THE PALE SOFT PALACES OF DEATH

Each day en route to the hospital I passed a washed out family photo montage which sat close to a window by the stairs in my flat. The sun would hit hard and violent, or sedate and dull, but as the moons rolled on my childhood scenes took on a softer and more spectral quality that reflected my internal gaze.

Hallways are liminal spaces, gates between here and there. Just like dying.

Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings, presiding over the pauses between conflicts, paid witness to this passage of time.

Once there had been generous gardens. Ponds full of tadpoles to be collected in glasses and frogs to catch; a tortoise sauntering about the lawn. Air, I recall, the temperature of my mother’s body.

Then it was dusk. Beside this wide expanse of water, a collection of fur, flesh, and skeleton was laid out neatly.

Boneless I slid into the water. A gentle surrender. My nervous system calmed and I allowed myself to imagine how it must feel to drown. I played there for a while. I wanted to be between worlds like you.

I had watched both fathers die now within months of each other. Both hearts slowly failing. When you know that this is it you can observe and feel into that time. It stretches out. It bends and it folds. And it flickers, because you are attuned to them being neither fully here nor there, but rather suspended in between. Before sleep I’d feel a constriction in my throat, a well of energy bubbling up in my thorax, what I think was a reserve of love opening up my chest and stretching out of me to be carried in the ether to them. My heart was very open then.

Then I was no older than four, in the bath with my dad, combing the hairs on his legs with a doll’s brush. The warm water becomes milky and soft, a looseness of zero resistance, a rare gift of a pause between generations.

He was at rest and I was playing quietly close to his calm and muscular body. As he died there was a resonance of that moment. A quiet intimacy.

Decades later I would lay in the bath with Ariel. I would nurse her and she’d fall asleep on the breast, skin to skin, warm milk in her full stomach, us both supported by water. Perhaps it was like being in the womb; I wondered if it had been peaceful there – maybe more so than being out here, but who knows.

As the last few days descended my dads eyes lost their focus. He was blind and mute and pale. Just beyond pale soft palaces filled with our breath, collapsing and expanding, shape shifting.

I peered into his open mouth and saw death eating him from the inside out.

In the Tibetan traditions the monks discuss the elements leaving the body as we die; when the fire dulls we feel cold, when earth leaves we feel inertia, the water element was drying out in my father so he experienced thirst.

Mouth care is a way to tend to the dying. The colour palette of the NHS medical supplies felt like the aesthetics of SpongeBob. Oral swabs offer up tiny reservoirs of water for comfort and relief. I imagined the boxes and boxes of them that would land from goodness knows where to this London hospital. Who made them? How many might a box hold, how many mouths would they service? How many deaths would they witness? Shallow attempts to swallow resulted in bouts of hiccups in my father. This reminded me of Ariel when she was in my belly so I giggled.

There were very few visitors to the hospital. Ariel and my father had not become close, and she declined to see him. A man who worked at the home came once. He and my father had sparked up a friendship. He would tell me that my father’s last-minute cancellations, transparent excuses when we had planned a visit, was due to his shame. He had kept the last year of his drinking a secret.

I am grateful that I was not alone to tend to him. That the state would take care of this dying business. Comfort and Dignity became key words over those days. The nurses cleaned him with the doors shut, tucked him into his bed, and they would then allow me in. They filled him full of opioids in an attempt to settle his body and mind, both of which appeared disturbed; the Buddhists and the palliative team agreed that we die in accordance with how we lived. In those moments, paying witness to his pain, my motivation to live sober and in peace might perhaps exceed my ability to do so. It was a work in progress.

Our favourite nurse was a man from the Gambia. He wore the cross and told me about his family, his home country and of his faith. I learnt later that if he had arrived on a temporary visa he would have no recourse to public funds, which means no access to benefits which was dropping many nurses into poverty. The government had also recently brought into law a change in policy to prevent social care workers from bringing dependents when they migrate to the UK.^[1]

The economic and social disregard for a person who was now so tenderly looking after my father disgusted me. Surely, if we wanted this man’s labour our sovereign responsibility was to offer some provision of care? Perhaps they just don’t know what care looks like anymore – the social and economic requirements for a human to live their potential rather than operate in survival mode. This was a racism inherent in a nation reliant on cheap labour from overseas to care for our elderly and ill. I felt shame, sadness and anger around my heritage as a British national at that moment. I looked at my white hands and wondered where the blood was.

We stood next to each other at the end of my fathers bed, race, class, gender unimportant at this moment, two humans caring for one Other in their own way. I asked him when he thought my dad would die, he told me he would go in his own time. We simply would wait with him. Patiently. I wondered then if I had been impatient somehow. He had a gentle smile and tired but kind eyes that brokered exhaustion and grace; one could operate with both. Economic insecurity and loneliness was enough to embitter anyone, how to counter such maladies? We operate as close to God as we can. This man had that.

