Stone Yard Devotional

by Charlotte Wood

To find my parents I had to recall the cold, unsheltered feeling I had – physically, I mean – at each of their funerals. There had been the sensation of too much space around me there, at the place where my father, then later my mother, were sent into their adjacent shafts of opened earth. (It seemed callous to me back then, to lower a person into a hole in the ground using ropes and cords instead of arms.)

I stood on the grass and looked at the ugly flowers, then at my parents’ names carved into each slab in front of me. And I realised: Your bones are here, beneath my feet. I squatted then, those few feet of earth between their bodies and mine, and I kissed my fingers and pressed them to the crackly grass.

When I first saw all that packaging I couldn’t stop my tears coming, which was ridiculous. But something about the nasty little packets overcame me; it was to do with splitting everything into awful, unnatural fragments. The loneliness and waste of it. And a polluted feeling: even here, the inescapable imperative to generate garbage. Surely, if God exists, He could not approve of all this rubbish.

After my parents died – not together, though close enough in time to fuse inside my primitive self, inside my dreams and my body, into a single catastrophe – for many years I felt as though I were breathing and moving through some kind of glue. I could not have said this then. If someone had asked me how I felt, I would not have been able to answer. The only true reply would have been: I don’t know.

My own thoughts are not interesting, except as arguments against what the Scriptures are saying. Which I don’t think is the purpose of the exercise, so I keep my mouth shut.

There may be a word in another language for what brought me to this place; to describe my particular kind of despair at that time. But I’ve never heard a word to express what I felt and what my body knew, which was that I had a need, an animal need, to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home.

I’m masked now (still a novelty for us, while the rest of the country is sick of them), and there is a relief in that anonymity.

I have sometimes thought it wrong of me to be so preoccupied with my mother and not my father. But at the same time I understand why: my father and I knew each other, absolutely. And I am convinced that had he lived a long life, I would never have known him more completely than I did as a child. I don’t know why that should make such a difference, but it does.

Something in the voice and the gullible nonsense of these stories recalls Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted, an old book I once found in a charity shop and kept because it amused me. It was a dictionary of objects and concepts (‘knife’, for example, or ‘failure’) that supposedly often appeared in dreams, followed by a short declaration of what each foretold for the dreamer. A great many of the entries had a certain meaning, but a different meaning if ‘a young woman’ dreamed of them. I still remember some – I used to recite them at dinner parties. Tadpoles indicated ‘unease in business’. But if a young woman dreamed of tadpoles ‘in clear water’, it foretold that she would ‘form a relation with a wealthy but immoral man’. To dream of salt was an omen of discordant surroundings. But a young woman eating salt in a dream meant her lover would desert her for a more beautiful girl, ‘causing her deep chagrin’. My favourite was this: ‘To dream of a dolphin indicates your liability to come under a new government. It is not a very good dream.’

The second thing she remembered was that on finally leaving the hospital – alone, to stay at a hostel for young Catholic women until the flood subsided enough for my father to be able to collect her – she was handed an envelope with her name on it. On the bus ride to the hostel, she opened the envelope and unfolded an invoice for the cost of burying her child.

Yesterday I heard a shriek from Carmel in the kitchen. From its pitch, I knew it had to do with mice. There is something terrible in a quiet place about the sound of a woman’s screams. It is worse than the sound itself; it gathers force, becomes an omen or a reminder of something horrible from the past.

Afterwards, over a cup of tea in our kitchen Richard told me that late last night, driving home from a dinner in town, he and Annette came across the strangest sight. Not far from their gate the surface of the road began to move. In this one stretch of bitumen there were so many mice crossing the road that he had to slow right down to understand what he was seeing. He and his wife sat, transfixed, floating across what seemed to be a wide river of silver water, flowing steadily beneath them.

My friends who grew up in cities found it grossly morbid, to bury a body rather than burn it. I don’t know why. They would shudder, speaking of worms and decay, appalled in some existential way. Perhaps it was the slowness of decomposition they found so horrifying. We don’t want to think of our bodies gradually breaking down, our tissue leaking softly into earth. We want death done with, vanished like smoke into air.

I used to think there was a ‘before’ and ‘after’ most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time and space could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life. But now I know that with a great devastation of some kind, there is no before or after. Even when the commotion of crisis has settled, it’s still there, like that dam water, insisting, seeping, across the past and the future.

We all make saints of the dead, I said. It’s the only way we can bear it.

I prayed for (sent compassion, fully attended to) the boy, who would be a man in his early sixties now. I don’t think he had any religion back then, but who knew now? I wondered if somewhere, this morning, he too had felt the firm touch of a thumb on his forehead, the dust on his lashes. I assumed at first that he’d still be in prison, but that terrible night was more than forty years ago now, and life never really meant life. Perhaps he had been released. What did he think, now, about what he had done? What does it take, to atone, inside yourself? To never be forgiven?

Lying awake in the dark, I understand that this low vibration is telling me a dreadful truth: that I will die. This knowledge that remains mostly hidden from the self but is always there, gaining ground inside us, unstoppable. This is why I hate the mice; I know this now, in the humming darkness. And knowing it doesn’t stop the hatred.

She was too tired for anger but it would not be possible for her to do the work of forgiving him, or even listening to him. She was no longer capable of a compassionate lie, she said. In her remaining life there was only room for the truth, and sometimes that would be brutal. It was sad, but it was too late; she had to prepare herself for what was to come. Only what was essential could be allowed to reach her now.

It’s been my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite peaceably accept the state of being reviled.

As I swept it came to me that my inability to get over my parents’ deaths has been a source of lifelong shame to me. I used to think that time, adulthood, would clean it away, but no. It recedes sometimes but then it returns and I’m eternally stuck; a lumbering, crying, self-pitying child. The fact of grief quietly making itself known, again and again.

I wish, for the thousandth time that I had been older than I was when she fell ill. I feel sure more maturity would have brought with it some greater capacity to help her than I had.

I went to the toilet and sat down and my bowels emptied completely. This is not pleasant to talk about I know, but it happened: an urgent, steady, total voiding, the need for which had insisted on itself as soon as I knew my husband was in danger. This went on for some time, and I could do nothing to stop it. I sat with my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands, letting my body empty itself, until there could be nothing left. Throughout the hour of this emergency I had been absolutely calm. But the primitive body knows fear, and responds. I have had this same thing happen two or three times in my life, at moments of great crisis, and I have never spoken of it to anyone.