you are as surprised by the attendees as the non-attendees. A throng of my sister’s closest uni mates – all in the first great flush of their early twenties and ostensibly with better shit to be doing than this – were at my dad’s; his lifelong best friend, Don, left the voicemail we left him telling him the news unanswered. At my mum’s funeral, none of her side of the family attended, including her closest cousin, Josie – but clearly she was popular at work because an entire office’s worth of people lined up to shake my hand and tell me what a good laugh she was. Only after death do you see facets of the living you once knew through the eyes of those who knew them away from you: you learn who thinks them kind, who considers them wise, who considers them a best friend. They, all of them, line up to tell you how they were capital-G Good: we are, all of us, washed of sin when we die. When we live we are jagged and complex and fucked up and we oscillate between joy and despair, and all of that is flattened out in death, all of those wrinkles uncrumpled. We go into the ground as saints.
My parents are dead and forms; forms, forms; forms, forms, forms. There is a form to declare death and you have to pay for each printout, which means you have to predict exactly how many corporations and banks and agencies are going to ask for certified proof of death and then pre-emptively pay £12 for them to have it, and we umm and ahh and ask for four (you need two, at most: if you take anything from this, just know that everywhere takes photocopies, and save yourself £24). Then you have to, as in our case where there is no will (while I am here handing out advice: if someone draws you up a will and you go through the hurdle jumping of defining exactly who gets what in a will and how the will should break up, and where everything goes after you die, and all you have to do to verify that will is sign it, exactly once, please sign it exactly once, and do not leave it, unsigned, for two years, on the table next to you among a big pile of post, Mum), jump through the various hoops to invoke probate, a sort of de facto all-of-this-dead-person’s-shit-now-belongs-by-blood-to-you ritual where I had to go to a local family court, get knife searched on the way in, then swear godlessly on a sign of the cross to say that I am the one true heir to a £90,000 terrace near Sheffield, nobody else may make claim on my land. The bank wants to know she’s dead, the electricity company. I stop chasing the £800 left in her building society account because the constant administration of it was too exhausting. The government sends me a letter to tell them they overpaid her pension, i.e. made payment into her account exactly once post-death, and now they would like that money back, now: I tear the paper up and scatter it into the bin. I am warned that people might wheedle out like cockroaches from beneath the family fridge: someone, somewhere, some distant cousin, might try to make a claim on what thin gruel there is left, and to be prepared for it. They mean legally, but I want it in blood: I am angry, so angry, I am ready to meet anyone head on, if anyone even steps to me and tells me they want a penny of what’s mine I will tear at them until they are just a mashed pile of red, I will punch and punch and punch, I need this, I need them to come out, I want so bad somebody to take this out on, I need it.
My parents are dead and one day, three years later, I go back there, to the house, after we’ve sold it. This is a mistake: I’m watching from sort of afar, in case an old neighbour sees and recognises me and we have to do a whole awkward thing, and everything feels juddery, at once familiar and not. The house looks more or less the same – steam rises from the exhaust vent on the boiler we had put in a few years ago; the smoke bush my dad planted 20 years ago still looks somehow both fragile and overgrown in the front garden – but it’s not. It’s late October, cold but not freezing, and, on the doorstep, there’s a pumpkin, carved for Hallowe’en. We never left a pumpkin out, even once. And then suddenly I am overcome with the realisation that this isn’t mine, now; that another family exists in this space, fills every corner of it with their own existence, their own sofa positioning, their laughs echoing on the walls they now own, their voices shouting upstairs for dinnertime, their crap filling the basement. I feel like a ship on the sea with endless deep blue beneath me and nothing holding me up. No anchor, no home. Someone else’s pumpkin makes me lose my entire mind.
My parents are dead and my friends are trying their best. My friend takes an afternoon off work and drives me out to the countryside, out far away from the grey jagged misery of the town, and I wind the windows down and let the warm June air rustle my hair, and I inhale bugs and lungfuls of green, wholesome air, and I put my hand out of the window and wave it through the wind, and then we stop at a pub overlooking green rolling hills, starched yellow almost in the sunlight, and we both sit down with amber ales and he tells me he thinks he has cancer.
‘What?’ I say. ‘What?’
And he sits stiff-backed in double denim and says: ‘In my bowels. They did a test. I’m waiting on the scans.’
And I say Jesus, I say Jesus Fucking Christ. What is with everyone getting cancer?
And he says I know.
And we drive in silence back to the town and we line up more beers in another pub and meet some friends and he tells them he thinks he has cancer (‘In my bowels,’ he says. ‘Blood. Bad blood, that black blood. They did a test. I’m waiting on the scans.’) and he starts crying so much the landlord very quietly asks us to leave the pub, because quote, unquote we are really bringing the vibe down, and then the next pub we go into we are also asked to leave because of the crying thing, too. And at the funeral a week later I ask him if he’s coping okay and he says a cheerful ‘Yep!’ and then proceeds to not ever mention cancer or die over cancer at any point over the next three years, and I figure there is something, about death, there is something that brings out the weird little crevices in all of us.
My parents are dead and it’s a year or so later and everyone thinks that I’m fine including me. I’m cat-sitting for my sister, my boys, my big beautiful boys, but there’s something wrong with Boz: he’s thin when he used to be plush, he’s quiet when he used to be loud, he keeps coming up to me, shaking and feeble, just leaning on me with all the little weight that he has. One morning, before I leave for work, I find him after calling him for breakfast, and there he is, shaking under a shelf: I coax him half out, bring him a small plate of biscuits, swaddle him with a towel. Boz has been my best little mate since I was eleven and he was six months old, and now I look into his huge orange eyes and I know that he is dying. Moww, he says, and I say moww back, and I cry, and cry and cry and cry, and kiss his little head, and cry and cry and cry, and I’m crying now, and I cry and cry and cry and cry, and I suppose that’s when it all hits me – me, on the floor, cat biscuits on my fingers – that’s when it hits me most of all.
* * *
My parents are dead and I’m starting to get to the age where my friends’ parents are dying, too, and I feel I should know what to say to them. And I never really do: instances of grief, I have found, are unique, two never coming in the same shape, and they can be piercing and hard-edged and they can be like passing through deep dark treacle or they can be like a long, slow-passing cloud, it can make everything grey or everything sharp, it can hit you like a truck or it can hit you like cholesterol. There is no one single catch-all solution to dealing with the worst life has to throw at you because life has such a habit of swinging you curveballs.
But what I do always say is: oh man, this is going to suck.
And I always say: you need two fewer death certificates than you think you need.
And I say: snakes will come up from the grass and you will want to hurt them.
And: at one point you are going to become keenly aware that everyone is judging you for the exact way you outwardly behave when someone close to you dies, and I need to tell you that that is a nonsense. You are going to feel a dirty little feeling of guilt. If there’s a long illness involved, there might be this horrible, metallic-tasting feeling of relief, one too hard and real for you to admit to yourself is there. You will do weird things and behave weirdly and not even know it is happening. You will offer up a portion of your psyche to the grief gods and say to them in the rain: take this and do what you want with it. Suddenly your body is not your own, your mind, your home. There’s no right way of dealing with it but there are a thousand differently angled wrong ways. You’ll cycle through all of them.
I’m on my fourth Christmas without parental guidance now, and I suppose