Overcompensating, my mother said,
reminding us,
whilst trying not to, touting,
we had watched everyone—
overzealous, champagne flutes,
dying to a granular was not oddly specific,
nor highly unusual—
and even if it was,
we owed you the performance
that it wasn’t.
Dying is hardly special, you said,
it is so frequent it barely warrants
an occasion,
and we laughed at the nakedness
of our desire to weep.
Nine months, something, something—
your words beyond, terminal,
did not register as much as your
fastidiousness about the medical details,
and our need to make sense
of your impending absence—
the revised version of you,
dying as you stood there,
before us,
dying in a mustard paisley op-shop
button up,
beside a celebrant that grinned
like someone kept aloof for authenticity.
As we stared
at the pressed edges of your final
evening outfit, we wondered if
you were as stoic in the fitting room
as you were, when you said,
I do,
knowing that you would never
succumb to the strains of monotony,
or learn the sexless beauty of cohabitation.
We were struck by your lightness,
your reluctance to beleaguer grief,
and our lack of idea of what we might
say to someone who was planning
a communion without a vision of continuity.
You were never ostentatious but
you lifted the glass flamboyantly
over the supermarket sponge cake like
it was your last chance to flirt with the
things you might have never wanted to be,
as much as the things you would have been—
like happily married,
like committed in a way
some people can never find it in themselves to be,
like wearing the same shoes everyday
as a testament to your modesty.
When we emptied your apartment,
we found that you had already
arranged most of it for us for fear
of being a burden—
the act of dying embarrassed you,
we read in your journal,
that you thought you had
somehow failed to fulfil what
you should have been able to.
Dying made you feel more inadequate
than sad. More negligent than remorseful
and these thoughts
were almost too heavy to pack into
the boxes with your books that
had given us a false sense of your continuity—
you had seemed as well as you
could have been, as you continued
to hoard them and dress for work
each morning like your life was a panorama
still stretching out before you.
You needed constancy to make peace
with the unlived time
and to believe
that death was unremarkable—
and although we all thought it,
no one said it,
that buried in the familiar choreography
of your world there could have been a
sense of refuge from reality—
an avoidance of the facts,
as you went on plunging
into your work, I thought, as I
watched your bride cross the
registrar room in her wedding leggings
and her Mary Janes that she wore
every day with a sense of pragmatism that
almost exceeded your own.