Tom is Dead by Marie Darrieussecq Page B

drawer—I didn’t even make enquiries. Though there must be protocols, a way of grieving your dead without upsetting the service. Keep your coat on, it’s cold . I didn’t know where Tom was. I couldn’t believe that he was there. I was looking for him. Don’t leave the body to animals. Come up with a way of passage, a place. I wasn’t there yet. Historically, I was a barbarian; along the path of humanity I was in prehistoric times. I knew nothing about the gestures, the shrouds, the anointings. I had no idea about the ritual candles and the prayers. Even the weeping, I knew nothing about. Weeping is a job; professional mourners get paid.
    At the ages of four and seven, Tom and Vince took death more seriously than I did. They witnessed the death throes of flies, pondered over cuttlefish bones found on the beaches of Vancouver. They asked where the cat had gone, when the cat died and, little by little, day after day, its absence gradually confirmed—they’d surrendered to this mystery of death’s lack of evidence—and concluded that cats were mortal. For Tom, death defined cats. Death separated the cat from the human. ‘Cats die,’ explained Tom. Vince, he tapped into the sadness of death—he’d grieved for the cat—he weighed up the difference between objects and us, the inert and the living.
    I did what I could. You only have one mother, just as you only have one death. Tom was stuck in the morgue, under the ceiling, looking for a way out. The badly buried ones, the ridiculed ones who howl to the wind, the grave-less ones who bump up against windowpanes, these were now his gang and they had come back to haunt me. Tom demanded that we get it over with. It was with compassion that I began to think about his poor body. Tom was hanging about, hovering around his body.
    For ten years, I’ve blamed myself. Now I’d like—not to breathe, not to rest or to forget, but—to relax the jaws a little, the talons and the claws between which I remain motionless, not struggling, held tight by the pain and maybe by a vague glow from above: I don’t believe in signs anymore, but the pillars aren’t the only things that have stayed in my mind from my visit to Souillac Abbey.
    Putrefaction. In Vancouver, I read books by Patricia Cornwell, stuff about medical examiners, six months in a dry climate for mummification, eighteen months for a clean skeleton; for children it’s quicker—how are you meant to cope with that? To be alive while Tom was beneath the earth…I think it was ghosts that presented me with the notion of the air. Not the Greek world, nor that of the Bible, but Anglo-Saxon fantasy. Stuart’s heritage. That Tom’s molecules drift freely in the air. Today, I regret this. As if grief had authorised me to make such blunders. Neither in my family nor Stuart’s are the dead cremated. We want slabs, yew trees, plaques, weight. I would’ve liked to be able to visit him, I think. To sit down and tell him what’s been going on in our lives. To change his flowers like I changed his nappies. To plant jonquils and boxwood. To water, at the edge of the desert, a grave in a temperate land. To drop by and see him. I would’ve known how to do that. How to earn my way back in, maybe. A good mother, after the event. A good mother in the hereafter. But I didn’t know.
    Not that I believe that he’s anywhere; apart from in my mind, and in the minds of Stuart and the children, and our parents. A home where he survives, that radiates from us, that’s bigger than us. He appears all of a sudden, and I think of him. He appears all of a sudden from nowhere. I see him. I raise my hand gently, and I caress the air.
    I had a look on the internet to see where the crematorium is. When you move house, you worry about shops, schools, bus stops, and, if necessary, hospitals. The crematorium is more than an hour out of town. But they