did. And on that score, we accept the death of the very old far easier, because we feel as though they were not going to do a whole lot more, or become anyone much different. They have long since be-come, and now they are be-going. But when people die young, we wonder. Pages are left, but all are blank. What would they have done, in the time since? What actions taken, what loves shared, what hurts made? What would they have thought, what would they have said? And what would we have thought about them and their doings? We imagine we might know, because we knew them up to that day… but we can’t, not really. We are left to reach out into the void, grasping for some way to continue our relationship with them. But there is no answer.

It doesn’t get any easier, they say.

But it does, really. Or at least, it gets so much less constant. Every year that passes, I am ever less frequently drowned in grief, and for longer and longer times, I am fine. When it comes back, I have no questions, just a cacophony of loss that blocks out my senses. But briefly. Ever so briefly. And then it settles again, and things are ok.

Maybe that is because I was very young when my father died, and so my life has grown without him in it. Maybe this is not the grief of others. But I don’t know.

__________

Ubiquity is everywhereness.

Ubiety is whereness: the condition of being in a place.

We use the stories of our past and our stories about the future to make us feel constant; continual; whole – to try and make sense of our lives – but in truth, everything that has gone before, is lost to us. We mourn the past we shared with the people we love, even while they are still alive. We mourn our own life, even while we are still living it. This is the ache of memory; of melancholy; of nostalgia; of knowing that this very moment is gone in an instant, and will never be here again. We want to be ubiquitous, but we are not. Our being is present tense. The only firm ground we stand on, is the actual ground we stand on. Our ubiety. We are tied to it.

Where are the dead?

I don’t know what the word is for nowhereness.

We put their body in the ground, and mark the spot. But they are not there. The atoms of their flesh and bone remain, right in front of us, but their body can no longer bring us the them we are looking for: their presence in our present. Near or far, when they were living, we knew they were around here, somewhere. But now… we could search for them the whole universe over: open every door and scale every peak, plumb the ocean depths and stare through every café window, and still not find them.

When that feels too much to bear, we try to carry them with us, in references and stories, in remembrances and imaginations of incorporeal existence. We intertwine them in our own minds with our sense of past and future, to make them as ubiquitous as we want ourselves to be. It comforts us to feel as though they are still with us. Still here, somewhere. Watching over. Present. We try to hold on. To stop the dead from dying. 

But holding on is the habit of the living. The dead do not need us to hold on, even if we could. They do not need us at all. They have already gone.

Unselved, unburdened, unplaced.

Nowhere. 

Free.