My Plague Year: The Plague

I was at an appointment with a career service this week, and I asked the adviser if I should keep my unfinished Masters in there, explaining that I had withdrawn from the course, or whether I should leave a gap.

She asked me if I intended to return to it. What a question. I still remember the morning when I made the decision to quit. My sister had called my husband the night before, to tell us that my father was dead.

I had just come back from a run. I was teasing my husband because he’d sneakily eaten of the Easter eggs. We’d just finished eating tacos. I was sitting in an armchair, and when my husband told me, I replied, ‘it’s not true.’ My body started to shake. The chair shook. It was like that moment in Mulholland Drive when Naomi Watts goes to the cinema and realises the truth of what she’s done has been revealed, and everything shakes.

I howled. I had always thought of myself as cold, unable to cry the way other people did. Yet that night, I cried all night. I woke myself up crying. I couldn’t sleep, and doing anything else seemed profane. That life continues is the cruelest insult when it comes to grief, because you have to navigate around the fact you have been plucked out of your normal life. Everything demands an explanation, and yet nobody wants to particularly hear it when you give.

So that next morning, my husband walks me to a café on the other side of the river, because I can’t just sit in the house. Through my tears, I explain that I’ll just have to give up studying for my MA. What else can I do? I can think of nothing I would want to do that gives me pleasure in any way. My pleasure is a guilt. For my dissertation, I’m writing a novel where the main character’s father dies. How could I ever hope to touch that work again, when I was navigating a deep fear within my art as if it was something so abstract.

The bubble of a funeral is a shared madness. The funeral home has a bar attached, and someone I don’t remember tells me I have to eat something. So I eat a little, and I drink a lot, and I smoke some, and life goes on and I feel guilty for the pleasure of it. Then we finish our calamares, and we go and cremate my father.

Then the next day, we bury him. The hotel in Gibraltar overlooks the cemetery. My husband asks if I want to move rooms, and this time I am so caught up in this insanity of grief and death that I say no, because I think it’s so ridiculous that I have to laugh at it. The cemetery is by the airport. Every time I fly in and out of Gibraltar, I will forever see my father’s grave. And I am sure in time that will be some form of comfort.

The funeral ends and I see family I haven’t seen in years. I’m perversely amused that we’re standing where my father, my grandfather, my great-grandparents and my uncle are buried, and I am talking about my career prospects. Then everyone leaves, and the bubble pops. Am I allowed to talk about this any more?

The woman at the careers office tells me I can omit my withdrawn MA from my CV, but then I would have a gap. I want to tell her it is a gap, a deep chasm that will never close. Then she says ‘or you can leave it in, if you want to state the reason you left it.’ I nod. ‘I’m sure you have a good reason.’ she says.

This is the moment when you make a decision. When the words can come out and you know there will have to be some sort of performance. You can say ‘my father died’ and then you get the pause, and the intake of breath, and the look. They tell you they’re sorry, and that’s fine, but I don’t think the look ever goes away unless they’ve been where you are now, but that particular club is for another day.

Instead, you can nod and say yes and let it go, and then you feel deep shame, like death is something you should be ashamed of. So sometimes you say it: ‘my father died’ and you feel better but you know what you have passed on is contagion. You are plagued, and you have passed on a portion of the grief disease to the other person, and that sadness has stayed within them.

And of course, you are not allowed to pass sadness. So young, and always so happy. So calm and relaxed and well put-together. You should always be there for another drink and another dance and another night out where everyone can feel happy because you are there. And if you are sad, you are perhaps useless. Nobody wants you to come and hear you say the three poisonous words that will put an end to the fun.

And yet, everyone presses you for things.

I was in a bar over summer in Roanoke, Virginia with my husband and my father-in-law and my brother-in-law, and I am feeling down because all I’ve done most of the summer is sit on the sofa and eat. I am feeling down because we are in a beautiful part of the world and I feel like half of my feeling is missing. I am feeling down because coffee and alcohol make me feel like my heart is about to explode, and I wake up at 1am in a sweat thinking about my father’s body on the floor of his caravan covered in blood.

The bartender asks what I’ll be drinking and I say tonic water, and she replies ‘Just tonic water?’ and I say yes, and she says ‘Are you sure?’ and I say yes, and every time she comes back to take an order she asks again, in that tone, like I’m the sad boy in the corner who doesn’t drink. All I want to do is tell her, and pass on my plague. But I don’t, because at that point the plague infects me all over again too.