People say it’s the finality of death that they can’t handle. But what was tearing me apart was that I didn’t know where Aidan was. I mean, he had to be somewhere.
All his opinions and thoughts and memories and hopes and feelings, all the things that were unique to him, that made him a one-off human being—they couldn’t be just gone.
I understood that his Aidan-ness was no longer contained in his cremated body, but his personality, or spirit, or whatever you want to call it—it couldn’t be just snuffed out. There was too much of him to simply disappear: the way he didn’t like Catcher in the Rye when everyone else in the whole world did; the slightly goofy way he walked because one leg was a tiny bit longer than the other; the way he sang like the Smurfs when he was shaving. He was so vital and full of—yes, life—that he must be somewhere, it was just a question of finding him.
I still saw him in the street but now I accepted that it wasn’t him. I still read his horoscope. I still spoke to him in my head. I still e-mailed him and rang his cell phone, but I understood I wouldn’t hear back from him. But some days I’d forget he was dead. I mean, literally just for a moment or two, usually when I had come home from work in the evenings; suddenly I’d find that I was waiting for him to come in the door. Or something funny would happen and I’d think, Oh, I must tell Aidan that. And then I’d be overwhelmed with horror—I’d break out in a sweat and black spots would dance before my eyes—the horror that he’d been taken away. Removed from this earth, from this being alive business, and gone to a place where I could never track him down.
Until now, I’d always thought that the worst thing that could happen to anyone was if someone you loved abruptly disappeared.
But this was worse. If he’d been imprisoned or kidnapped or even done a runner, I’d have hope that he might eventually come back.
And my guilt was unendurable. His story had been cut off so brutally and prematurely, while I was still here, still alive and well and working and with everything to play for. His body had taken the full impact of the crash, so I felt that he had died in order for me to live and it was the most appalling feeling. Like I’d cheated him out of the rest of his life, and really, I felt it would have been better if I’d died, too, because I was too ashamed to live my life when he was dead.
I fantasized a lot about him still being alive. That somewhere, in a parallel universe, he hadn’t died—that the taxi had never crashed into us that day, that our lives had carried on smoothly, and we were blithely living out our allotted forty years or so together, unaware of the lucky escape we’d had, mercifully oblivious to all the pain we were being spared. I went into incredible detail in these fantasies—what we wore, what time we went to work, what we ate for lunch—and at night, when I couldn’t sleep, they kept me company.
But what about him? How was he feeling? I hated that he had to go through whatever he was going through, on his own, and I knew that he would be doing all he could to get in contact with me. We had lived in each other’s pocket, we had spoken and e-mailed ten times a day, we had spent every second of our spare time together, so that, wherever he was now, he’d be finding the separation terrible, too.
I would have given my life just to know that he was okay.
Where are you?
At the funeral, the priest had said a lot of guff about how Aidan had gone to “a better place,” but that was crap. Such crap that, at the time, I’d wanted to shout it out, but I was too bandaged and sedated and hemmed in by family members to manage to.
I hadn’t known any dead people before Aidan. The only other ones were my grannies and granddads and you’d expect them to die; they were old, it was right. But Aidan was young and strong and handsome and it was all wrong.
When my grandparents had died I’d been too young or hadn’t cared enough to wonder if they’d really gone to heaven (or hell—Granny Maguire was definitely a candidate for down below). Now I was being forced to think about an afterlife and the absence of any certainty was terrifying.
In my teenage years, I’d yearned for a connection with some sort of spiritual being. Not with the Catholic God I’d been brought up with, because that was just way too dull, anyone could have that (if they were Irish). But the vague all-purpose God of dreamcatchers and chakras and fringey skirts had caught my fancy. Especially because you could keep adding to it—Reiki, crystals, guarana; the list, as long as it was “spiritual,” was endless. Coincidences and anything remotely spooky thrilled me—anything that would make my life more exciting really. I taught myself to read tarot cards and I wasn’t bad at it; I liked to believe that that was because I was quite psychic, but looking back, I knew it was just because I’d read the instruction book and learned what the symbols meant and anyway most people only get their cards read because they want a boyfriend.
I’d knocked off the tarot cards some years back, but I’d never stopped believing in a vague “something.” If I didn’t get what I wanted—a job, a bus, a pair of jeans in the right size—I used to say that “it wasn’t meant to be,” as if there was a God, some sort of benign puppet master, with a story line for us all. One who cared about what we wore.
But now that my back was to the wall, now that it really mattered, I found I didn’t know what I believed. I didn’t believe Aidan was in heaven. I didn’t believe in heaven at all. I didn’t even believe in God. I didn’t not believe in God either. There was nothing to cling on to.
I got ready for work, I rang his cell phone like I did every morning, then in sudden frustration shrieked to the empty air, “Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?”
31
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Number twos!
Dear Anna,
I hope you are keeping well. Listen, it’s gone to hell here altogether, with the old woman and her dog. Since we came back from the Algarve there hadn’t been sign nor sound of her and would you blame us for thinking we had “shaken” her. But by the looks of things she was just “regrouping.” She was back with a vengeance this morning. She came early and made her dog do a “number two.” Your father stood in it on his way out to buy the paper and as you know he is not a man who is easily stirred to action but this has stirred him. He says we are going to “get to the bottom” of this. This will involve Helen and her “skills.” Luckily, she is very annoyed too and says she will do it for free. She says it’s one thing to have dog wee at your front gate but dog poo is a different matter entirely. Your loving mother,