Guilt and envy

There are some rooms I remember better than others in the various houses I have lived in. These are the rooms that make a home from a house. I scarcely remember the hall and stairway that I ran through to escape on that awful day. In fact I have trouble remembering accurately which house I was in when I was told the news that my father had died.

On the same day the year before, my grandmother had died and it was left to my uncle to tell me and my brothers, in the kitchen of the house we then lived in – my first home. Not long afterwards my Dad had the stroke that forced us from that home to find security in the shop with Uncle and Aunty.

It must have been in the living room behind the shop that Uncle told us about Dad – the poor sod had drawn the short straw again. I still confuse in my mind the places where this task that he performed happened.

I remember that I raced out of the room and up to my bedroom through an unlit hall and up a dusky stairway. It didn’t occur to me that if I had carried on at the top of the stairs, instead of u-turning to the bedroom I shared with both my brothers, that I would have arrived at his bedroom where he had died in the night.

I lay on the bottom bunk and cried. I’ve no idea how long I was there. I remember it as hours and I was on my own. To this day I don’t know where my brothers got to, and I have never asked them.

Dead. Such a short word. Abrupt. Hard. So appropriate for sudden death that it’s almost onomatopoeic. Maybe people who die slowly with chronic illness shouldn’t be allowed to use the word. They don’t deserve to be ‘dead’. They don’t deserve the simple sound which ends their lives like a full stop at the end of a sentence. They take too long about it; they ‘pass away’ or maybe ‘have died’ but ‘dead is just not right. Let them have the triple full stop …

For almost a year, as I remember it, Dad had struggled to adjust to the stroke. He walked awkwardly now, dragging his right leg and using a walking stick which he would have preferred in his right hand which hung limp beneath his limp right arm. He hated his disability and was impatient with it, as he was with those around him who found it hard to cope with an irascible invalid. Still, his pride made him persist in his efforts to overcome the effects, to learn left handed writing and so on. But he never spoke clearly again. His struggle was in vain. A second stroke within a month of Christmas and he was dead.

I lay on the bed. Did I drift off to sleep? Is that why it feels like hours that I was there? Uncle hadn’t helped, or rather he had tried to but he was clumsy. What do you say to people who haven’t yet reached teenage and lose a parent? He told us he would try to be a father to us from now on. I was so angry. How dare he? How could he? But my grief was not the grief of injustice that can’t be righted, nor even at the loss of my father. It was guilt. Regret at not having the chance to say sorry.

Such a small incident the day before when my twin and I had been fighting. Dad called me into his bedroom next door to ours to tell me off. I wonder why I had to listen to the way he said it rather than what he was saying? His speech difficulty made him sound like a wound down gramophone playing a foreign language record. I laughed, not out loud, but a sort of nervous giggle. He lost his temper. It was the last time I saw him, and he had sent me away.

Forty years later I discovered my twin’s guilt – that he had not cried at all. The past cannot be changed – yet still I am haunted by this incident that the lofty arrogance of hindsight that tells me I could have or should have avoided, and I envy his dry eyes.