When All Is Said

by Anne Griffin

The drink had gotten the better of us. But my kiss was one of honest sobriety. Full of the love she had unleashed in me and gone on unleashing for all our years together. Not that we were the perfect couple. But we were good, you know. Solid and steady. At least that’s how it felt for me. I never asked her, mind.

‘I’m here to remember – all that I have been and all that I will never be again.’

What I didn’t know until after he died was that my mother had watched her younger brother Jimmy die of the same thing. People didn’t talk much of things like that in those days. Death and illness were sacred and silent, not to be stoked and stirred.

It’s an awful thing, to witness your mother cry. You cannot cure nor mend nor stick a plaster on.

wondered how hard it was for her seeing one son pass life’s milestones, while her other, cold in the ground, never got the chance.

smile more to myself than to her and think what an even richer man I’d be if I could bottle and sell that ballsiness of hers.

‘So, yeah, I was thinking

And each time, I swear to myself that this time will be different, that I’ll make the effort. That I’ll ask about your job and what you’re working on. And I promise myself I’ll listen to you with my whole body and every ounce of concentration in me. I’ll hang on your every word. And then I might even ask another question. But as soon as you walk in the door sure it’s like a bolt closes over my mouth. And in you come, all bags and bustle. Landing on the couch with a big grin on your face like you’ve just arrived from the Bahamas. You hand over the bottle of whiskey and sit forward, elbows on knees, hands together, looking about the place, then over at me and you say something like: ‘Well, what’s the news?’

I only ever wanted to belong to one person and she wasn’t in that room. And in my heart I knew that even if I was a man comfortable with all the small talk it would take to break into that new life, I didn’t want it. I simply did not want it.

No one, no one really knows loss until it’s someone you love. The deep-down kind of love that holds on to your bones and digs itself right in under your fingernails, as hard to budge as the years of compacted earth. And when it’s gone … it’s as if it’s been ripped from you. Raw and exposed, you stand dripping blood all over the good feckin’ carpet. Half-human, half-dead, one foot already in the grave.

I’d lost all sense of time, you see, couldn’t have given a damn if it was five in the morning and it was time to milk the cows. I would’ve done it, happily. That’s how she made me feel, happy with the world, with myself.

In all our years I never stopped wanting her. Never. Not for one moment. Not for one second. I watched her skin survive the years, softly, folding upon itself. I touched it often, still hopelessly loving every bit of her, every line that claimed her, every new mark that stamped its permanency. We had our tough times like everyone else, but through it all I never looked at anyone else. Never desired another.

Loneliness, that fecker again, wreaking his havoc on us mortals. It’s worse than any disease, gnawing away at our bones as we sleep, plaguing our minds when awake.

‘it was his very breath, beside me in the room or the next room or somewhere in this place, I didn’t care. It was simply knowing he was there, that meant the world to me. I didn’t need him to do anything other than just be alive. Is it the same for you?’