A Final Appointment

(A poem by my dear wife, Jocelyn Almond)

There’s a big, old, kindly fisherman,
So some people say,
Who performs a special duty
Until Judgement Day;
And everyone shall meet him –
Everyone good who dies –
Because he waits to greet them
At the gates of Paradise.

At the end of every weary day,
When I was very small,
I’d find my mother waiting for me
Outside the gates of school.
Now, if one thing keeps me going
Through this sad and weary life,
It’s the thought she’s waiting for me
At the gates of Paradise.

Darling, if I die before you
And ascend to Heaven above,
Heaven won’t be Heaven
Without your precious love.
Until you’re safe there with me,
Nothing will suffice,
So you’ll find me waiting for you
At the gates of Paradise.

61: Earth – Rising

On a spring day in 1975, I had come down to this little house – long before it was to become my little house – to pick up my wife, who was not yet my wife, from where she lived with her parents, to take her back on the bus to my parents’ house, where I was still living, to spend the afternoon and evening together, for the first time ever.

The house was very busy and very noisy that day. My parents were there, and my mother’s par­ents had come round from their little maisonette half a mile away; by brother and his friend were there, as were my sister and her friend. So to get some peace, and find a space in which to talk, we stayed in my bedroom, she on the long sofa, and I perched on the edge of the bed with my elbows on my knees, and we talked and talked. For six hours we talked, and when it was time to take her home again, I was in love, and I was addicted to her conversation. From that point, I craved her company for her conversation. Everything else immedi­ately assumed the role of distraction, whose pur­pose it became to tug the seconds and minutes out of the future until, at last, new conversations would arrive, and my addiction was for the mo­ment satisfied once again. At first, we met every day at school, then, once our courses concluded and the exams were upon us, daily contact ended, and on those days when we did not meet, I would always phone her in the evenings, and perhaps for an hour so, there came the conversations that I craved. We would meet once, each weekend when she would visit my parents’ house, and on one day during the week I would visit her parents’ house. The gaps were filled by phone calls, and by wait­ing, by seeking distractions that used up the inter­vening time between where I was and our next meeting.

And that craving, that addiction, that affliction, has never left me. Everything else, for our entire married life, was subordinate to our conversations, and nothing mattered, not really, apart from our conversations.

So now, all these months after having been cleaved so irrevocably from the conversation that I crave, I find that I experience matters just as I did then, all those years ago, when the world was di­vided into the joy of conversations and the barely endurable discomfort of waiting for conversations. So this is what I am waiting for, and this is why everything is nothing but an attempt to find a dis­traction through which time will pass until it is again time for conversation. Except now, no con­versation can ever come again. And that fact makes the distractions useless, makes the waiting pointless. What I await can never come, yet I find that I am waiting all the same. I do not really, not really want to read Orwell’s 1984, but I read it anyway in order to bring closer – according to my old habit – those new conversations that I crave more than any addict has ever craved his fix. Yet they do not come. So I endure a state of perma­nent withdrawal that will never lessen, as the daily routine of sleeplessness, nightmares, pounding heart, abdominal cramps, revulsion at everything, headaches, dizziness and weeping crash together like runners in the field trying all at once to get through a narrow gate.

I would like my new, my new unwanted life, to be wanted, needed by someone, as my dear wife needed and wanted me for all those years yet, trapped in this despair, I see no way of ever find­ing an opening I might squeeze through. That I could ever do this, strikes me as ridiculous as the notion that I might one day live on Mars, and step out from an agreeable little modular dwelling – where I still have some of my old books – under its protective dome, where it quite often gets as warm as I remember it back on Earth, all those years ago, before the illness came, and we would walk across the little field close to her parents’ house, or explore the Roman Museum at Verula­mium … and where under the dome I would sit on an old, familiar chair watching the horizon, because I know that the Earth will rise in a moment, and as the sky darkens on another Martian day, that distant, distant planet where I knew my con­versa­tions, will grow agreeably bright, hinting at a tranquil blue, and for just a second I will fancy that I can hear her voice calling to me, as she used to, from inside, for she has something new to tell me, and now I do so want to hear it, even though we are on Mars. I would want to keep hearing it forever.

But I am not on Mars, I am here, where I have always been, waiting and waiting for nothing.

[The photograph of Mars is a public do­main image originating with NASA and sourced from the Wikimedia Commons website.]

53: Always – Waiting (2)

Why stay here any longer? Why endure this despair? Such questions have draped them­selves across my daily experiences for such a long time that now they are just part of the furniture, as they say. Simply another aspect of what happens. Especially since my dear wife died, and my mission as her carer ended so abruptly, those questions have grown so large… So I answer them, pretty much every day, when they intrude into my thoughts, I say to them, ‘Let me wait one more day. Something might turn up, something that at last makes real sense of staying, something that will help.’

