Sawdust

How do you get a ball of thoughts on to a piece of paper? Which thread do you pull out and stick down first? Especially when there are a lot of loose ends in that tight ball of chaos. I recall my creative writing workshops from university – Lania told us: “If you’re struggling to find an ‘in’, talk about the setting. The weather. Fixate on a character.”

The setting is an empty classroom in January. Sunlight streams through the windows I’ve just exposed, gently contracting the blinds to satisfy my craving for vitamin D that has intensified these past few rainy weeks. It’s cold outside but feels like June now on my back. I’ve been asked to cover I.T. this afternoon but they’re all ‘working from home’. And so, I am at a loose end.

Fixating on any given character in the narrative would lead to a rather depressing encapsulation of my childhood trauma, and anyway, besides that, my fixation on people always leads me back to grandad.

On Sunday the 14^th August, I told grandad to let go. I walked into his room at the care home that day with Willow in tow. She would barely be coaxed across the threshold. Willow has an especially emotive face and so I couldn’t ignore the bolt of horror stricken across her eyes as she became aware of the other figure in the room. Grandad lay on his side, unconscious but looking overall like he was sleeping. Until you really looked. His knee was poking out of the bed sheets and as I moved to cover it back up, I saw how exposed it really was, the fat and flesh having peeled back to reveal an almost spherical joint attaching his thigh to his calf. His thigh and his calf were the same thickness, his skin pale and sore. I covered it with the duvet slowly and deliberately.

The carer offered me some time alone with him. I could feel the implication of her words but was numbed by the trauma of his repeated NDEs. I struggled to convince myself that it was actually a goodbye that was warranted instead of a ‘get up you lazy bugger’. Willow was pulling her lead tight, now, in an attempt to leave the room, alerting me to her fear with a low cry which always puts me on edge. I tried to blank her out as I took the situation in. He was murmuring in his sleep.

“Grandad?” I tried after a moment. The invitation hung in the air, crisp and clear against the backdrop of death. I stroked the side of his head, along the dip of his temple, just as I had a million times before, noticing how the dip had deepened and turned every shade of blue. “What you doing you silly goose, get up.” My voice cracked this time. I surprised myself. Maybe I was starting to see the severity of the situation. Or, more likely, maybe I’d never truly become immune to the pain. And maybe every time the big drops and the upside-downs came around on this ride, my heart raced all the same. My heart has become a significant problem, these days. As if every time his would dip out, mine tried to compensate by beating like utter fury, making me sick to my stomach and fragmenting my thoughts. Now that he’s gone, it’s still subconsciously trying to revive him by flooding my body with adrenaline constantly.

I had started to panic, granted, but I am very good at coping with panic. I have seen her before. I continued to stroke his head, and said gently in his ear, “Eeeee god you lazy bugger,” to which he fluttered his eyes and murmured a wordless complaint. This made me smile. I knew his blood pressure had dropped again. I knew he hadn’t eaten or drank for days. But he could hear me. He knew I was there. I thought on this for a second, Willow’s crying intensifying my heartbeat all the while, then I said, “You have to stop now please”. He made an indignant noise. A year ago that dry, gasping mouth would have been tickled by a smile as it formed the words, “You’re bloody cheeky, Charley”. “Grandad. I love you so much, but you need to stop, this isn’t right anymore. I’m ok. You have to go now. You have to stop.” It felt like pushing sand out of my mouth, gritty and uncomfortable across my tongue, but I kept going, with such dulcet Mackem tones that he couldn’t possibly mishear. Then, riddled with memories of his confusion, his growing anger and his emaciated body, I whispered, “you can’t get better from this.” It was the first time I had admitted this.

And so, I told him to go. By the time I straightened up, relenting to Willow’s desperation to leave the death room, I was stiff. I moved like I was in a dream, towards the door. I looked back one last time and I said as loud as I could (he was deaf as a post) “I’ll always love you,” and again he murmured something, and I know he knew I did.

People were crying, then, as I walked out of the care home. Some of them wanted to hug me. Alas, the numbness had sealed my heart once more and all I said was, “Don’t call me. Please, I can’t take it. Call someone else.”

I didn’t cry for hours, until I was sitting in the bath later that night, my phone a bomb once again, waiting, waiting, my heart rushing the seconds as it raced. Then, I fucking screamed. I choked on my grief and my panic, begging God to let my grandad die while already falling into the void his soul was leaving in its wake.

The next day, nothing happened, and the next, nothing. He was dying now of thirst, fitting from dehydration. Give him the fucking morphine, we said.

Then, on the morning of 17^th of August, I was dreaming I was flying. Over the park and Ashbury Drive and Hillside School. I awoke suddenly to the slamming of my bedroom door. It has never done this before, and my anxiety was now so bad that I was immediately in fight or flight. I think, now, that he had come to tell me himself that he had done as I’d said was best, and to check on me one last time on his way to Nannie. Minutes later, Auntie Dawn called me. The words “he’s gone, Charlotte” barely even registered at the time but now they are like a brain worm eating away at me every day.

You see, I didn’t even know what I was going to write about this afternoon, only that I wanted to write, and yet here we are. This brain worm masquerading as a thread is the one I have pulled out. Hopefully things will get easier, now.

Love,

Char

xxx