28 July 2016

Ted and I are coming to the end of a two-week stay at Hawkwood College, Stroud as Writer (and Dog) In Residence. Our room is on the first floor at the far left of the building with one window overlooking the courtyard and another (just visible in the picture, below the lower gable) at the front of the house with views across the valley.

When Alicia Carey, the Principal contacted me in January to ask if I’d like to come, I knew straight away that I wanted to use the opportunity to see if I could make a book about bereavement from the 30,000 words of memoir, 150 blogs and 40 poems I’ve written since Chris died.

Over the past 18 months, many of you have encouraged me to share the account of my journey more widely because you found it moving and helpful to read when confronting your own losses and disappointments. I’m so grateful for your support for me personally and as a writer.

I recently found a publisher who is also interested in the idea and, for the past fortnight, I’ve been wrestling with how I might offer my experience of bereavement, not as an expert guide, but as a fellow traveller doing my best to make sense of things that most of us will experience at some time in our lives.

A book has begun to take shape that I hope might become a good companion for others also living through the pain and confusion of bereavement. Re-visiting the time of Chris’s illness and death, has been tough but I as I commit my story to the page I hold it more lightly: the act of writing is both a means to remember and a way of letting go. It’s one way I mourn her loss.

I’ll continue the process when Ted and I go on holiday to Ireland next week. By the end of the summer, I should have something to show the publisher and, with a bit of luck, I’ll have a completed manuscript by the autumn.

Wish me luck!

Saturday 9 July 2016

Chris loved apple pie. When friends asked her, during the last 6 months of her life, if there was anything they could do to help, she frequently asked them to make her an apple pie. Pies of all shapes and sizes were delivered to the house and to hospital wards. All were consumed with gusto and gratitude… and gouts of fresh cream.

Which is why, a year ago, Chris’s sister Helen and their mum Joan chose to plant a Bramley, queen of cooking apples, in her memory, in a secluded orchard a few streets from Helen’s house in Manchester.

I drove there today, with some of Chris’s ashes, to stay with Helen and her children Adam (20) and Rosie (17) and to visit the tree. Joan couldn’t get there because of a problem with her train but, after some to-ing and fro-ing, we decided to go ahead without her and that she and I would have a separate ceremony by the river at her home in Stratford-Upon-Avon, later in the year.

After lunch Helen, Rosie, Adam, and I took Ted with us to the orchard. Helen pointed out the tree, its slender young branches already bearing fruit, and I dug a small hole close to the base but far enough away so as not to damage the roots. The four of us took it in turns to mix some ashes with the fine dark loam then I re-filled the hole and tamped the soil down. Before leaving, we said a silent farewell to Chris: beloved daughter and sister; loving and generous aunt.

During her lifetime, Chris nourished the talents of all around her, from her artistic niece Rosie to her many doctoral students. Which made me think she would be pleased that her ashes will help the tree grow. In a year or two, with a bit of luck, it will produce enough shiny, plump Bramleys to make a good-sized apple pie.

I’ve already put in my order for a big fat slice.

With cream.

I’ve been meaning to get a haircut for weeks. Just a trim, mind you. Nothing too drastic. I rather like the white mane that’s appeared since I last went to the hairdresser. Note the word hairdresser. I haven’t been to a striped-pole men’s barbershop in years: too many bad memories of pudding-basin haircuts inflicted on my tender scalp under matron’s watchful gaze when I was a kid at boarding school.

But I’ve been on the road working and travelling for a couple of months and I’m beginning to look like Einstein on a bad hair day. So as I walk past City Barbers on Worth Street, New York and notice that it’s devoid of customers, it occurs to me to break the habit of a lifetime and go inside. I poke my head in the door and am greeted by a moustachioed, bear of a man with a thick Slavic accent.

“You. Come in. Sit.”

“I just want a trim, please.”

“Trim. Yes. Sit.”

I sit.

He swirls the bib across my lap and fastens it firmly round my throat. It’s tight but I decide it would be unmanly to complain, and that appearing unmanly would not be a good thing right now.

Without another word, Dimitri (which should be his name even if it isn’t) picks up the scissors and launches himself into action, hacking at my locks with a frenzied mania that wouldn’t be out of place in a slasher movie. With his right hand he frantically combs my hair into sheaves to be scythed by the razor-sharp shears he is wielding in his left.

