Shadow Run

This then was the dark period of my life. I’d heard of such things just the same as I had heard of tigers. Saw one in a zoo once. Didn’t touch me or my life though. Wasn’t much more than a curio in an antique shop. I didn’t relate. Turns out that I didn’t relate to much of anything.

The day that Arthur Higgins died was as unremarkable as the man himself. A late September morning hove into view and Arthur was not there to see it. They say he died in his sleep. I took to wondering how that may be. Whenever I had an issue with my health I awakened in the wee hours and paid for my failure to attend to healthy living. I have a notion that were I to die in the early hours of a new day, the hours that most devote to sleep, I would be more wide awake than I ever am during the day.

Did Arthur die in his dreams? I think about this still. Do we dwell in a parallel land whilst we sleep? A life support to the troubled world we occupy during our waking hours. And if we die there, where do we go? I like to think the dreamland is where we came from before this interlude of life, and it is where we will return. So to die there is one hell of a bummer. I don’t like to think of Arthur going to hell. He was too rigid in his ways for such an eventuality.

The date on the certificate of his death was the same date as the morning that Arthur never saw. This is another thing I have worried away at. I’d assumed that the date would have been the night before. Maybe this is a case of rounding up so a fella gets an extra day of life chalked up. When in doubt, give the deceased the benefit of that doubt. I hope the paperwork matches at the other end. Their equivalent of passport control doesn’t bear thinking about.

I’ve talked about Arthur because he is where it all began. Arthur was my father and the sole representative of those people who made this life of mine possible. I never knew my mother. She wasn’t around when I was old enough to ask after her. And Arthur said very little about her other than to confirm that she was not there. There were no photos of her. No keepsakes. All possible fossils, relics and linkages to the woman who had carried me within her for the best part of a year did not exist. 

Sometimes I fantasised about my origins. I checked the world around me for anomalies. Searched for evidence that I was little more than a lab rat. In a way, I suppose that I was. My life with Arthur was sanitised in that way boys will recollect when their Mum went away and Dad stepped into the feminine breach. Meals were odd. They may have been hot, but they lacked warmth. 

My childhood was a disconnect. All of me wasn’t there. The absence of the maternal side of my family was so complete that I was like half a house. My insides were exposed and I was uninhabitable. Funny how a child can feel. Sad that they never share the biggest secret of their existence with a single soul. In the keeping of that secret they remain adrift. Lack the connection that allows them to make sense in this world.

The day Arthur died changed everything. These things are never marketed or diarised. There is no fanfare for the change in a life. At some point you flick back through the pages and you see where one chapter ended and another began. The books of our lives are formatted after the fact. Others can read us far more easily than we ever read ourselves.

This haphazard and lackadaisical unfolding of life shunts meaning this way and that. I was blown hither and thither in the days after Arthur’s end. I had inherited his practical approach to the machinations of life. I had a funeral to take care of. It was only when I ran out of tasks to keep me busy that I was hit with yet another lack. The initiation of this lack carried with it a cold hilarity. I could not for the life of me think of anyone to invite to the funeral.

In the end, I posted news of Arthur’s death where I could and on the day of the ceremony I sat in the front pew of the crematorium and wondered whether I would be alone in singing unfamiliar hymns and listening to irrelevant prayers before the wooden box containing a portion of my life rolled along a conveyor belt into the yawning mouth of finality.

Two people attended the service. One of them an elderly lady who had left before the end so I never got to make her acquaintance. The remaining congregant was called Norman. He worked with Arthur many years back. So long ago that it was another life. The details of that life were something Norman feigned an inability to convey. We parted as strangers and there were no promises of a reunion.

Afterwards, I went to a nearby pub. I’d only ever been in that pub once before and that was to scope it out as a suitable location, were I to have to cobble together an impromptu wake for mystery guests at a funeral I struggled to believe was real because people like Arthur don’t die. They move away to spend an eternal retirement by the coast. I’ve seen those closed communities and that was where Arthur was destined. The accident of his ending was a travesty that was beyond my comprehension. The instructions of his life had not been adhered to and he was left incomplete.

