The Impossible Truths of Love

by Hannah Beckerman

You need to know that I’ve always loved you even though you were never really mine to love.

There had been a moment, this morning, when she had thought she was not going to be able to endure the day ahead.

There have been tears, insomnia, headaches, anger. There have been mornings of waking to a temporary amnesia before she has remembered this new reality and the shock has hit her again and afresh, as though she is learning it for the first time. There has been the chasm deep in the pit of her stomach, as though her body is not yet ready to acknowledge her loss. There have been those rare moments she has been so busy with funeral arrangements that she has, perversely, forgotten that it is her father who has died. And then she has remembered and the guilt that she had forgotten, even momentarily, is almost as acute as her grief.

It still feels surreal, like a bad dream I can’t wake up from.’ It is less than a fortnight since his death and already these platitudes feel familiar on her tongue, as though she has swallowed a guidebook to grief and can now regurgitate it at will.

Sometimes she feels like a chameleon, adapting herself to suit whatever environment she is in. Other times, it is as though she brings out different incarnations of herself, like outfits in a wardrobe, befitting the occasion. There are times when she wishes there was a way to fuse the various aspects of her life so that she no longer felt comprised of jigsaw pieces that don’t quite fit together. But then she wonders whether perhaps she likes it better this way: that perhaps this compartmentalising suits her, given that this is the way she has chosen to organise her life.

She cannot believe that she will never get to watch him grow up, that he is frozen in time at thirtysix days old, that he will only ever lead an adult life in her imagination.

They are thoughts she cannot stop thinking, thoughts that cause her chest to collapse in on itself, like a sinkhole opening up and swallowing everything in its path.

It seems so unnecessarily cruel to Nell, this theft of a person’s personality, memories, connections. As though ageing isn’t painful enough without dementia killing off so much of what makes a person themselves long before their body surrenders.

Nell is unsure whether the disquiet she is feeling is justified, or whether she is merely collecting scraps of chapters from different books and building a narrative that has never really existed.

Grief, Annie is discovering, does not follow a neat, linear trajectory. It does not, contrary to popular aphorism, get easier with every day. It does not gradually recede, like a tide that only ebbs but never flows. Instead, it is more like an unpredictable season of tropical storms that can be whipped into a tempest out at sea before crashing onto land, disabling everything in its path, without any warning.

She remembers very little about the daytoday events of that time. Her memories are like an abstract painting: a swirl of emotions, a sensory impression.

Grief, she is learning, is love’s echo: it is not possible to have one without the other.

‘I love you, Mum. I need you to know that. I will always love you, even if you were never really mine to love.’