Please be aware that this essay contains discussion of death, homophobia, and suicidal ideation. Take what steps you need to protect yourself.
I was not sure whether I wanted to write about this in public. The last time I published what I suppose you would call a ‘personal essay’ in the truest sense of the word — an essay about an experience personal enough that you’d baulk at telling a stranger about it, though I will admit that throwing the weird and troubling shit about your life at strangers in the interest of unbalancing and charming them is more effective than you’d think at times — it was held against me in a way that I did not expect, and that still hurts. (Even admitting that hurt is fraught. Bear with me. I’m doing my best.) But I don’t know how else to mourn, to ensure that someone is remembered, except to write it down. So here I am.
Someone died in April. His name was Norman, and he was related in some capacity to me, though I don’t know exactly how. There is a lot I don’t know, and will probably never know. But I do know that Norman, having remained lucid and sharp into his nineties, lost a leg unexpectedly last year following an acute medical issue. With no mobility, he had no real recourse beyond moving into a care home, which is where I learned two weekends ago that he had passed away.
I know that shortly after he moved into the home, my parents went to see him on a whim. He was one of the last remnants of my mother’s side of the family, which is less a family tree at this stage, and more of a very threadbare family collection of twigs. On that visit, I know that Norman confirmed to them what had been something of an open secret in the family for years: specifically, that he was gay. He also told them that he had been entrapped by police as a much younger man, and the resulting criminal charge had kept him out of a career in teaching.
I did not know Norman well. He would call our landline every so often, while I was growing up, and he and my mother would talk at length every time. She spoke very highly of him: he was smart, he was funny, he had always been kind to her when she was young. She told me over and over that he always asked after me. As I got older, sometimes I would pick up the phone when he called, and we’d exchange nervous pleasantries before I handed him over to my mother. He asked me about university, once when I was home for a holiday, and told me he had been setting aside some books for me, as a gift. I never knew he was gay. Even after I came out, nobody ever gave me reason to suspect.
My parents told me about their visit to Norman over lunch, on one of their carefully-regulated visits to Oxford. I don’t know how to explain the bizarre relief of knowing that somewhere within your family, there is precedent for you. I insisted that my mother pass on his phone number, which she did, and decided then and there that I would make a visit to the care home myself. The public transport from Oxford to Leicester would be unmanageable, my father pointed out, and offered to drive me over; but the last thing I wanted was to have to share whatever Norman had to say to me with my extremely straight and profoundly clueless dad. I could do it, I told myself. I’d wait for a long weekend, or sort out some annual leave, so I could make the trip there and back without risking exhaustion around work and writing commitments; and in the meantime, I would call. It mattered to me. I need you to know that this mattered to me.
I did call, and we did speak — not for very long, but we did. My mother had been right: Norman was smart, and he was funny, and he steamrollered over any worries I’d had about awkward conversation by being handily the most charming phone conversationalist I’ve ever encountered yet. I told him I was hoping to come and pay him a visit, and he said I’d be welcome whenever I liked. There was a pub nearby, he said. We could go to lunch. I promised him: as soon as I could.
You can probably guess how this ends. Right?
Work kicked off into its busiest part of the yearly cycle of horrors. I had to finish redrafting my novel for my agent. There was always a reason to wait, and never any reason to doubt that I’d have more time. Then, of course, the whole world went to shit in a handcart, and the version of the pandemic that tore apart care homes all over the country was somehow substantially worse than the version we had outside. Reader, I fucked up. I didn’t go when I could have gone, and now there is nobody to go to anymore.
I don’t know how he died. I only found out that he had passed when I worked up the nerve to ask my mother on the phone, after months of believing that no news had to be good news, just this once. She had tried to call him weeks ago, and the phone had rung and rung; she had looked him up online and found an obituary in the local newspaper, and that was how she learned that he was gone.
There’s a line that recurs in Hamilton, though I know Hamilton is kind of a tired point of reference in 2020. It goes: I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory. When you’ve been depressed to the point of suicidal ideation, you learn to live hand in glove with the prospect of death. The first time I wished I could die, I was terrified of it; I felt broken and helpless and small. Every time after that, I grew less and less afraid. It’s like abuse. Every little encroachment attacks your sense of what’s normal, until suddenly you’re roommates with the idea of your own annihilation, and that’s inexplicably something you can live with. For some years now I have thought of myself as pretty much okay with death. It’s awful, of course it’s awful; but it’s familiar. It’s not a shock anymore.
But here is the difficulty: what’s become familiar to you is the thought of your own death. Loss is something else entirely, and it hurts differently every single time. And when I learned that Norman had died, I lost a potential connection to queer history that I never made the time to properly forge. I lost a member of my family who had lived quietly through terrible injustices, endured them, and emerged. I lost someone who had cared about me from afar for years, and who I never got to meet as an adult.
I’ve been sitting with that grief for about two weeks. The least I can do, I think, is hold a little memorial. Here in the quiet corners of the internet, in the middle of a plague, as we all get ready to pretend it’s over and go back to school and to work.
I will always regret not making the time. Tell people you love them.
W