Despite the insulating fog of my confusion, the shadow of grief that is compulsory in such circumstances fell upon me like a Winter duvet in the height of a muggy Summer. My reaction to such discomfort was to run. I am not alone in this. I’ve yet to meet anyone who turned to face their grief, introduced themselves and shook its hand on the very day that it came calling. To one extent or another we are all liars, cheats and cowards and somehow we know that grief belongs to that warrior family known as the Great Levellers. There’s no hiding and there is no escape from such as these. But since when did that stop us from running and secreting ourselves from the reality of the matter?

At first I sensed the presence of my grief. Always I put it behind me. I figured that as long as I busied myself and travelled in the same direction then it could never catch up with me. I suspect there are those who adopt this as a life plan and it is successful for them to some degree or another. An incessant marathon. A gruelling journey from beginning to end with no time for a picnic of the soul.

In my case, the shadow cast by my grief eventually eclipsed my days. When I’d read of dark days I’d thought the extent of the darkness was a sadness that could readily be illuminated by a well placed smile. This though was a whole new world and the harbinger of that world stood right behind me and breathed down my neck. I felt its saliva dripping onto my flesh and all I could think of was the deterioration of Arthur’s incomplete remains. He may have been dust on the four winds of a world that ceased to exist for me but still he decomposed and rained upon me. Foul tears of a lament I closed myself to as I grimly walked away from the truth of him.

My indefatigable grief kept pace with me throughout those foolish days. It stayed at my shoulder and threatened an embrace that would undo me forever. Still, I grit my teeth and banished my tears with a spiteful will. 

I will not do this.

These were the words of my denying spirit. I had no words for what I would do. No notion of how to chart a course through the remainder of my days. All I had was an evasion of the inevitable. 

With each passing day the presence of my grief became more persuasive and I felt its growing power. The pull of it grew even as I continued to place one foot in front of the other. Now there were the ghosts of words forming in the gossamer thin gap between me and the shadow that would not be denied. Dark thoughts that danced between us and mocked my ignorance and cowardice.

The song of my grief began as a whisper and built and built until it was the screams and cries of the damned. An asylum of existence that spoke of the misery of the ages. Darker and darker was the path before me. Ghosts loomed and threatened to bar my way in a life that was no longer my own. Not like this. I was in a state that vaporised the reality of me and left me in a cell of limbo.

The sense of everything coming to a head jarred my senses. I regressed to an age where I would stamp my foot and shout at the unfairness of life. A tantrum was building. A nonsensical fight was brewing. In a moment of detachment I laughed at this solitude of madness, and as that laughter died down and fell into an ominous silence, the world turned and I faced the creature that had formed in the shadow of my self-imposed exile from reality.

The shock of the confrontation stopped my heart and I wondered whether this was how Arthur had exited stage right. A final and fatal sin of the father being visited upon the hapless son.

There in front of me was a dark creature. My grief made flesh. As I stood face to face with my nemesis I tasted my own blood. The muscles of my body spasming. Mouth closing and teeth biting down upon tongue. There was something enlivening in the taste of my life and I reared up before my enemy. Throwing my arms in the air and roaring defiantly in its featureless face.

The creature did not pause or shrink, instead it mimicked my movements, but no sound issued forth from its gaping maw. Instead there was a stench of death and a fetid feeling of eternal absence. I could stand it no longer. I threw myself at the monster that had stalked me these past months. A monster a lifetime in the making. And we fell into an embrace at last. 

There is no telling how long we wrestled in the mud of my life. We fought and fought until I sat astride the darkness that had threatened to consume, and I pummelled it towards a submission that would never come. I persevered all the same, knowing this was how it must end. I punched and I screamed and as the energy seeped out of me I pleaded with it to cease my torment. I kept up the onslaught with every fibre of my being until I collapsed upon my foe and wept at last.

No sleep claimed me in the aftermath of that battle of soul and will, but still the waking day approached. And as the light of the new day fell upon me I saw my shadow unfurl and awaken. I lay battered and bruised and watched as my shadow took its place in the world and we became one at last. Then I cried tears of a joy that had eluded me all my life. And I laughed through those tears as I saw the truth of my shadow. That it was made possible by my light. We were one in this life of contrasts that spoke of meaning. And my grief and my love were one also.