I held my fathers face and stroked his white beard. I closed my eyes and the feeling of it in my hands reminded me of you, Thoth. I wondered at that moment if that was what had initially attracted me to you. The sensuality of this pale soft fur. Maybe loving you had allowed me, in some way, to continue loving him. That is why you returned to me 49 days after his death.

I studied him; a body that had once felt like protection, at times also a threat. I touched his calves, followed his veins, stroked his feet that had taken him around the world, and rested the back of my hands in his palms. Hands that I needed to remind myself had held me as a baby. Things are rarely all bad.

I took his watch so I might keep a part of him with me. I listened to it night after night, falling asleep to its rhythm knowing that on this plane of human existence time would keep rolling and tomorrow the sun would rise regardless of him. Regardless of me. Regardless of Ariel. We would all return to ground.

I spent time with the huge scar down the centre of his chest and I put my ear to his heart. I heard it slow day by day. A body winding down. As the days went on I couldn’t bring myself to look at the hollowness growing in depth beyond his rib cage.

In the preceding months and by the grace offered courtesy of my sobriety I had been physically drawn to my dad. I mean I really wanted to just be close to his frail body. I would reach out to hold his hand as we’d cross the road, I’d momentarily rest my head on his shoulder until we both noticed the odd intimacy between us and would straighten up. It was a gift this time you gave to us and I lay with him in this liminal state for eleven days. This was my chance to flood him with a latent love I could finally express. He was my captive. Sometimes I wondered if I crowded him so I would retreat. Then, on his last day of living Cirrus clouds gathered outside our window. It was as if their wispy formations carried my voice into the huge sky so you might understand me more clearly. It wasn’t hard to say goodbye. I’d lost him before. His double was everywhere.

I lent in and whispered “I’ve seen birth and death up close now and there’s not much in it. It’s violent and sweet all at the same time.”

Paul Thek wrote to Peter Hujar reflecting on how Peter had told him all his photos were an attempt to find his father. All of my lovers and a drive that edged death were something similar and then in those last months, weeks and particularly the days I found him again.

I read about Hujar’s life. He’d run away from home aged 16 to escape an alcoholic and abusive environment. My mother ran away from my dad under similar conditions and it had felt like my dad ran away from me aged ten.

Sometimes the threat is loud and coming from the inside. Sometimes we know we don’t fit. Or we just can’t do it. Whatever IT it is that we simply cannot do that. To survive we need to be free of THAT. I think in the case of my father I was the THAT that at some point he struggled to do. There was conflict, then absence and then longing, a lot of longing. Eventually I learnt to direct my love towards God.

Intimacy and vulnerability resonate in Hujar’s portraits where love and rebellion rise. Many of his subjects seemed to hold power, vitality and grace, or at least he caught them in a moment where this was true. His photos to me were expressions of freedom, alongside sometimes an inevitable dissent, photographed always with empathy. There was a wildness in his work, a wildness I could see in my dad and in myself.

I considered us all, Hujar, my dad and the wild boars of the Forest of Dean.^[2] We all had an ability to work the ground, move with courage and were potentially best when up against a wall. Life and its will to survive. A pulsation.

And then we’re done and are gone and all that energy and force moves elsewhere. In the days that followed his death I lost track of who I was talking to, God or my dad. Sometimes something talked back.^[3]

I prayed that my father not be alarmed by the sounds, lights and rays of this indeterminate state, to understand this too would pass. He would move beyond the astral realms into the heights of pure concept, existing as pure potential in all the ideas I have ever had. Luminous we reached altitudes where oxygen gave way to pressures so low I turned a cool blue.

It was then that the cosmic snake once again revealed herself, this time winding her coils tight around my neck and squeezed and I wanted to drift but he cut me free and I fell from 8000 feet into a pale taffeta nest. My body, his, yours, hers, the borders and sovereignty of self sometimes collapse.

Sometime later his remains lay beside us and Ariel told me, eyes closed, nearing sleep, that my father was faced with a choice, him or me so he volunteered himself. Over time, I realised that this would not manifest for me as an immediate threat to life, but a slow and tenacious one. The lessons my ancestors would share with us deep in the sanctuary of our cave in those months that followed made this clear.

These insights came on silent and cloud free nights, where the ground underneath and before us would rapidly lose its heat. You would run cold, your fur would stand on end and the layer of air immediately above the surface of your fur would cool to its dew point. Then a mist or shallow fog would rise. It was as if we were looking out over open and exposed moors, cold air would sink into the hollows as far as we could see as we sat holding hands. A medium between worlds, you would hesitate before you spoke.