When I think of that time, I think of a fingerprint, lines tracing around each other outwards from the small, intimate core. At heart the family, lovers, the friends and colleagues, spiral outwards, back inwards as you try to catch yourself in freefall
There is a hierarchy to grief. It is profound and right to observe it, especially when deaths happen publicly and violently, when such people as Jack and Saskia, who were just beginning their work and lived with the brightest hope, are killed. Especially then. The beloved young belong to the ones who hold them closest. First and foremost to the intimacy of deep feeling, scent of childhood, growing up, sun holiday. Sound of their footfall, their phrases, the taste of their jokes, trick senses of smell and sight.
Those who are left now must transmute their loss into objects suddenly so precious: necklaces, sunglasses, which yield to the way they laughed: light on water, a certain song. These dear fragments synecdoches of the left-behind. Then they become words, spoken, relayed, written down. A collage of a life. When they open their mourning to the world, it is by kind invitation.
But if grief is a spiral so is guilt. Now for some they bond as double helix in the cells
Survivor’s guilt is felt by those who were invited but did not go to the event, or were not in the same room as where the attack took place; or did not fight the attacker; or were standing near but could not help those hurt; or even those close enough to look into the attacker’s eyes, and speak to him, and say stop. Because we did not die, we can suffer that sense that we have less legitimacy to grieve it seems without end
Some write and apologise for not responding to the invitation to Fishmongers’ Hall, as if they now feel they should have been there, if only to have put their own lives at risk alongside those whose were. Perhaps wanting to have been closer to the feeling that it could have – or should have – been them. Through all of the long months that come, for many that feeling sustains. There should be many words for these kinds of sorrow, these kindred feelings, for us as kin.
And in the bright, cold morning in the atro-city, circling the towers of the University, the whorls of cobbled stone, this grief spirals outwards, and catches all who knew Jack and Saskia well, through work, or slightly, or as image. I did not have the chance to know Saskia, I think of her ambitions in victim support her life touches so many, whether they know it or not. As they do their shopping, visiting, touristing around. And Jack seems everywhere, and Jack is gone. Jack grew up around here. He worked in the local pub; the florist says her daughter was a bargirl at the same time. He had a summer job at the punt operator’s: the plumber says his son worked on the punts with him. Flowers in plastic begin to appear in those places. Silent offerings. Both Jack and Saskia studied and found parts of their vocation here. There is a sense that everyone has died, yet here we are, still moving. My eyes constantly sting in the cold.
Those of us carrying the other cannot find comfort or rest. We cannot speak of the disappeared, the dead, who is horror, who has inflicted terror and horror. There is only this: the parabolic descent. Dive into the wreck of what was still a life, and what ruins of life it left. The possibility of a whole life after that
This is grief as exile. From the pure sorrow that one can have when someone one loves dies. It has the sternest edge. It is illegitimate, transgressive. Laced with something more
There is a desire to be quiet, forever: to be so angry as to rage, and at the same time, to hold everyone close, even closer. Living surrounded by inanimate objects becomes unbearable and absurd. I stay out of my kitchen, away from the knives. (And did the chapel bells continue to mark time: the quarter hour, the half, the hour, the work day, the “day of rest”, as they must in prison?) Even the slightest moment of natural sound – a cat purring, a bird singing (in December – do I remember that right?) seems more necessary, yet more remote.
Face this feeling as a monster turning to eat itself. Repeating the turns. It has its own language I have not yet learned: it has its own grammar. It is a feeling without a word, without a name. It is not grief, or shock, betrayal, or guilt: not only. It is culpability where it lies
He was a guarded man. I taught him fiction now left with so many stories what was apprehendable what was trust in those who invited me in and what was known about him that I was not told of, while students were in prison and in my care though this did not happen in prison, it was partly made there and how any of it was able to happen the way it did at all. Now, I am locked inside what if language fails me
Excerpted with permission from ‘Disenfranchised Grief’ in Aftermath, Preti Taneja, Simon and Schuster India.
