One of my best friends died when I was 19. My father died when I was 20. I witnessed the last breath of both of them. I heard the death rattle. The rattle is aptly named, I think to myself whenever I hear the term.
I was reading an essay by Mayukh Sen, Grief Books*, which made the observation that many of us acquire grief books. A piece of writing that ferries us around through loss: allowing us to feel less alone.
Sen writes:
My father had been sick with lung cancer for three years, the final of the many illnesses I had seen disturb his body since I was a child. The inevitability of his loss did not suffer its blow. I was 25 when he died and I could count the people I knew who had endured the loss of a parent before that age on one hand. His loss felt unbearably cruel in a way I could not articulate. So I became cruel to the world in return. If a friend expressed sympathy in ways that felt incorrect to me, I killed them off, the excision a bid for self-preservation. Any generosity I had was reserved for those who had touched grief like, even strangers.
Myself, when my father died, I did not know a single friend my age who had lost a parent. I did not know other friends who had lost close friends either. And while I did not excise friends in the way Sen describes there were plenty of friends who I judged could not or did not understand the circumstances very well. Where as some others - strangers even - did understand.
For grief can be very singular and difficult if not impossible to share - although the willingness to share, can be a shared impulse. Still on that day, when I read that page - juggling the distractions of an autistic son bouncing along an overground train - I recognised a truth in the way I had used books as grief books. I recognised the genre of grief books he describes (cancer writing; the memoirs of grief, such as The Year Of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion). I felt for a few moments a spasm of grief and recalled the death moments of my friend and of my father. Moments that never truly leave me.
I’ve commented that there are events which occur when afterwards you feel changed. Perhaps changed enough to feel a different person. The first kiss, the first love; the first death of a loved one. That these seminal changes are hard, if not also impossible, to relate to people who have not experienced them.
My father found some comfort in reading what Sen describes as a genre of “cancer writing”. He read John Diamond* as he was dying of cancer. My father could relate to Diamond in a way he could not to us, with our lives ahead of us. Cathartic and sad every time my father read a new piece. Both losing an inevitable race at the same time.
I remember my early set of grief books being CS Lewis’ Grief Observed, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. I am not religious, but I still recommend people to CS Lewis - particularly if they have a Christian faith - today. I had grief food. Memories of grief food. Stodgy British puddings like jam Roly-Polys, bread and butter pudding, and spotted dick conjure my father’s joy and sweet tooth at such dishes. In my cupboard, I have an inexpensive and well used bowl from my dead friend. She would have been happy it has been so well used.
Grief books can come in all forms and shapes. Sen’s grief book became Five Morsels of Love by Archana Pidathala*
Sen:
Pidathala makes grief central to her work without overstating the systematic motivation. I marvel at her strength. “Every time we meet,” she writes of her and her cousins, “we reminisce about the morsels ammama would feed us and unanimously agree that we will never have or find the same taste in anything ever again.”
She lays bare the cool logic behind the impulse to cook in death’s shadow: death reminds us that we are lucky to be alive. To remain alive we must eat.
A sense of wonder pervades every page of Pidathala’s book. She is more concerned with joy than death. One gets the sense that cooking, and the act of writing about it, has taught her to live again.
At the end of the essay he writes:
“When my father died my two closest friends confessed that they were terrified. One didn’t know how she’d handle what the loss did to me because she never had a best friend who had lost a parent before. “Don’t worry,” the other reassured her, “it’s like we’ll get to meet a new person.”
…
But the inverse of my friends maxim holds true too: those of us who grieve may change ourselves but the world around us shifts.
...
I am now able to acknowledge that this cookbook was no diversion but rather a guidepost clarifying my grief. Maybe I’d have the will to write about it one day I told myself as I read over it over and over again the sound of my fathers voice dimming in my memory. So now I have.”
I often think about when I will write about my father’s death, my friend’s death. I’m starting to make a piece of theatre work around it. Sen made me think. And so now I have to.
*John Diamond’s obit in the Guardian (By Jay Rayner) starts: “The journalist, writer and broadcaster John Diamond, who has died aged 47, did not battle his illness bravely. Nor was he courageous in the face of death. He developed cancer and, despite treatment, it killed him.” Diamond was married to food writer, Nigella Lawson.
*Sen’s tweet about the essay collection, In the Kitchen, published by Daunt Books.
*The website of Pidathala’s book: five morsels of love