When All Is Said

by Anne Griffin

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

Tony never stopped telling me I was full of greatness. 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.

These days people are all for talking. Getting things off their chest. Like it’s easy. Men, in particular, get a lot of stick for not pulling their weight in that quarter. 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. Men, sitting alone at bars going over and over the same old territory in their heads.

It’s all grand up here in my head but to say it out loud to the world, to a living being? It’s not like we were reared to it. Or taught it in school. Or that it was preached from the pulpit.

How many times did Sadie talk to you that way, I wonder. And is that why you are the man you are? So sure and happy in your life?

See if he’s handled the abandonment better than me.

But, it’s not that I can’t read, I can after a fashion, at my own pace with no one standing over my shoulder. I always found a way ’round things. I was a great one for losing the glasses at the right moment or complaining about the small print.

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.

Maybe, I’d have been happier if you’d been a gobshite. Chip off the old block. Then maybe I could’ve talked to you. Feck it, son, you really pulled the short straw with me. A cranky-arsed father who can’t read for shite.

All I had lost came back at me. A big tsunami of hate and sorrow. How sorry I felt for myself.

I looked away, unable for it. Unable for the lie of a man I would have to become to make my way into their circle. To be accepted, to belong. But here’s the thing, son, 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.

But today has been about trying to make amends for the many times after that great beginning when I stole that smile from your mother’s beautiful face; for all the things I never did or half did and for the many promises I made and broke.

My hands begin to shake when I think over it all, son. Can I, hand on heart, say that I did my best for her?

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.