And I cheat by lining up my projects, for I have to stay here to see them through, and I don’t want to abandon them, or at least I feel I have some obligation to wait and see how they turn out. It’s a sort of trick I am playing on myself. I cannot go yet, because this project, or that project, like an infant, or like my sick wife, needs me to stay to do these things so that it may prosper. And if it does prosper, is that not a sort of prospering for me also?

But there is such a thinness to that reason for staying. I am starting to see through my own trick. And so I introduce another one, by deliberately reading two or three books at the same time, by trying as hard as I may to find them interesting, by underlining phrases and sentences, putting boxes around whole paragraphs, and writing notes all over their pages. I should not go yet, because I have not finished this book, and even though it is not really of any importance … well, something helpful might turn up, and if not proper answers to my predicament, then perhaps something at least comforting, or just interesting, that for a moment shows me a different perspective, from where I can see the sun shining, like it used to, in my dreams.

51: Time – Breaking

There is a part of me, a fundamental, essential part, who does not live in time. He has no aware­ness of things coming and going, of their not being here and then of their being here. For him, my dear J has always been here. She was here already, when I rode my tricycle for the first time, not so much waiting for fate to unfold its complex map of indecipherable interconnections, but just here, like the sky, like dreams, like waking every morning, like hard words. And now…

And now he does not know that she has gone, that my dear J has gone ahead for a while. And so he brings me dreams, every night he brings me dreams, and there she is … sitting, walking now (as in adult life she could not), reading a book to me, telling me how affairs must be ordered. And I am always at least a bit puzzled … ‘But I thought you had died … how odd…’ And sometimes I even start to tell the sorry tale of breathlessness, of the paramedic, of the flashing blue light that on this night had come for her, of the hospital. She pays me no attention when I talk like that.

But my non-temporal self seems so puzzled by it all. No tricycle, no orchard, no grandparents, no wife, and an aging face in the mirror that looks so forlorn and lost, as if pleading for a ticket that will affect the transition out of the prison camp to somewhere a bit nicer than that. And he says, in such bewildered tones, ‘But they are right here. I have just been up and down the pavement outside, and the bearings are easing. I have my married life ahead of me, don’t I? Will anything be achieved? Will my grandmother stop snarling at my inability to make money? Did I not, then, ever master any­thing of value? I will learn to play the guitar and the lyre, won’t I? Though those tunes I wrote seem ready to pop into my mind, new and as yet unfin­ished, at any moment…’

Has time itself broken? Or has it always been like this?

49: Forever – Waiting

Even though I have attained the age by which a proportion of men retire and begin to ease them­selves into old age (though, in fact, my state pension cannot be claimed for a few more years), I am all the same hounded by that deep and power­ful impression that has always been near the front of my conscious mind since the age of nineteen, that my life’s mission will soon commence – what­ever it is – and that in this new condition, I will feel differently about things, value things, value myself, differently. For over four decades I have sensed that my life’s mission – whatever it is – is about to begin, and I so very much want it to begin. Of course, I have already discovered, and completed my other mission, to care for my sick wife for the entire duration of her adult life, and I know that many people will look askance and think, but that was his life’s mission, surely? It was a mission, yet it never at any point attained the sta­tus of the mis­sion. That unknown mission, so my gut feeling tells me, is yet to begin. I accept now, after all this time, that it may never begin. That sense of hoping for, needing, a beginning, is just that, an always-to-be-unfulfilled sense of not being where I want to be. But, dear goodness, it is such a strong feeling, so dominating my waking experi­ence, it is as if everything is muted and suppressed, further away than it should be, not properly expe­rienced at all.

On this new mission that will not present itself, I am at least content, perhaps even confident, in some measure fulfilled or wholly fulfilled, if not objectively valued myself by the wider world, at least finding value myself in what I am doing, that this thing, or rather its fruits, will be of use to oth­ers, something that will give my life a purpose that will lift it above the purposeless that so weighs on me at the moment, and has weighed on me since childhood.

But what a strange circumstance this is! I may choose from so much, read anything – in English – from the world’s massive, massive repository of books and articles, perhaps even find a way of learning new skills, earning new qualifications (if I could have my life over again, I would put archae­ology near the top of my list). Yet I do not know how to choose from this bewildering array of alternatives. I think someone in my predicament would be better off in the pre-Roman Iron Age, where my choices for what to do in life could be counted on the fingers (not including the thumb) of one hand: become a farmer, an artisan, a black­smith, or a healer. But the world has grown com­plicated, and I do not know what it wants of me. Time is running short, and I suspect, with a sense of dread, that this unknown path I cannot find, so cannot tread, will elude me all my days.

