When All Is Said

by Anne Griffin

It’s the simple things, son, the simple things.

Instead I kept on moving, mumbling away, trying to block out the weight of another ending, another loss in this worn-out life of mine.

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.

But, do you know something? I’d give my last breath right now to see her at that mirror one more time. I’d watch each twist and turn of her hand with complete admiration, appreciating every stroke.

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

People didn’t really do that back then, encourage and support. You were threatened into being who you were supposed to be.

I never asked her how she coped losing the person she knew best. The person who accepted her humanity and all the failings that came with it. The person who loved her unconditionally. The person whose hand was always there to hold. I wish now I had.

When I met your mother, it felt like she’d filled a small piece of the hole that Tony’d left behind. Certainly, her love took the edges off his loss a bit. It was like bubble wrap in a way. Keeping him safe and settled within me, the sharpness gone. But as mad as it sounds, I sort of resented her for robbing that little bit of him from me.

But it’s his living presence I’ve missed the most since your mother’s left. And no amount of talking to him in my head can take the place of being able to see the man, to touch the skin and bone of him, to hear him sup a pint in Hartigan’s. What I wouldn’t give for just one hour of his company. No need for much conversation at all. Our elbows on the counter. A bottle of stout each in front of us. Half empty glasses. Looking out at the town. Tapping our feet to the music on the radio or laughing over the madness of the world. The company of the trusted, what? Being understood without having to explain and not having to pretend all is fine. Being allowed to be a feckin’ mess. The feeling of his pat on my back as he passes behind me to go to the jax. Is it too much to ask for a simple resurrection? But I’m grateful for those years I had him. Isn’t that why I’m sitting here? Giving thanks for a man who shaped me, guided me, minded me and, most of all, taught me to never give up.

There was a love but of the Irish kind, reserved and embarrassed by its own humanity.

And as for Irish men. I’ve news for you, it’s worse as you get older. It’s like we tunnel ourselves deeper into our aloneness. Solving our problems on our own.

But having spent half my life distracted by what was outside – my deals, my empire – I often forgot to see what lay inside and how precious it was.

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.

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.

I should have told her every feckin’ day what a marvel she was.

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.

‘How have you coped?’ I say, instead. ‘With him dying, leaving you, how have you managed to keep going?’ ‘Ah. That. Does one really? That’s more the question. Does one really cope? If I’m anything to go by, then the answer is one doesn’t. Your wife died not too long ago, am I right?’ ‘Sadie, yes.’ ‘Well, you know then, it’s a living hell. You either choose to live with the pain of it or you get the hell out. I decided to drug myself to the eyeballs and imagine him at every corner and in every room of this place. Fat lot of good that did me or Emily for that matter.’ I feel her hand press harder on mine. ‘And you, you’re still with us so I take it you’ve chosen the former also?’

‘The thing I miss most about Jason is not what he said or did,’ she says, her hand long gone from mine, lying flat against her chest now, ‘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?’