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.

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.

I often wondered, did those hands that pocketed our cash ever ache for the touch of the soil as they held the smooth glass or the cold concrete or the dusty coal of their new lives? At night in their dreams, did they move with the rhythm of a scythe or reach to calm the hind of a cow before milking?

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

She was so self-contained that sometimes I think I missed the full extent of the hurt and guilt. I did my best to be on guard for it. 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.

seen. It was too much even for me, a man of forty-three, to try to comprehend what Sadie had said, let alone a child of four. Loving yourself? The very thought.

enough. I liked to stroll around the alien streets, listening to the alien voices. Never knew I was that much of an ear-wigger. Could’ve hung around those street corners all afternoon, if I was let. It helped me realise we were no different from our American cousins – the same things matter the world over: saving face and money.

I swear I can see the steam rising from your head, all those brain cells you must be burning up. 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

And there, in pockets of twos and threes, in front and to the side of them, stood my great hope: my peers. Those who would pick me up and stick me back together again. My stomach lurched and my heart slowed with the effort of it all.

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. Jesus wept.

I can’t do it on my own any more. I never dreamt the day I met her that there would come a time when I’d find it hard to breathe because her toothbrush no longer sits beside mine

That’s how she made me feel, happy with the world, with myself.

‘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?’