chapter two
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
C.S. Lewis The day of the funeral, I woke to the slight chill of early autumn air, the first foreboding of cold, dark winter days and darker, colder nights ahead. The draught through the window vibrated with acute timbres that piqued my ears. I pulled my knees into my chest. I wanted to sleep more, freeze the thoughts inflaming my mind. I wanted to forget.
Morning light pried open my eyelids. I shut them again, tighter. Something felt different. I willed my eyes open again. I surveyed the bedroom. There was an unusual quality of solitude, the base note to a singular feeling of emptiness hanging in the air. Philippe was gone. He had been there in the night. I remembered. I remembered his presence beside me under the dark sheets. I might have felt worse except that it was impossible. I lay there cocooned in the duvet, dreading the day. It had been arranged that one of Philippe's longstanding friends would come for me at ten. I had never been to a funeral before, nor been so close to Death. Until now. I dragged my spirit through lethargy so thick it threatened to suffocate me. Despite this, when the doorbell rang I was dressed and ready to go. Ploughing through my own resistance, I opened the door. Marco had nothing comforting to say. On the way, he broke his silence once only. "He didn't suffer much, Tashi." "Bullshit," I retorted, and bit my lip. Marco flinched. "Sorry, I didn't mean to…" I said much later. I stood in an aisle just far enough away to block my view over the edge of the coffin. I could not bear to see his body, refused to let the sight of his corpse be imprinted on my memory. My imagination already taunted me with macabre images. That was enough. I would not allow this to be my last image of him. His parents and siblings stood side by side in the front row holding hands, some with their arms around another’s shoulders. Other friends and relatives filed into the room. Philippe came in last, the same way he had always entered crowded rooms, with a huge grin on his face, flashing teeth, moving theatrically, boldly engaging a potential audience with mischief in his eyes. I laughed inside despite myself. I saw him. Just as if he were flesh, blood and bone. He was whole, nothing broken, nothing displaced. He appeared normal, as if it were perfectly natural that he should be there among the mourners, his friends and family. As if he was not lying there in the coffin. I watched, riveted, as he made his way one by one to each of those he loved. He sidled up to them, bent forward a little and spoke into their ear, sometimes smiling, usually joking, always with a consoling gesture. Each responded in their fashion; some with a quizzical look that suddenly broke on pained faces, some exploded in sobs and some smiled through their tears. None could see him, but they all felt him. That was obvious. When he approached me, my body suddenly filled with the essence of him and my knees folded with the weight of his love. He stayed by my side, teasing and consoling. Once he succeeded in making me smile, he went over to stand with his parents. It was a simple service, after which everyone piled into vehicles and drove the short distance to a suburban graveyard. Philippe wasn’t even there when they lowered the coffin into his grave. I knew he wouldn’t be. The reception, held in the basement of a nearby church, passed in a kind of blur. Later I vaguely remembered talking to his relatives and old friends, offering condolences. None of it made sense to me. Meanwhile, I saw Philippe mingling with the crowd, enjoying himself as if at a party. I resented his happiness, envied his light heartedness. ~ After the initial shock, I descended into an abysmal despondency. I raged at him for betraying the pact and leaving without me. I screamed in protest at the walls of my skull, my mind bound in a straightjacket in some room where I had been left unattended and powerless to battle my own demons. Whenever his image came into focus, I screamed abuse at him, but he stood his ground until my love washed the rage away in a flood of longing. My interior life became despair so all-encompassing that there were times I could no longer breathe and I lay in bed gasping and angry at my own instincts for sucking air into my lungs against my will. More than anything I wanted to go find him, at first to rebuke him for not loving me enough to take me with him, and then later because I missed him more than I could stand. His mother visited me two weeks after the funeral. She came to assure me that Philippe had loved me. Mothers know, she said. She had been with him his last day. They had gone down to the river for a picnic in the afternoon during her lunch break at the hospital. Philippe had talked and talked about me the whole time, and she was looking forward to meeting me. She was glad she finally did. "You are just as he described," she said. "He loved you so much." "If he loved me so much, then why did he leave?" Her eyes tried to comfort me but there was sadness in them, more than in my own heart. She asked if he had been with me those first three days after he died. She thought so, because he had not appeared to her until after the funeral. He had stayed with her for nine days. I took everything she said at face value. Questioning would have meant questioning my own sanity and I was in no condition to do that. Eventually, Philippe stopped waking me in the night. Instead, several months later, I woke in the morning with his breath on my cheek. I heard him rushing up the stairwell to my flat. I saw him at the end of the street grinning mischievously, all teeth and bright eyes, comically beckoning to me from behind a tree. He spoke to me from the branches outside my bedroom window. He whispered through the ivy clinging to the glass. He thought it was funny. Didn’t I get the joke? I cried harder and took to drinking. At first, only a few drinks at work. Soon, more drinks in clandestine bars after work. I tried to quell the intolerable pain until I found myself alone again and then it got worse. I asked for more and more shifts until I was working almost every night in the club. I slept all day, every day. My friends worried about me. Too often, in the wee hours of the morning after work, they found me sobbing on a bench in the neighbourhood, oblivious. They brought me home, put me to bed. Two seasons of grief consumed me. I hated the city more than ever. I hated the club and my life-style. I missed the daytime, the light. I despised myself for the loneliness that forced me to seek out company when I needed to be alone. I was drinking far too often and far too much. Philippe’s friends seemed to have accepted his death and were getting on with their lives. Not me. I hated the fact that I missed him so much. I hated what I was becoming, an embittered, self-pitying drunk. Others were more forgiving. They told me "time heals", but I knew Time alone would never be enough to heal my gaping wound. I needed to get away, far away, even from myself. Every day I was reminded of him. Every day I walked past that building on my way to work. Every day I saw someone who had known the two of us. Every single day images from the past formed out of the commonplace; everything related back to him and our history together. He was every rider on every bicycle, every man sitting in the window of every Bistro we had ever been to together. He was on a bench in every park. He played with the children in the street and he was always waiting for me when I got home. Why couldn’t he have been home waiting that night, I wondered? Toward spring something began to change in me. Tender, fragile shoots emerged from a warming earth. Suddenly the trees donned miniscule bulbs like ornaments on their branches. Tulips appeared over night. Children traded their soggy mittens for brand-new running shoes. Windows swung open in wide welcome to the sweet, sultry air. People’s faces turned to the sun, cracked lips broke into smiles that had come out of hibernation. The terraces were brimming with anticipation of summer. The sun's rays stroked newly exposed skin and promised hot, lazy days and new love affairs ahead. I felt a faint, yet distinct desire to connect with life again, embrace a life that had more meaning than my old one. I wanted to go somewhere where there was an abundance of life. I wanted to surround myself with so much life that I could forget death. I asked for time off work and when it was gladly granted, I went at once to speak with my travel agent. He recommended Costa Rica. "No army and beautiful beaches," he said encouragingly. I booked a two week charter and left Montreal the following week. |