March to March in a single year

March 2019

I begin by beginning the paperwork of death.

Registration is the easiest. Next, the funereal and financial. I meet state and private administration requirements as I can. I make telephone calls and follow up with letters, answering requests for this piece of paper or that document of proof.

I contact banks, cut cards into tiny shards of fingernail plastic and I organise piles of papers stretching back 30 years into mountains and mountains: save, shred, unsure.

Daily, I meet my duties with a dogged determination. Once, in indifference, that fixed and blinkered determination casually earned me the nickname Boxer, the loyal and stupid carthorse from Animal Farm. Boxer knows nothing but blind devotion, but it is to an unworthy cause: a cause that did not merit nor deserve his enduring dedication.

If you think I am fishing for sympathy after the death of a husband, father and man whose time I shared for thirty years, then spare it.

There is no nice sentiment for Boxer, and I want none for me.

What do we do with Boxer? We're simply invited to laugh at the old horse's death with grim recognition. Sent off to the glue factory, Boxer, when all is said and done, is just a horse doing what a horse is trained to do. Spare the emotion.

Use laughter instead. It suits me better.

If, at this time, you want to laugh, make it hollow. But now, in death, I am Boxer. The requirements of stupid steadfastness are needed now, more than ever, as I face the long days of work ahead.

Yet I would argue there is one important difference between Boxer and me. Call it what you will - reflection, speculation, self-knowledge, perhaps a gut instinct for self-preservation - I know there is one burden I cannot shoulder. The responsibility of talking; of telling others about the death; the mutuality that would be expected of me in the taking and giving of sympathies. It seems so polite, so organised and so formal, and all so pointless.

I know my first step forward then is to receive no kind emotion. If I am given kindness, it will blunt my purpose, make me drop the things I have to do, give me weaknesses and not strengths.

Then these duties I offload. I have no space in me for sympathising to the emotions of others. I have no emotions to offer in return. I cannot make anyone feel good about this moment in their lives when I am emptied in my own.

Emotions? I will save the variations of that force for later. Then, I will have the space and time to allow myself to enter its territory. I will feel what it is; I will walk its boundaries, tread the paths, cross into its lands. Then I will feel all the unevenness of that landscape to move through its places where I must diminish and grow and feel for those for whom I must pause and howl.

Close friends and family, they are the best. They ask me no questions and, for now, in this immediate vacuum of death, we can simply look at each other. We need not ask.

But some people, I cannot avoid. This person who has died took a part in many lives across this planet. A trawl of shocked commentary, remembrances, thoughts and responses are passed along chains of hands. A loving and capable collator gently passes me a bundle of papers.

I know the best to the worst. I could run my fingers along the edges of all the feelings I am handed; the soft and gentle slopes and thoughtful smoothings; the dips and graceful bends; the tiny slices of razor edges hidden under water mixed with honey; the sharp abutting inclines of brief words and the cold, hard surfaces thrown into shadow by empty silence.

I receive genuine, heart-touching sorrow from India. From Brazil, warmth and lively remembrance. From China, careful expressions of sorrows, laid to rest with the final words on an ancient wound. I am force-fed a letter from France - the writer filled with earnest regret, now makes the best of things  and hopes my response will bring about their better state. I resolve never to answer. I bat away the online outpourings of wails and weepings from Takako, she who will never be consoled at the absence of her best friend and the loss of the person who was the most important person in all her life. And the message from Wai Ying I return, equal in cold cruelty as the perfunctory message I receive.

But at this point, we are both motivated by anger. It is an ill-matched battle. This is the one emotion I feel. It permits nothing else. Anger is mine; it is my territory. Here I command the greater powers. Anger is what I know first and best. When death opened a new door into life, my anger became so intense, I could have destroyed everything; I could have torn down your buildings, smashed cities, watched the earth, burn. Facing what I faced, at this point, to my mind, your suffering was as nothing; it was justice.

There is a single impediment to the purity of anger, and it is knowledge of consequence. I know now I stood in a dangerous place. While I felt my anger had a right that I had never felt before, that same sense of justice in my own anger caused part of me to pause. There would be that point, when I had done all, destroyed, ripped apart, smashed you into atoms, I would need to stand and say, fully and completely, hand on my heart, why I acted as I did.

Fortunately, in the midst of it all, I am tested. My daughter, who shares now the same sense of injustice brought about by the visceral carvings of death, simply returns to school.

She is newly aged 18, but her ten hours make her an older, wiser woman. She has seen death work; watching how it lingers and toys and plays and sucks away the last rattle of breath. Then, in a second, it's gone, simply upped and gone, indifferent to those who remain behind, exhausted and betrayed.

But the school, three days on from her grieving time, finds a fight, and excludes her.

Their reasoning is risible, and I laugh. I clap into the air and hoot my delight. I am proud of her. I am a proud, proud mother, made as whole as if she had run the race, received the medal and earned the certificate to stand as a testimony to the end of our times, marking her brilliance and shining example.

The school has excluded her on vague grounds that her behaviour is unreasonable. Despite my warning to them, I discover they have no practical bereavement policy. The staff do not seem to know that they have here a young woman who, ten days earlier, watched her father die.

