by Diane Langford

short fiction

Distracted by the noticeboard outside a Unitarian Chapel,  Muriel shuffles her walking-frame closer.  In a few moments, a gathering advertised as The Death Café, will take place inside. Somehow, it’s a sign. The shock of her daughter’s death has diminished her. Daughters are supposed to bury their mothers, not the other way round, unless, of course, you’re Joan Didion … and even then. Of course, she’s familiar with the stages of grief, and is galloping through them like a wild stallion. Denial hit long before her daughter actually ceased to be. Grief is indivisible after all.  Dividing grief into stages is a western obsession her daughter had told her. ‘Another example of a colonial mind-set … labelling, categorising.’

Grief is not a pebble inside a jar to be taken out and put inside a larger jar, then, a few months later, put inside an even larger jar, until it’s comparatively smaller, as a bereavement circle leader had suggested. Even if one’s perspective changes day to day, that’s nothing to do with pebbles in jars. Grief is constant, intense stress. You’ll go mad if you can’t relieve the pressure: petty hatred of people going about their carefree daily lives, having a laugh, making inane remarks, ‘She’s in a better place,’ ‘At least she’s no longer in pain,’ or the random acquaintance competing for the title of chief mourner.

Amongst her daughter’s writings was a memoir she was still working on two weeks before her death,

‘As a child, even until my 40s, hell, even now, I kicked back against what felt I was wrong, unhealthy, unjust – and felt it was received with disdain and I was naughty and therefore bad. Many of these feelings of injustice, even disgust, I could not articulate. However, I just knew something was not OK. This kick back was towards family, white and middle class friends, teachers at school, work ‘colleagues’ and most even to myself as internalised shame. As an adult in their 50s, red flags wave everywhere, especially on social media. Things other people find cute or pleasing grind my gears, not because I am a ‘bitch’ (I am a bitch), but because they contribute to erasure, dilution, white supremacy and even occupation. I see BPOCs doing it often too.

When studying herbal medicine, it felt alien and unsafe in the form taught at university, within my classroom setting, the teachers, students (one who said “go back to where you come from if you don’t like it here,” but loved doing partner work with me to get good grades), the approach to learning, curriculum content building and time-table. Nothing was contextualised in terms of the legacy of trauma, theft and colonialism.’[i]

Here comes guilt, a visceral ache specific to her relationship with her daughter. The IDF and the GPO, even John Lewis and Marks and Spencer had combined to pile pressure on the two of them while her daughter was dying. The Royal Mail disrupted the handwritten correspondence they’d started after the deadly diagnosis, when they’d thought she had another year or two. After the first round of chemo, Muriel had returned home, out of London. Her daughter wrote by hand, in laboured, spindly handwriting, nothing like her normal hand, distinctive as a fingerprint. Twice, on consecutive weeks, tracked envelopes, containing spontaneous, free writing about their feelings, how her daughter wanted to be memorialised, her musings on her last wishes, disappeared into the maw of the Royal Mail, on one occasion arriving soaked in rainwater and pulverised. On another occasion, the envelope was torn open and completely emptied of contents.

Society was crumbling at the same time as her daughter’s vital organs were failing. When the once-mighty Royal Mail cannot be relied upon to deliver a personal letter, we can no longer rely on rights and norms, the rule of law, national treasures to function. How do you complain to the Royal Mail? To make a claim for a refund if a tracked item is not delivered, you must do it on line, a time-consuming process that entails a neat Catch-22. You have to apply within 10 days. Her tortured letters took more than 10 days, one of them a month, before boomeranging back onto Muriel’s doormat via the ‘Return to Sender’ system. Ergo, she was out of time.

