Hallmark - Flash Fiction

Happy Birthday Son I wrote in the card, echoing the precast gnomic message already imprinted both front and inside, wondering how many more occasions of just such cards I would be privileged. 

Looking forward to sharing so many more wonderful days with you oh how hollow does that sentiment sound to me?  

I hope you enjoy the present and that you get lots of use out of it. “What present Mum? Where’s the present? What possible use could it be to me, whatever it is?” I’ll just put it with the others. But it changes the room I suppose. 

Suppose I could have written many happy returns. Though there won’t be any, happy or otherwise. Returns on what I wonder? On investments? Well that’s gone bust. A college fund foundered on the rocks. No returns of this day as it was intended. Conceived. As I conceived it. When I conceived you. Just am annual return of this utter melancholy. But of course it’s not restricted to just one day a year. Anyway I can’t change it now, it’s in indelible ink. More indelible that the flimsy tissue of the human body’s fabric. 

I tore the card up into confetti sized pieces. I would have to go and buy another one. When you were young, we used to make cards together for your little friends. So I could always make you one by my own hand. Since you are eternally frozen in your age. 

I don’t suppose Hallmark make an “Unhappy Deathday” card. It’s not clear who U should send it to, you, or me… 

Thresh - Flash Fiction

I wrap myself in the bathroom towel. Either it’s grown or I’ve shrunk. We’ve have, however, both gone saggy. If it’s expanded, it hasn’t increased its absorbent surface area any. The terry pile had long gone, but now even the frayed bobbling has been worn away to leave a thin fabric that cannot wick the water from the guttered wrinkles of my skin. But I can hardly fault the towel since it has rendered long years of faithful service. Though in that time it has rubbed out all colour from my body hair. Of course I know that not to be true. The hairs have blanched after years of shadowed eclipse beneath clothes. I know that not to be true either. I am not a plant requiring chlorophyl for photosynthesis. Though hair sprouts from my ears like vine tendrils. 

My fingers scrape the stubble on my face like a violin pizzicato. A symphonic rasp. Scratchy, like a recently threshed wheat field. Without the threshing. You always insisted I was clean shaven before any kiss. A reasonable request and an unconditional act of devoting myself to you. But now I can indulge my loathing of the razor. I have neglected to throw the can of foam away. I wonder if it’s solidified inside. Or evaporated for that matter. 

I have a different teeth cleaning regimen now. For a new set of dentures. But they pinch my receding gums, I don’t think they’re the right dimensions for my mouth. You could have helped sort that out for me. You always resolved life's ill-fittings. Dealing fearlessly with those in authority who always intimidated me. I leave them soaking in solution over night. My unstayed cheeks pucker inwards, as if in permanent anticipation of a kiss that will never issue. 

We used to turn the mattress every six months or so. Marked it on the calendar. A sort of anniversary. Flipping it was a two man job. For one man and one woman. I can’t do it on my own. Don’t even need a double any more of course. So I just sag further into its recess which dwarfs me whole. Nonetheless it’s hardly womblike. I shiver in its embrace. I was further confronted with the black spots on my side of the mattress, exposed every time I stripped the bed linen to wash it. So I have ceased laundering the sheets. They’re either dead bugs or their aborted eggs. Either way they are nightmarish. We were zealous about the mattress and the linen, but never the infestation. It always seemed to be on my side of the bed whichever way we turned the mattress. Yet it was you who died of a respiratory disease. Maybe I had become immune with them just under my head always turned to their side to sleep. Maybe I should have exposed you to them for some seasoning against their spores. Perhaps it was just the fetid breath from inside me, transfused to you through our kissing that did for you. 

Contingency - Drabble

The terminally ill child bears her fate with far greater acceptance and equanimity than her mother, who after all, has spent her longer lifespan neglecting the import of her own attendant mortality. The child has had less time to become beholden to the reasons for life, or make the deals with herself as to why it might be held to be valuable. Her thread is not as extended as that of adults. Her sense of permanence less entrenched. Her mother had calculated to plug the void of meaning, by rearing a child. And now that stratagem was collapsing around her.

More Tea Vicar? - Short Story

“May I come in?”

“Good grief, is it time for my Last Rites already? I haven’t finished my cuppa. Or my morphine for that matter”

“I’m an Anglican vicar not a Roman Catholic priest”

“Good, because I’m not one for confessing, death bed or no death bed. Besides, De Quincey has already said it all for me. So, you’re a representative from the church of compromise and sequestration set up by Henry Tudor are you?” 