Soon we are both engulfed in a blizzard of white hair. I consider reminding him that I just want a trim, but the blades are snip-snapping so fast that if I distract him now it could be fatal. I hazard a nervous smile. Perhaps he’ll be merciful?

But Dimitri is an artist, impervious to all but his own inner demons. Scissors, comb, and electric clippers perform a danse macabre on my head until the topiary is completed to his own original design. Finally, he draws breath and reaches for the doomsday weapon. It looks like a small flame-thrower but turns out to contain water. He squirts it vigorously until what’s left of my hair is drenched and can be combed flat.

He holds up a small mirror and grunts.

Not wanting to excite him further, I pretend to look in the mirror and also say nothing. This seems to satisfy him. He puts the mirror down and picks up the electric clippers once more.

“You vant eyebrows?”

I consider the proposition carefully. Is he asking if I want to retain my eyebrows intact or have them also receive the benefit of his trichological ministrations?

“Er… ”

He forestalls my indecision with a few sabre-like slashes of the clippers, which reduce my eyebrows to stubble. For an encore, he lunges at my ears and denudes them of the straggling hairs that it has been my unfortunate custom to pluck out absent-mindedly on socially inappropriate occasions. I am beginning to appreciate the severe genius of the man.

“Moustache?”

I assent with the barest flicker of an eyelid.

“Don’t move.”

I turn to stone. The clippers do their murderous work and my upper lip is suddenly liberated from most of its hirsute confinement. I fear that its sudden appearance will repel the fair sex and frighten small children.

“Good,” says Dimitri unfastening the bib from my throat and flacking it like a matador’s cape to remove all signs of my shorn hair. It’s a statement rather than a question. He holds out a stubby, calloused hand.

“$20.”

I hand him a $20 bill plus an extra $5 as a tip. It’s a generous amount, even by New York standards, but the thrill of getting out alive goes to my head. Money seems unimportant at such times. Dimitri looks pleased with the exchange and gives a conspiratorial nod. As I turn to leave, I fancy I hear him, soto voce, uttering the old comrade’s farewell:

“Dos vedanya tovarisch.”

Later, walking down the street, I catch sight of a reflection in a shop window. It takes few moments to realise that it’s me.

Now that’s what I call a haircut.

So good, they named it twice.

It’s the best part of fifty years since I first came here as a student in the 60s and I’ve been back many times. Chris and I came quite often to stay with our friends Dick and Karen, and two days ago I was a guest at their wedding at the NYC Marriage Bureau and at Trestle on 10^th Avenue for the party. It’s been a long time coming (they’ve been together for 20 years) and maybe our own wedding and Chris’s illness and death gave them a nudge.

Yesterday, I visited the 9/11 Memorial Plaza. It’s said that we don’t do grief well in western society, but this memorial is stunning in its simplicity and profundity. Within the footprints of the Twin Towers, two massive acre-square waterfalls cascade thousands of slender streams, combining to form sheets of water that are gathered and held briefly in pools 30 feet below, before plunging deep into the earth. At the perimeter, the names of all the known victims are etched into bronze tablets.

It was on the day after 9/11 that Chris and I, who had been friends for some time, reached out to each other and became more than friends, so although we didn’t lose anyone we knew, the event had some personal significance for us. I went back this morning clutching a single stem of Gerbera which I offered in memory of those who died in the attack and in memory of the time Chris and I were together in the years that followed.

Then I caught the subway to Penn Station and walked along 34^th Street to the Empire State Building. I wanted to do something that Chris and I had not done together in New York, to symbolise the arrival of new energy and new love in my life. It took an hour to get up to the observation deck on the 86^th floor, but the view of the city and the sense of limitless possibility it exudes, made the queuing and cramped lifts worthwhile.

As I looked downtown at the gleaming One World Trade Centre, I recalled that, out of the smouldering rubble of the Twin Towers, workers rescued a badly damaged Callery pear tree. With loving care, it has thrived, been replanted in the Plaza, and christened The Survivor Tree. It stands as a modest reminder of the universal impulse for life in the aftermath of death.

So, I’m flying home this evening in good spirits, with love and gratitude for all that Chris gave me, and with high hopes for what the future might hold.

New York, New York.

Thank you.