Dear Royal Mail Complaints Team, I’m disappointed and outraged by the negligence with which Royal Mail has handled my mail on two consecutive weeks, failing to delivery a special delivery item and mutilating another. Losing a personal, private notebook that was enclosed in the mutilated letter caused incalculable distress to myself and my daughter, receiving end-of-life care for breast cancer. My letters are a weekly support for her at this terrible time for both of us …

A (quote) nice (unquote) man, tall, full head of hair, stylishly casual in a button-down sports shirt, steps up to greet her as she moves, shakily, as if sliding on ice, into the vast coolness of the chapel with its gloriously gaudy, stained glass and vaulted ceiling. Oh no, Mister, the postal service wasn’t set up so you and I could send each other a letter, she wanted to tell him, it was part of the infrastructure necessary for the development of capitalism. The democratic postal service was an inadvertent by-product.  For a relatively small sum of money, anybody in the country, regardless of status, could send a letter to another person regardless of who they were.

Her daughter’s death has forced her to re-evaluate events that took place over seventy years ago, decades before her daughter’s birth. Family history intrudes into her consciousness in new ways. A vivacious, peroxide-haired aunt, her mother’s sister, chain-smoking Topsy (real name Violet) Townsend, maker of fashionable hats in Auckland, Aoetearoa (New Zealand), suddenly became ill. The telephone rang in the middle of the night in her family’s government house (kiwi terminology for social housing). Her 12 year-old self was terrified by her parents’ sombre tones, heightening her overwhelming fear of death. Later, when her maternal grandmother came to visit, she’d listened, invisible, as the adults talked about Topsy’s horrible end. Her grandmother, called Pansy, although her actual name was also Violet, had nursed Topsy for the few months that she survived after her diagnosis. Topsy had became emaciated and confused, her belly swollen and her limbs like sticks.

            Her grandmother had lifted Topsy, bodily, in and out of the bath without any help even though she was an old woman. She’d changed her first-born’s clothes, tried to get her to eat and drink. At the hospital bedside days before her death, Topsy married the gay man with whom she’d lived, serving as each other’s ‘beards’.

 Her aunt’s death was impactful, even though she’d only gleaned the import of it from furtive eavesdropping. When she’d started primary school, aged 5, Topsy had given her a beautiful dress to wear on her first day, but her mother had said it was too pretentious and expensive for school. Other children would think she was ‘putting on airs,’ if she wore it to school, her mother said. The dress was stowed away in the airing cupboard, never worn. In young Muriel’s mind, Topsy was cast as subversive and exciting, breaking the stultifying grip of perceived conventions that a 12 year-old child can only dimly understand.

Now, the ‘nice,’ tall man is taking her by the elbow, guiding her across ancient flagstones to where a group of people are sitting around white Formica tables that have been pushed together. Further off, others hover by a tea urn, collecting small cakes on pretty china plates, cakes and plates donated by Friends of the Chapel, according to her guide. Two nervous facilitators try to get everyone to sit down. Two youngish men, after filling their plates, are leaving a trail of crumbs as they saunter over, scraping their chairs on the exposed flagstones, one of them staring fixedly at his phone all the while. The other, with thinning hair and a strange Chaplinesque face, fiddles with the clasp of a designer rucksack with one hand while biting the nails of the fingers of his other hand. ‘Poor thing,’ she thinks, ‘he must have lost someone very close.’

The fellow with the phone places it on a collapsible tripod gizmo and tunes in a pair of wireless headpieces. Fishing in the commodious pockets of a long, black overcoat, although it is a hot day and he is pinkly sweating, he produces a packet of tobacco and a cigarette-making machine and proceeds to make one neatly rolled cigarette after another. Although she’d given up smoking over 30 years earlier, the craving suddenly returns with a vengeance. He too must be mourning somebody close, she thinks. Poor thing!

            Her daughter’s face had become emaciated like the starving children of Gaza, her limbs like sticks, her belly distended, her feet and legs jumbo-sized. So painful was every part of her body, the hospice staff winced when they had to touch her and hear her involuntary screams. When she was settled for the night, hiccups would begin. Not like normal hiccups. A rasping intake of breath, like whooping cough, followed by a peculiar high-pitched, whistling, out breath.

 Only a few weeks before her death, Muriel had been with her daughter to see the oncologist at the hospital near Euston. ‘You’re still here?’ he said, gaily. ‘You’re supposed to be dead.’