“Yes, I understand you were a former professor of History”

“Hey less of the ‘former’ if you don’t mind!” 

“My apologies. Do you give lectures from your bed?”

“Tell me vicar why are you here exactly? I mean we’ve never even met one another before. So why now? What’s the occasion I wonder? What could it possibly be about my current plight that draws you here? Could this be a getting to know you session, the first and last of its kind? So you can gather some notes for the eulogy, just to infuse it with enough singular detail to make it sound like we were personally acquainted. Thus further voiding an already empty ritual”

“My my, you have a very dim view of religion”

“Since my cataracts and glaucoma I have a dim view of everything vicar. It’s not enough that your putative god built in such obsolescence into our body’s cell machinery. He had to  supplement our enervation with all these other afflictions. Built in his image? I pity him... if he actually existed”

“The human condition is indubitably a puzzling one. We’ve spent millennia trying to solve these conundrums and yet here we still are. Here I still am, a minister and adumbrator of a religious faith. It must hold some validity, or at least people believe it does”

“Oh yes, very scientific. We historians laboured under similar illusions. Crediting our academic discipline proceeded upon scientific standards of proof, of supporting evidence. But you know what? I lost my faith in it. Turns out history is merely the value judgements of mankind on past events. Kings and Prime Ministers may legislate and act and mass movements may make their moves, but it is only us academics and chroniclers who rule on them. What should be accorded weight and what should be dismissed. I thought I could change the world by reflecting great insights into human behaviour, so that we could learn from the past. But here’s something I comprehended from the scientists across the High Table at dinner. The past may keep repeating itself, but you never know which bit of the past will repeat and when. As with the Butterfly Effect, the starting conditions of each epoch under comparison are different, so the outcomes will be too. Therefore I grasped I couldn’t save mankind and by the end of my career, I knew I couldn’t even save my students either. And now with my failing body I discover I can’t even save my family? There, will you put that crisis of faith into your sermon at my funeral? Might prove instructive to others...”

“No, while we don’t paint paragons of people, we do try and keep the last and lasting impression of them positive”

“Like I say, a meaningless ritual. I suppose I have left it too late to change my will and organise something different to mark my passing. Like a New Orleans Jazz Funeral, though I can’t stand jazz. Or a viking boat pyre, though I suppose smoke alarms and health and safety will put the kyybosh on that. I quite fancy the idea of a sky funeral, but we lack for indigenous vultures in our perishing climate...”

“The Christian funeral ritual is as much for the bereaved left behind as the send off for the corpse wherever it is aheaded. it plays an important function in the mourners coming to terms with the reality of death”

“I admire your self-surety I really do. But then I’m the one with the greater question mark hanging over him over the near future. Tell me, when you confront the realities of the world armed only with your good book of homilies and vague imperatives from which you elicit your answers to the human condition, does it fill you joy or despair? After all even Christ had misgivings while up on the Cross, Thomas was so sceptical they fashioned it into a soubriquet for him. Moses beat the rock with his staff because he had a moment of vacillation in his conviction. See, I may not have the detailed answers, but at least I am released from the bondage of blind faith, of doubt and despair. Because I accord the cruel, cosmic joke of existence. Of coming into life, of making attachments and then having them snatched away from you by death. All because of biochemistry’s drive towards entropy. Mind you there are those proponents who argue that even those precious attachments are only an outcome of biochemistry too, the blind imperative to pass on our DNA”

“You live on in the hearts of those who love you”

“Until they too pass on and no one remains to light the candle for me. All our mouldering hearts full of unrequited love, because there’s no one left to meet it”

“See that sounds like a very bleak worldview that can only lead to despair”

“The despair actually only comes at this particular juncture. I’m sorely testing the love of my wife and children because I am checking out of this world before them and abandoning them”

“You cannot be held responsible for the failings of the mortal body”

“Who then? Only your god could be an alternative candidate. But I can’t descry him, seeing as I don’t believe in his existence. But it’s a particularly cruel twist of fate that means any last days I eke out under my condition, can only be secured by these infusions of morphine to dull the pain from numbing my mind. And I know there will come a point where I slip into a state where I cannot medicate myself, so my poor benighted wife will have to do it. She and she alone will hold the power of my life in her hands. She could determine at any time to supply me the terminal dose so that it’s morphine that shuts me off rather than the disease. What terrible power that is to wreak on a loved one? That’s why perhaps I say my imminent passing is a dereliction of love. To place such an unreasonable burden upon them”

“But the corollary of that is to wish your wife dead before you. That could be misconstrued as selfish thinking”

“Any two historians would give you divergent views on that one. Do you still credit that’s how your god set things up? Or is it more likely to be the result of blind forces?”