48: Still – Waiting

As a person passive who waits to see what floats towards me on life’s variable stream, what comes? What attracts my attention? What seems worth picking up and holding to? What follow? What look into? What learn? What throw passion into? For these past few years, life’s stream has seemed such a poultry affair, filled with little things of no value, mostly dross, disturbances, annoyances, difficulties, frustrations, not even a false promise, let alone a promise. For this is the lot meted out to humanity as a whole, the experi­ence of everyone, everywhere, for the whole of time. There is no personal fiefdom of misery, but a collective prison camp where all must gather, from which only the insane and deluded ever think they have escaped.

And as a person active, what do I stride out towards? What prospectus do I examine to weigh my choice? Do I suppose the existence of some­thing, and in blind faith set off to find it, master it, possess it? There is no vantage point that I can reach from whose raised summit I may see that clearly. What to choose? What to choose? And why? It all seems such a nonsense, now … ambition, career, empire-building (oh, such a grandiose notion), making something of myself – for what end? Life’s miseries are not dealt any blows by such egotistical cravings, whether one’s desires succeed or not. Striving, driving forward, taking up, asserting one’s will seem the preserve, perhaps not entirely (I will grant you that) of the selfish, the greedy, the self-opinionated, the cruel and the stupid. No value, then, in ambition for the quietist, for the lover of sunny days in gardens. Either the sun shines, or it does not. Either fate takes you to that garden, or it does not. The man mistreated in a prison cell may conjure in imagination the most exquisitely cultivated curtilage, and place himself there, and the glow that comes through his narrow window from beyond closed lids may be shafts of sunlight scattered by the most beautiful of boughs, laden with sweet fruits.

Where does all this get me? There is nothing to pick up, nothing I can see that fires the chase. All is waiting quietly in such sorrow…

31: Always – Waiting (1)

Lost in memories, I can sometimes forget myself. I have no idea whose life it is I am recollecting.

Sometimes I feel that I must be a time traveller sent on a mission from the far, far future, and that is why I feel so strongly that I do not belong here – but I have forgotten who I really am, and I have forgotten my mission. I have been accompanied all my life by an impression that there is something I should be doing, but I cannot remember what it is. Sometimes the intensity of this sensation is unbearable. Sometimes I feel that I am waiting for my memory to recover, and sometimes I forget that that is what I am waiting for.

In the absence of my mission to direct me, I have always thought that my life has yet to properly begin, that it hasn’t actually started yet.

20: Enthusiasm – Lacking

What I haven’t yet done tires me out. I am already exhausted by the things I must do tomor­row. Rather, it is the mere anticipation of having to commit myself to action that is so debilitating. I can tolerate thoughts of writing, if no one has any expectations of me, and if I have no expectations of myself. And the idea of reading isn’t too un­comfortable, though this very much depends upon the precise nature of my projected reading matter. But everything else is unbearably wearying, especially the thought of having to prepare food and having to eat it. The thought of dealing with other people, meeting them, talking with them, especial­ly strangers, is debilitating. Any anticipation of having to sort things out, of having to move them about, of having to decide how to order them and what to keep and what to throw away, simply crushes me.

I wonder whether I have ever experienced enthusiasm in the way that I think other people expe­rience it? Not to feel a tremendous weight of aversion for something is perhaps the best I can mus­ter. Even though I am not every day scrubbing the floors or cleaning up filth, it seems to me that life is nothing but an endless, cheerless, numbing, exhausting chore. Would that I could have a feel­ing that is different from this. There is nothing I can do to effect that change in my perception. So I wait and wait, and hope for some miraculous change, a cure perhaps, that would render living something less than abominably aw­ful.

5: Waves – Crashing

Imprisoned on this salty shore where, in my dreams, I bide, I cast a stare to distant star and sigh in my despair. Did ever sun rise on this lone­ly strand? Or was it always grey twilight here? The only sounds I hear come from the surf that surges up the shingle and from the mounting gale that starts to shred the leaves of palms that block my way behind.

I stand and wait and hope to see a light that no star has shed on me, but comes instead from dis­tant lantern swinging on a line, on a boat, far out to sea. For that must mean my friend has come for me, a friend I do not know, who somehow knows my desperate plight, so comes to rescue me.

And were I on a boat of mine, upon those fate­ful seas, I too would sail a course in hope of find­ing souls to save.

But as before, no lantern shines, no friend will come this time. The same shore waits for further dreams, when despair will prod my hope to stir, and I will stare across the waves, and hope again in vain.