If a person could see me now, sitting on my fashionably grey sofa watching the latest blockbuster, they might be a little jealous. My home is tidy, perfectly finished, each room an exact replica of a page in the Next Directory. In the kitchen, the coffee machine gleams while my perfectly ironed tea-towels sit neatly in organised drawers.
But what they wouldn’t know is that Jennifer Jones’s sister died in front of her three months ago, and Jennifer Jones has just realised that, for those three months, she hasn’t been living.
Not really.
I know I’m alive, but I haven’t really been living. Being alive and actually living life are two very different things. I’m not explaining myself very well; I’ll try and do better.
When you lose someone – when your life is turned upside down and you’re left broken – grief clings to every part of your being: you can’t see properly, you can’t breathe, you can’t speak, you can’t eat, you can’t sleep . . . you’re living, but at the same time, you’re not alive.
But the thing about realising you haven’t actually been living life properly, is that when the fog of grief begins to lift, it makes you look at the world differently. And it makes you appreciate every little detail.
Take my husband. He is currently picking his nose. His index finger is reaching out from the freckly hand that held mine while I pushed our children out into the world, up into the nostril of the nose that I have kissed the end of, its sharp tip red and cold from the snowball fight we had in the small garden of our first home, and yet, even though he is now examining the findings of his excavation . . . my loins are on fire.
I think I can honestly say that I have never been aroused by the sight of my husband picking his nose, but aroused I am.
‘Do you fancy an early night?’ I ask him. He squints in response to my question, his right cheek rising and his head tilting as he no doubt mulls over my proposition. I can almost hear his inner dialogue: Why is she after an early night? Is she just tired? Why is she licking her lips like that? And why is she unbuttoning her blouse? ‘In fact . . . why don’t we have an early night here?’ I say, my voice husky, a voice that belongs to a younger me, a thinner, less wrinkly, stretch-mark-free me.
‘The kids,’ he replies, swallowing hard as I take his bogey-free hand and pull it towards my hundred-wash-grey Marks & Spencer bra.
‘The kids are asleep,’ I reply, unzipping his flies and straddling him.
The next morning, I stare at the calendar, at the empty boxes that March has to offer – most days a blank space with a number hovering in its corner. I’m not really thinking about the calendar though, I’m thinking about Kerry. About the way that, three months ago, the electrical synapses in her brain misfired. I’m imagining a tumble of veins intricately woven in between the grooves of my sister’s brain, I’m picturing the little arc of blue electricity as they ignited with each thought, how perfectly they were working while my sister listened to me talking about the location of a new jeweller’s. How they were sending messages to her body to make her walk, just in front of me, across the zebra crossing as the rain poured and I stopped to look at the location on my phone. How one of those little blue sparks flashed red, a smoky bronzed spark that reacted to the oncoming car, that rusty spark that made her push me out of the way of the car instead of saving herself.
I can still taste the mint from the chewing gum I had in my mouth, hear the conversation we had, feel the drizzle that was soaking into my clothes as I walked across the road. The image of Kerry flying through the air hits me: her body flying backwards, feet and arms in front of her as though she was just trying to touch her toes, blue eyes staring straight ahead: red coat, red boots and the screech of brakes. I let that image go as I exhale; the next breath in comes with the image of her hands. I can’t remember making the decision to stop walking, I was too busy looking at Google maps, but I remember the feel of her hands and the pressure – like a punch – against my ribcage. I remember seeing them splayed against my chest. Her nails were painted silver and she was wearing a thumb ring – the one with the large fake emerald that wasn’t on her hand when she arrived at the hospital; I spent hours the night of her death trying to find it amongst the debris lying beside the road: I never did.
I breathe out again.
In the past three months, I have managed to carry on, a zombie walking through life but not living it. Some people are consumed by anger, when they lose a loved one; that’s where Ed focused his grief, anger towards the elderly driver of the car with the broken windscreen wiper, but I don’t think I had room for anger; grief stripped me of feeling anything at all. A numbing pain had settled inside my body when I watched Kerry’s coffin shining from inside a hearse. Looking back, I suppose I should have been grateful for grief’s anaesthetic during those first few months because once the anaesthetic began to wear off the pain of Kerry’s death suddenly exploded like pins and needles. Her loss consumed me for weeks. At first the pain was visceral, and I cried as it clawed at me, as it scratched and kicked: grief had its grip around my throat and had begun to squeeze. Some days when I woke, its grip was so tight that I didn’t think I could breathe, felt that it would suffocate me, that my death certificate would read ‘Cause of death: suffocated by grief’.
As time passed, grief’s grip became a little looser, and the next day looser still; slowly but surely leaving me alive, leaving me with this gift: life. This gift is like a glass vase; its purpose is to be filled with beautiful things; it holds the sun’s rays and splits it into a million different colours, a rainbow of possibility and directions. But if you don’t hold it carefully enough, if it slides from your grasp, it will be shattered and lost: you will never be able to repair it.
This is where you find me, a woman who is somehow still alive, whose sister left her with the gift of life; I can’t waste it.
I chew the inside of my bottom lip as I stare blankly at the calendar. There are a few appointments dotted about: there’s a hair colour on the tenth.
Hmmm. I had better bring that forward. My roots have needed a bit of TLC for a few months, I’ve got to stop putting things off . . . also, I suppose my life could end before that and I don’t want to have my roots showing in the chapel of rest. I pull out the notebook from my stationery drawer and begin a ‘To Do’ list.
When Kerry died, nothing was ready. She had no life insurance, no will, we had no idea how she wanted her funeral, why would we? She was only twenty-five. She and Nessa were just starting their life together.
Nessa stayed until the afternoon of the funeral and that was it. She didn’t even say goodbye; took her daughter out of school, and just up and left. I never got to ask her about an engagement ring that was shining on Kerry’s finger as the curtains drew around the coffin: a ring she must have chosen alone and slipped onto Kerry’s finger in the chapel of rest . . . I think of that moment of vulnerability that Kerry had shown, the worry that Nessa might say no. Clearly, she wouldn’t have.
I click the button of my pen.
To Do:
Check life insurance
Write epitaph
Make hairdressing appointment
Write epitaph?
‘Get a grip, Jen,’ Kerry says. She is sitting on the kitchen counter, taking a bite out of an apple. I’m not crazy; I know she isn’t really here. I keep replaying old memories, like this one: this is a conversation we had when I had been Googling brain cancer after I’d found a tiny bald patch left over after a spot on my scalp. ‘Get a grip, Jen,’ she’d said; she was sitting on my kitchen counter and eating an apple. My subconscious also tends to embellish these memories, replacing parts of the conversation that I can no longer recall exactly by giving Kerry lines from films that I know she hasn’t even seen.