“You have your beliefs and I have mine”

“Bad faiths both... I’m sorry where are my manners? More tea vicar? Or would you prefer a touch of the harder stuff?”

“Well I wouldn’t say no”

“Here you go”

“What is it? Scotch? Wow that’s bitter. Hold on a moment, that isn’t... Have you given me your flask of morphine by any chance?”

“I’m sorry vicar, my ailing sight you see. Can’t tell the difference”

“Should you be quaffing alcohol at the same time as morphine?”

“Don’t think either vice is going to make too much difference in the long run do you?” 

*

Postscript: The Funeral

It was a virtual stranger who officiated at the service. Whether this was a deliberate decision undertaken by the ecclesiastical body or not couldn’t be established. But suicide is still regarded as a sin and more so in a man of the cloth who has pledged himself to avoid such mortal sins. He was found dangling from the church rafters, hung by the length of his liturgical stole. The recipient of his last pastoral visit was unable to attend the funeral as he was bedbound. he was insensible of the whole matter, despite the gossip spreading beyond the parochial congregation through making the local news rag.

The Bereaved And The Bereft

It is a little remarked tragedy that several of the terminal illnesses that conduct a human spirit off this earth, also have the unfortunate tendency to reduce the full functioning of body and mind and return them to the state of the dependent infant. Just as we entered life with requirements of feeding, dressing, bathing and assisting with toilet by others, so can the days leading up to exiting this life be filled with the same physical functions beholden unto others.

This entails round the clock care, with most of the burden often falling upon the family. Especially if the dying person has requested to die at home. And such a fraught responsibility often opens up fissures within the family that just make the whole pressurised process unbearable.

When a child tends for their parent, it throws up many agonies. Firstly the life-long balance of the relationship is inverted. Seeing your forever powerful, protective and loving parent reduced to such impoverished powers just doesn't compute. The parent, unlike a spouse or even our own offspring has been there every single day of our own lives. Their passing cannot but leave a hole. Additionally it reflects upon your own mortality, for here ineffably confronting the child is the fate that befalls us all, if our own titan of a parent succumbs then what chance us? So our familiar and comforting realities are asunder. In our own dismay and incomprehension, often the soon-to be bereaved lash out, because they cannot process these emotions.

One natural fault line for these feelings to follow is the division of labour of care. Families are not democracies and utopias. They have inequitable resources, means, childcare, job responsibilities. Members may not even reside in the same city or country. We also possess different thresholds of what we can tolerate when it comes to physical human frailties. Some will happily clean up soil, whereas others simply cannot no matter how much they may wish to contribute. The burden will always fall disproportionately upon some shoulders more than others. And that is before you have considered the emotional inequalities, of how each sibling feels towards their parents.

They shouldn't, but very often parents have favourites. The first born; the youngest; the one often most overlooked in the middle, who the parent made sure to keep an eye out for; the one most like the parent; the one most different (my father favours the one of my twin sons who has inherited the fewest of our family genes, since he is full of self-loathing for his own appearance). Such little yet lingering resentments burst out at these times, if the near-bereaved start hurling accusations of not pulling weight. The charge that so and so is doing less, is often met with the gripe that the accuser was always the parent's favourite anyway.

I have to admit finding this hard to stomach. What are the reasons for caring for an ailing family member? Love is hopefully the sole drive. An unconditional one that you do it because you want to do it. In which case what does it matter how much or little other family members contribute to the care regimen? Of course it isn't always solely love that provides the motivation. It can be out of a sense of obligation, familial duty or even guilt. Less than ideal causes, ones in which the petty resentments can easily perch in amongst the crevices and erupt when it all gets too much, or is prompted during arguments with other family members.

We are only human. So to my mind, no one has the right to lambast any one else for what care they may or may not be contributing. We each can only do what we can do. Arguments and negative emotions during the parent's last days can be of no possible help whatsoever and make the process of grieving way harder. The family circle changes shape when a parent is removed by death. Surely the way to reconfigure and re-sutre the shape of the family in the aftermath is to permit each member to emerge with a clean sheet as soon as the care period has unfortunately ended. That petty resentments are not allowed to persist. That the family unites and accepts one another with unconditional love. That no one is to be judged, only re-embosomed. What better legacy for the passing parent to cede than a reunification?

I'm not saying it's easy and desperate raw emotions are flying around at such times. But if families could keep this aim in sight it may, just may help them to come to terms both individually and together with their awful loss.