xmas countdown: 7(ish) more sleeps [cw: death, grief]

This Christmas - Lachlan Denton & Studio Magic

In September, I bought a book of poetry called Mourning Songs. It’s about the size of my palm, its pressed paper cover features a lovely drawing of chrysanthemums, it appeared beside the register at my favourite bookstore one evening, and it was a terrible, terrible disappointment.

I should have read the introduction before buying it. It seemed like the collection would be so apropos, but instead it’s like this:

The poems in this collection sing of grief as they praise life. ... As any bereaved survivor knows, there is no consolation. ‘Time doesn’t heal grief; it emphasizes it,’ wrote Marianne Moore. The loss of a loved one never leaves us. We don’t want it to. In grief, one remembers the beloved. But running beside it, parallel to it, is the joy of existence, the love that causes pain of loss, the loss that enlarges us with the wonder of existence.

Um, no, thank you. I do not want to be enlarged by the “wonder of existence”. It was really wonderful when Zach existed, and everything is just worse now. Maybe this doesn’t make for saleable books of life-affirming poetry, but, damn it, it’s true.

I’ve struggled to find music about death that doesn’t try to make something beautiful from it. That’s a fine impulse, of course, but I’d rather have my feelings validated than romanticized. I haven’t found many unvarnished songs of mourning, but the few I've discovered mean a lot to me.

In the first verse of Real Death, Phil Elverum sings: when real death enters the house/all poetry is dumb. 

I sometimes fill the silence of bike rides without Zach on the phone by singing the repetitive centre of LCD Soundsystem's Someone Great: and it keeps coming and it keeps coming and it keeps coming til the day it stops.

In September, the only xmas music blog I follow posted this song. Lachlan Denton was in a band with his younger brother, who died suddenly last year. His brother's name was Zac. Zac was twenty-four, and will never be older. Lachlan made an album called A Brother about (for?) him. I feel a strange mixture of gratitude and envy, listening to it.

I’m grateful because I don’t have many anniversaries for Zach to haunt. This song opens with:

This Christmas you won’t be home. The first since you came to us.

I think such first times are hard on a lot of people. In Levels of Life, Julian Barnes writes, of his first year without his wife: "instead of being studded with events, it is now studded with non-events: Christmas, your birthday, her birthday, anniversary of the day you met, wedding anniversary".

I will notice some absences this Christmas in Ontario. I won't lean out of my mum's kitchen to see Zach entertaining whatever vestiges of our Waterloo friend group have materialized at the Solstice party. I won't hold their arm as we walk back from seeing Star Wars with my dad and brother, and they won't explain who all these Disney-owned characters were in the old extended universe. I won't sit by the gas fireplace in my old apartment and read out loud to them until I start to fall asleep.

But these will be aching moments, not amputated traditions. My relationship with Zach wasn't shaped like that. We spoke nearly every day, and no one knows me better, and my thinking is so interwoven with theirs that I still feel frayed and anonymous and dull, but time zones and borders kept the rhythms of our lives out of alignment. The holidays aren’t fraught with firsts.

However:

This Christmas I won’t be alone. I’ll be with the ones you loved so much...
And we’ll talk about you, laugh just as much as we cry.
We’ll keep thinking of you, laugh just as much as we cry.

I envy that. 

Anyone who knew Zach or I well knows that we mattered to each other. But very few people knew us as a couple. We started dating just a few months before the post-graduation scattering of our friends. We'd been together barely half a year when I moved to California. For the most part, the people I love know Zach mostly through me, and the people who Zach loved know me mostly through them.

Many incredibly kind and empathetic people in my life who have appeared to support me in grief. But I am still envious, hearing this song. I wish there were any obvious group of people who knew Zach, and me, and the intersection that was Us. If they existed, I’d want to talk about Zach with them.

I am probably overselling how much this is a special problem that I have. I think it's quite common to wish for more opportunities to speak of the dead. Julian Barnes also wrote about the people he calls the Silent Ones, his friends who would leave vacancies in the conversation where the departed ought to have been:

I remember a "dinner-table conversation" in a restaurant with three married friends of roughly my age. Each had known her for many years—perhaps eighty or ninety in total—and each would have said, if asked, that they loved her. I mentioned her name, no one picked it up. I did it again, and again nothing. Perhaps the third time I was deliberately trying to provoke, being pissed off at what struck me not as good manners but cowardice. Afraid to touch her name, they denied her thrice, and I thought the worse of them for it.

I suspect that people are nervous to bring up Zach around me. Or that they get nervous when I mention their name. I see flickers of flinching on their faces. I don’t blame them. It’s not always a good time for the interruptions of grief. I have made progress—I can now make offhand references to things that Zach said without getting teary-eyed—but it’s not like I can casually discuss them. I am very distant from laughing just as much as I cry.

Still. Talking about them won't make things worse. I’m not about to forget that they’re gone. I’ll be thinking of them. It would be nice to talk about them more.

I guess that’s what I’m doing here.

- Tessa