Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

by Max Porter

Perfect devices: doctors, ghosts and crows. We can do things other characters can’t, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God.

But I care, deeply. I find humans dull except in grief. There are very few in health, disaster, famine, atrocity, splendour or normality that interest me (interest ME!) but the motherless children do. Motherless children are pure crow. For a sentimental bird it is ripe, rich and delicious to raid such a nest.

You’ve lived a long time and been a crow through and through, but you still can’t take a joke.

We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.

She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone.

We will fill this house with toys and books and wail like playgroup left-behinds.

You remind me of everything I have ever been interested in’ she said.

We stayed while she slept and a tall woman in a tight white uniform changed her covers.

We made love and I kissed her shoulder blades and reminded her of the story of my parents lying to me about children growing wings and she said, ‘My body is not bird-like.’

We were smack bang in the middle, years from the finish, taking nothing for granted.

I remember being scared that something must, surely, go wrong, if we were this happy, her and me, in the early days, when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the tin as it swells and bakes.

The wrist being clamped by upholstery, the darkness, the accident, the lovely dirt of public spaces.

Some of the time we tell the truth. It’s our way of being nice to Dad.

I lie about how you died, I whispered to Mum. I would do the same, she whispered back.

They offer me a space on the sofa next to them and the pain of them being so naturally kind is like appendicitis.

I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me.

I missed her so much that I wanted to build a hundred-foot memorial to her with my bare hands. I wanted to see her sitting in a vast stone chair in Hyde Park, enjoying her view. Everybody passing could comprehend how much I miss her. How physical my missing is. I miss her so much it is a vast golden prince, a concert hall, a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand buses, a million cars, twenty million birds and more. The whole city is my missing her.

Eugh, said Crow, you sound like a fridge magnet.

And the babes flung their duvets back in abandon, swung their little legs over the edge of the bed and scampered down the stairs. The chambers of their baffled baby hearts filled with yearning and they tingled, they bounded down towards before, before, before all this.

My dear, sorry loves. It isn’t her. Go back to bed and let me deal with this. It isn’t her.

He was young and good and sometimes funny. He was silent then he was livid then he was spiteful and unfamiliar, then he became obsessed and had visions and wrote and wrote and wrote.

I remember a story about a Japanese writer who fell on his own sword and it was so sharp it cut through blood and came out clean from his back.

Loss and pain in the world is unimaginable but I want them to try.

We stopped listening and kept on leaping.

Ghosts do not haunt, they regress. Just as when you need to go to sleep you think of trees or lawns, you are taking instant symbolic refuge in a ready-made iconography of early safety and satisfaction. That exact place is where ghosts go.’

Then, as they missed their mother, more and less, the fights got better, worse.

He was pro-Ted, our papa.

Ew!

She was soft and pretty and her naked body was dissimilar to my wife’s and her breath smelt of melon. But we were on the sofa my wife bought, drinking wine from glasses my wife was given, beneath the painting my wife painted, in the flat where my wife died.

I walked around the flat as if I’d only just met it, long strides and over-determined checking of surfaces.

We seem to take it in ten-year turns to be defined by it, sizeable chunks of cracking on, then great sink-holes of melancholy.

We hope she likes us.

:(

Are you being good? Don’t worry about doing stuff or not doing stuff, it doesn’t matter.

Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project.

MAN I would be done grieving? BIRD No, not at all. You were done being hopeless. Grieving is something you’re still doing, and something you don’t need a crow for.

It is everything. It is the fabric of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms.

He had the perpetual look and demeanour of someone floating, turning in the beer- gold light of evening and being surprised by the enduring warmth. A rolled-over shoulder half-squint half-smile.

Connoisseurs, they were, of how to miss a mother. My absolute pleasure.