She refused to talk with people who were unreasonable; she declined to engage with a man commanding her with military numbers to stand and move; she ignored authority when authority began to shout. The best of the letter - it will forever make me smile - is when the school acknowledges their loss of ability to cope with a silent 18-year old by telling me they engaged the services of the police and an ambulance.

My brave, defiant, wilful daughter, my warrior woman, my dragon daughter, she sat defiantly and ate her lunch in the reception area.

This day, best of all days in the wretched days, softens my anger and brings me laughter.

But two days follow. Two days I set aside to skim educational law on exclusion criteria, write letters to governors, arrange meetings, compose suggestions on staff training in conflict resolution, and prioritise our local school inadequacy above all my other duties to our family, to my reorganisation of our living, our company business, to HMRC, our accountants, requirements to the VAT office, Companies House - and all the multilayered strata that are obligations to three companies across two continents in the wake of a single director's death.

Yes, I have momentary relief, but too soon I am set to work, like Boxer, once again. 

Throughout this long summer, there is the horrible duty of tracking this person who was, their place in the online world.

I discover, too much, a digital person I did not fully know. A business person and a personal touring of sites and places, of people and events.

And I learn again what I already know: be cautious in the online world. The veils around a life are quickly lifted and the ordinary stuff of pedestrian everydays - purchases, inquiries, translations, the things which peak us and bring us low - these things are exposed on death, but you are not there to talk your way around.

My jobs from then, like a detective, are onerous but necessary. Picking my way through the online world, I doggedly must find all contracts taken by our business, so that I can inform providers, settle and close accounts and follow all procedures to complete all company administration.

Put simply, I am trying to avoid being charged just another £1500 for a service I didn't know we had.

And that is the least worst. From here, I am trying to avoid being fined, prosecuted, or imprisoned. Running a company - even one with no employees and only two brains for its assets - is a serious business and, I have learned, you don't try and cut a deal with Companies House.

But the man at the VAT office is so kind, and his gentle Yorkshire voice voice so lovely and reminding me of my mum that, when I put the phone down, I blub like a baby. The woman at HMRC is the same: helpful and patient while I press letters on a keyboard then mumble things like, 'I've seen that in a file somewhere. Can I go and look for it now?'

What of the unadulterated horror I have here; the history in Hong Kong. A simple banking procedure that takes five months to run, requires my signature to be affirmed as witnessed in front of HSBC employees, needs two DHL courier bookings, and scatters across the globe a trail of formal letters in indecipherable banking Chinglish. I know they have less than ten thousand pounds, but it belongs to me, and my name is Boxer.

Then there is all the other stuff.

A car, abandoned at the bottom of the garden. Not quite a classic, but rare enough to have an enthusiasts club and a price on its head. The project, like all projects, that one might save for a future day. I sell it to an enthusiast from Aylesbury.

The kitchen roof, leaking, unable to be repaired during the years of illness, and now in urgent need with rotten joists and crumbling slate. Two men and a scaffolding later, I have a kitchen roof.

The upstairs window where, if you bend your head to the left as you descend the stairs, you can see directly into the outside world, unimpeded by wood or glazing. The only problem is, I won't replace aged Victorian timber on three sides. Instead I spend my time chasing a specialist carpenter who can splice and resin a way back to the windowful glory on which I have set my vision. I now have a window from which I observe the outside world in the proper way.

And I spend the year doing all the ordinary on bereavement. The house clearing. The sweeping up of years of boxes, of things stored in cupboards, of stuff. It is all the detritus of life that we never throw away. The stuff that was valuable and, over time, forms of sort of sedimentary memory of our lives and interests. No longer worth more than the proceeds of a car boot sale, we cling onto it, in the hope it grows in value for our sentiments and expressions.

Only what if it doesn't? What if you have stored old computer cables, old tools which have rusted up, bits of paper marking the same notes in different pens throughout the years, old Acorn User magazines and receipts for a carpet bought in 1986?

For that stuff, we need to move house, or have the house solve the problem for us - perhaps being burgled by a social scientist interested in ephemera, or simply burning down.

But there are more important things to be done than spending months sorting boxes, running to the tip, giving things away on freecycle or selling the odd gem on ebay.

Heading to autumn there are the A-level exams, followed by preparations for university with interviews and visits. Then thoughts to Scotland, to Exeter, and one held in the conundrum of choice betwixt Wales and East Anglia.

Then the seriously citizen-pedestrian we all must do. The MOT, tax and insurance - I flirt with the idea of chucking my old van away like the carpet receipt and the stash of Acorn User magazines - but it is the vehicle I need to do the work I do.

But I didn't say. Throughout it all I carried on book-stitching, supplying shops, planning and stretching the income and setting up a horizon for my future employment - which I know will only be as good as my fingers can sew and my eyes can see. Christmas, sales were good. The spring show I scraped just in time after months of work, each night stitching late into the night under daylight bulbs.

March 2020

A friend who never knew me before visited my house. I gave them a tour of the garden - or the wilderness that passes for the garden - overgrown as it is with brambles and hedge and grass and plants that last saw shears in 2016 when all the madness began on our steady march towards that final point of March 2019 - and they asked with all the chiding tone your grandmother might use as if talking to the neglectful, the downright idle or the wilfully blind, 'Do you ever do any gardening?'

Maybe a different sort of future can start in March 2020.