‘Another joker,’ she said.

‘You’ve done so well,’ he said, ‘our longest living outlier.’ Outlier is what they call someone who outlives their prognosis. ‘I’m sorry, but we’ve come to the end of the line, there are no treatments left. We’ve tried everything. Nothing is working. In any case, your body can’t take any more.’

‘I’ll go on a trial,’ she said.

‘You’re not eligible. You have tumours everywhere.’

‘But they’re not all active,’ she said.

‘That makes no difference.’

Her daughter’s theory was that you have to be heartless and inhumane to be an oncologist. To sit there, day after day, telling people that they’re going to die soonish.  And still she lived on, squelching around in a pair of fleece-lined crocs, her legs and feet horribly swollen. Nobody would stand up for her on the bus. She would stand, sometimes calmly telling fellow passengers, ‘I’ve got tumours in my spine, and you are asking me to stand? See how swollen my belly is? I’m not pregnant, I’m dying.’

Why did she have to keep reminding us?

‘           I’m dying, mum,’ she’d say, frequently.

            ‘I know, I know.’

A facilitor explains the rules. We are not here to expound our theories about life, death and the universe, we’re here to listen to each other respectfully and with compassion. ‘My colleague and I will guide you through the process. We use egg-timers to ensure that each participant has an equal chance to speak. But there’s no pressure to speak at all and when the conch is passed to you, you can choose to pass it on. Turn over the egg timer when you’re ready to speak. Or, if you wish, you may use your few minutes to sit in respectful silence, thinking about your loved one.’

Muriel doesn’t know whether she’ll have the strength to speak. If she does, will she be able to stop?

A man is talking. His nails are bitten to the quick and his fingers double-jointed. His thinning hair is combed over and he has a Hitler moustache. His eyes, ringed with eyeliner, are like a budgerigar’s. The combed over strands of hair resemble the linear markings across the bird’s head. When he smiles, he looks strangely like Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator. His uptight emanations as he fiddles with the straps of his designer man-bag, are hypnotic.  Despite his foetal posture and jittery demeanour, he’s first to speak. ‘The date of our death is foretold when we’re born. One individual death is the equivalent of multiple deaths. All the hysterical talk we are hearing at present about genocide and mass killing is redundant. There will always be wars between the strong and the weak. It is nature’s way of keeping down the population. We have to take emotion out of the equation.’

His clipped, posh tone continues after the egg timer empties, so he turns it over again and his nasal little voice resumes. The facilitator to my left turns a panicked face towards a woman, like Muriel, also in her eighties. ‘Penelope, would you like to say something about your experience? Tell us why you’ve come along today.’

 ‘I’ve enjoyed coming to the chanting group, so I thought I’d try this group,’ Penelope says. ‘It sounded interesting and gave me a framework to think about my situation.  I’ve been living in the same house for 50 years. I’ve collected many beautiful objects and knick-knacks that have sentimental value. My late husband, who passed away twenty years ago, was a musician. My attic is full of boxes of scores, all marked up with his musical notations. I can’t bear to throw things away, but I know I need to downsize. My children have families of their own, they need the space more than I do. I’m going to move into a lovely space where the late, great editor, whose name escapes me, lived. Diana … There’s a lovely garden and library …

Trigger warning: Muriel remembers something her daughter had written in a letter that had evaded the Royal Mail’s censorship-by-non-delivery … A writing exercise set by a kindly middle-class tutor, volunteering as part of a therapeutic programme for Stage Four cancer patients, ‘When you step into your garden, what do you see?’ To which her daughter had angrily responded, ‘What if you don’t have a garden? What if you’re living in a tower block, what if you’re in prison, what if you can’t take a step? What if you’re blind?”

Penelope is saying, ‘So much of our identity is embodied in material things. I’ve been thinking a lot about this a lot lately. Who will value these objects after I’m gone? Who will love them?’

