Wonderers Heart

Put the statement “If there’s anything I can do” on that same list (see previous post) of things not to say to someone who has just had someone close to them die.

From the day he left, and for the first few weeks the same offer was made so often it became an almost continuous refrain. It was made sincerely by well intentioned people who don’t know what else to say, let alone how to help. They whispered that “if there’s anything I can do……..” that all I needed do is ask. It’s the customary thing to say to someone suffering a trauma and it’s not enough. I wanted more from people than offers of anything. I wanted help, specific life saving actions. Resuscitation requires effort and I drowned in words and offers of sympathy.

Defeated by the question my response was just as vapid “I wish there was something I could ask you to do, that there was something you could do…” and I smiled to indicate appreciation, that’s was barely felt, and trying to reassure, “there’s nothing to be done…”

I wished the situation was that simple that I might have been able to reach out to those who shared this loss by suggesting something meaningful they could do by way of consolation. What could anybody do? I was at a loss to know what to ask for, that there might have been some magical action that would have made a difference. I always promised to let them know. “If I think of something I’ll ask ” I promised. I didn’t ask, unable to think of anything to ask for.

I was too disoriented to identify what might help, not strong enough to be able to ask for help and anyway didn’t believe that anything would help.

Oh I just remembered my little brother, C. Robin, ignored my pleas for him not to drop everything and dropped everything to come interstate and be here in the days Mottsu was missing, and then found…C. Robin was by my side during days worse than I could have imagined.

He was brilliant when he didn’t ask and just did…

Then he uttered ‘that’ phrase one day, in the stretch between finding Mottsu’s body and his funeral, C. Robin asked “if there’s anything I can do….”.

There was something and it immediately sprung to mind, he could clear the leaves from the gutter at the back of the house. That gutter was a nightmare when it rained, and water spilled onto the house and into the walls. Water flowed back from the gutter across the roof and the sky-light in the kitchen would drip. The twig filled gutters were a problem. They were a problem for C. Robin too, he raised his eyebrows with disbelief. The gutters were the thing he could do? He expected something different, he thought I would have asked him to do something ‘serious’. Fortunately I convinced him that blocked gutters were not frivolous, and he did clear them. My hero…

If there’s anything you can do for someone who is grieving, do it.

“Widow, widow, you’re a widow” we’d taunt our mother, playfully. She would chase us around the table waving the wooden spoon, an insincere threat, laughing, at once offended and amused.

Widow was a meaningless word to my brother and sister and I. We were young, still in primary school. We thought it might be rude, we knew it described an undesirable state for a woman. “She’s a widow.” The words were spoken in solemn tones and uttered as a complete statement. Apparently it said everything about a woman and needed no further embellishment. Without context we hoped it was it was rude, cheeky more than coarse.

“She’s a widow.” my mother would say in a knowing serious way that excluded us from understanding it more. So we called our mother a widow, hoping it was naughty and thinking it was not naughty enough to be a punishable offence.

“Widow, widow” we’d call tempting fate, but not knowingly calling on fortune to curse her with widowhood. Did we summon my fate, conjuring up my widowhood with childish taunts? We didn’t anticipate the loss that lay in the distant future or the unspeakable loneliness of being widowed. We couldn’t have…

Twice, in different houses in different suburbs, Mottsu and I had a widow for a neighbour. Mary and Olga, even now, I recall them as one archetypal widow, each with her buttoned-up hand knitted cardigan, tweed skirt, thick heavy ankles and fur trimmed slippers warming bunion afflicted feet.

Each had lost her husband more than 30 years before the happy couple I was a part of, moved in next door. Each felt compelled to disclose her widowhood in our first neighbourly over-the-fence conversation. “Hello I’m a widow”, it couldn’t have been revealed as baldly as that. Memory plays tricks and husbandlessness might have been stated almost that simply.

Was it a claim on respectability, a statement of loneliness, or just a fact that defined them in the world?

I was sad for both Olga and Mary, a little haunted by our widowed neighbours. Frightened for myself? “Could you imagine me living for 30 years after your death?” I asked Mottsu, disquieted “How lonely I would be?” It was almost too horrible to contemplate and yet we talked about death and the dread of being left behind, each expressing a wish not to be the one left alone, both hoping to go first perhaps held in the arms of the other (ha – wishful thinking that was).

I’ve invested in top-brand ultra-concentrated, photo-ageing preventive skin care and high heels, actually they’re a little low to be real high heels but higher than sensible widow-shoes. Its part of the disguise, I don’t want to be recognised as a widow, but ultra-ultra treatment cream with a scientifically developed delivery system isn’t enough. I’m sure the wear and tear of grief gives me away. The unattractiveness of loneliness is not readily concealed. I feel messy and incomplete, tears spill out uninvited and unexpected. In my lowest moments I’m unravelled and fraying at the edges.

In the criminal justice system a life sentence is 15 years of jail. If I live as long or Mary or Olga my windowed state will stretch across more than two life sentences.

Now I’m the widowed neighbour of the happy couple next door, who hates herself when she gets this self-pitying erk, erk, erk, argh blaaah… despises feeling like an incomplete widow…

A long time after Mottsu’s suicide I looked across the room and saw my Statler egg cup peeping from the cupboard. I mean I often looked across the room, not just this day, and with the door ajar I should have glimpsed two egg cups. On this day there was just one egg cup. Statler solo?

Puzzling. Statler without Waldorf. Where was Waldorf?

I’ve searched only to confirm he is missing. I have no memory of losing Waldorf, I can only think he must have leapt from the cupboard, springing into a free-fall, bouncing on the bench, before shattering on the floor. Don’t ask me how I missed that spectacular performance. Don’t ask me why he stepped over the edge, if that’s what my egg cup did.

Statler and Waldorf, curmudgeons maybe, and a pair absolutely. Each only half an act without the other, much like Mottsu and me. In cahoots, each siding with the other, we could poo-poo and rail against popular opinion with the best. We shared outlooks and agreed about what we disagreed with. One rarely laughed without the other chortling too.

Wherever Waldorf went, however Waldorf is now, it is Statler’s welfare that weighs on my heart. I know the loneliness of being one half of a pair and left behind, trying to reconcile with an incomprehensible loss.

Even some years later I am engulfed in abandonment that began with astonishment and subsequently manifests as panic and anxiety on occasions, mostly it’s a resigned dullness.

I’m stricken with lonesomeness.

These days it is me and Statler together, both of us forlorn, alone, and lonesome.
That’s why (in part) I have finally come to writing this down…

“Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we dont know what it is. What a way to live.
Thats why I finely come to writing this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome.” Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker