Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

by Max Porter

Shuffling around, waiting for shock to give way, waiting for any kind of structured feeling to emerge from the organisational fakery of my days.

There should be men in helmets speaking a new and dramatic language of crisis. There should be horrible levels of noise, completely foreign and inappropriate for our cosy London flat. There were no crowds and no uniformed strangers and there was no new language of crisis. We stayed in our PJs and people visited and gave us stuff.

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.

Various other things slipped. We pissed on the seat. We never shut drawers. We did these things to miss her, to keep wanting her.

We watched London and London offered us possible mothers in jeans and striped T-shirts and Ray-Bans, so we spotted them and liked the nasty insensitive self-harm of it. We were blasé with a babysitter who said, ‘How can you laugh about it, it’s so sad?’

Caught baffled by the perplexing slow-release of sadness for ever and ever and ever. Which I suppose, looking back, was because of us. He couldn’t rage. He couldn’t want to die. He couldn’t rail against an absence when it was grinning, singing, freckling in the English summer tweedle dee tweedle dum in front of him. Perhaps if Crow taught him anything it was a constant balancing. For want of a less dirty word: faith. A howling sorry which is yes which is thank you which is onwards.