Muriel’s daughter had accumulated a significant amount of stuff, amazing concoctions arrayed on shelves, flowers that had been dried in a dehumidifier, machines to laminate drawings, theses, essays, many handwritten. Boxes of materials for quilting, momentos of friends who’d gone before, pieces of jewellery, dozens of pairs of shoes and slippers, exquisite jackets and dresses that no longer fitted when her stomach and feet became swollen.

Next up, the crowd-pleaser. ‘That’s so interesting, I’m glad you’ve been able to talk about how you feel.’

Now the cigarette-roller is in possession of the egg-timer.  He rolls a couple more fags, as the sand trickles away, then says, dismissively, ‘Everyone has a pre-ordained date when they’re going to die, so why worry? It’s no biggie. When your number comes up, that’s it. Take emotion out of the equation. There’s nothing we can do, so just enjoy your life day to day.’  Apart from that, he doesn’t have anything to say though he’s timed out twice-over, keeping everyone’s attention on what he’s doing with his phone and the obsessive cigarette rolling.

The crowd-pleaser speaks, ‘That’s so deep, Nicollo.  My sister has been giving my mother and me a terrible time. She’s been going to all the Palestine demonstrations, every week for two years. We just don’t know what to do with her. She get’s so upset about what’s going on in Gaza. I agree with you so, so much, we have to learn to live with death, even when it’s on a mass scale. These things happen from time to time. It’s human nature.’

In the moment, Muriel responds rationally and calmly, recalling the wisdom of a child, her eight year-old great-grand-daughter, who’d asked why it was taking so long for her grandmother to be buried? ‘There’s a queue,’ her responsible adults replied. ‘  Ah, of course,’ the kid said, experiencing a light bulb moment.  ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Millions and millions of people die every minute, every second. And they all have to be buried!’

Muriel turns over her egg-timer and speaks calmly, ‘My personal anger and grief is compounded by the calculated genocide being inflicted on Palestinians.’ Turning to the crowd-pleaser she says, ‘You should be proud of your sister for going on the demos. That shows she has empathy with others, has the imagination to feel what they feel and wants to do something, to be with others who care, to show the people being massacred that it’s not happening in her name.’

Even though Muriel’s egg-timer is still emptying, the nail-biter cuts in, ‘Millions of deaths happen all the time, so there’s no point in getting obsessed with numbers. Anger is a personality flaw,’ he opined.  ‘Anything that happened yesterday is irrelevant. Live in the now. Be happy.’

The egg-timer has depleted and still she hasn’t told them how the obscenely wealthy woman who lived next-door to her daughter, callously pursued the felling of a tree in her daughter’s yard and was supported by the social housing landlord, over and above her daughter who’d received the certificate from her GP which meant she officially had six months to live; how the landlord was obliged to put her in the category of vulnerable, but a whole campaign had to be waged to get them to do it. Instead they harassed her continually about the fucking tree.

Her rage intensifies as she thinks of the Marks and Spencer security guy who chased her daughter down the road, insisting on looking in her empty bag because she’d left the store without buying something. The sight of the M&S prawn sandwiches had made her nauseous. He’d tried to wrench the bag from her grip. She refused to let go and fought back. The story was reported in The Camden New Journal … ‘Cancer gran attacked by security guard … ’

John Lewis refused to install a new refrigerator at her daughter’s flat because they’d only sent one person who couldn’t manage the stairs on his own. She needed a fridge to chill her chemo, painkillers and steroids. John Lewis, never knowingly under-sold, took money from her bank without delivering the goods. It took weeks to sort, despite Muriel’s pleas on her daughter’s behalf.

Returning to the present, she puts her hand inside the pocket of her jacket where her fingers encounter a foil packet containing shrooms that her daughter asked her to administer when the pain became unbearable. They’d left it too late. At the end, her daughter was receiving sustenance through a tube, unable to swallow.

 ‘May I exchange a small packet of magic shrooms,’ she whispers to the fellow who advised her to live in the now and be happy, ‘for one of your beautifully-made cigarettes?’

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[i] Extract from Radical Herbal by Claudia Manchanda (publication pending)