Tom is Dead (6 page)

I remember the cheerful voice of the assessor from MALF, and the questions that I asked her:

— How will he travel?

— Tom will travel in the coffin that you choose for him.

— With us?

— Tom will travel in the hold.

I remember her clear and patient explanations of the inconvenience of travelling in the company of a coffin, yes, even if concealed beneath a sheet. Contrary to the Warsaw Convention. I remember how she said Tom, and from this conversation I can date my decision to say ‘the body', because Tom was elsewhere, held up someplace, detained, sorry, he would've really liked to be with us but he was late, late for his body, beside it in any case, and no longer inside.

I'd never envisaged Tom's body in this way before: a container. An inadequate, unsuitable container given that a mere accident had let Tom spill out. It was me who had been a container, me who had contained this body and who'd then offered it up to the air, skin first. This damp body gifted with life and capable of growth, a body that was Tom, a Tom-body, white skin, black hair, blue eyes: the only one of our children not born blond, a unique child. This was no longer a baby, the calf and thigh muscles were well-defined, four-and-a-half-year-old Tom ran fast and was proud of it. The round belly beneath the rib cage, the small of the back hollowed, the shoulder blades and the shoulders wedged back, head straight: standing was a given, but the feeling of a recent victory remained, especially since Stella was born. A little boy not much older than four, upright and walking, making his first decisions, asserting his first preferences, formulating his first questions about death, about the difference between the sexes and about the birth of children. And Vince joined in with his own answers, stepped in and directed, while Stella watched and became Stella.

The image of my three children all together, when none of them was missing, when nothing was missing: this is where I feel winded. Ten years on, what I'm missing still makes me breathless, literally, beneath the sternum. I've never really got my breath back. People who survive with a bit of lung missing say that each breath requires thought, must be calculated, planned for, as well as the movements that go with it, anticipating walking, sleeping positions.

That's all it takes. An instant of letting go, of carelessness, and I feel that I could lose my balance, breath, sanity, never again to find the thread. Maybe this state is called mourning. I've often been served up this word but it never satisfies me. How could
this whole thing
be contained in a word that goes in a dictionary, a word that everybody can use…? I would like a word for myself, a word for me alone. You should, when you lose Tom, be able to enter into a new vocabulary, you should have your own personal dictionary delivered to you, in a new language. Stuart says I'm obsessed with words. It's not so much that there should be a new word (though a specific word for
this mourning
would at least be a small relief). I don't mind not asking for more than those who satisfy themselves with the words
loss
,
grief
,
horror
or
mourning
. But that we be allowed, we the grieving, to reserve them for our sole use. That nobody should come to me and speak of their grief at the death of their dog, unless they're four-and-a-half years old. That words stay new, available, that there be no need to exaggerate them, to reinforce them, to put ‘great' or ‘huge' in front of them, because that adds to the exhaustion and the powerlessness.

The word ‘waste' is the one that comes to me most easily now, all this wasted time, all this time without Tom and taken up only by Tom, all this time not being together, Tom, Vince, Stella, Stuart and me.

I don't know how it works, in the brain. Not much is known about this. I read an account written by a man who lost his arm, his whole arm, up to his shoulder. His phantom joints hurt. At night as he rolls over in his bed, he anticipates, like we all do, the presence of his two arms. But the absence wakes him. The absent arm hurts. When he goes through doors and past obstacles he takes into account the width of two arms, as is natural, and he's never learnt to do otherwise. Apparently, the brain can take an entire lifetime to learn that the arm is no longer there; to disconnect the neurons that looked after this arm. There is, no doubt, neuronal work associated with mourning, detours, dead ends and short-circuits, a whole electrical system to see to, synapses to revise. I would have given my arms and my legs to see Tom again. I would have given Vince and Stella.

The assessor from MALF must have done a course in psychology. She'd learned how to talk to me, how to be patient and to listen, how to handle my moods and my incoherencies, my mental disorder. They call that
support
. It's increasingly difficult, especially in the English-speaking world, to get people to listen to the fact that you're not happy when you've lost someone close. ‘Close' is also one of their terms, these professionals of compassion. The way they take charge is impressive. They take charge of you all the way. The assessor from MALF remained completely calm and compassionate when I screamed at her. And in a way she was right to do so. Because her suggestion stayed in my ear. I was obsessed with her suggestion. Repatriate Tom's body. The Souillac vault.

The hospital morgue kept calling and asking us what arrangements we were making for the body. I remember that. The phone rings and it's the morgue. Time passes. Time presses. Time decomposes the bodies of little dead boys. I remember, as I screamed, the measured voice of the assessor assuring me: ‘The worst possible thing that can happen has happened to you'; and me somehow learning it. Hearing it. Listening to it. She was putting forward words, the first words, expert words. She assured me of my grief. She validated it. I was right, to be in this state. In this rage. It was expected, documented, it fitted into a framework, a scale. It was normal.

There's a lovely little cemetery in Souillac. It's my grandparents' town. I hadn't attended my grandfather's funeral; I claimed to ‘hate funerals'. Poor darling. But, after everyone was gone, I went to reflect in silence by his grave. So much more chic, I guess. And it allowed me to avoid seeing my father in tears, it allowed me to avoid having to hold his hand, to say I don't know what. I'd come alone to say goodbye to my grandfather who,
he too
, had always hated funerals—I'd come alone to support a departed one in his ordeal, shed a few tears and intoxicate myself with death. As I was already there, I'd visited the abbey, and bought some postcards.

Does Tom come from a particular land? Where do you bury your four-year-old son, what is his landscape, where does he feel at home? He didn't tell me. He'd only just begun to find his way around, to name places, to tell the difference between a city and a suburb. He counted time as well as distance in ‘sleeps', it was his unit of measurement: the night, the length of sleep. No, Tom left no last wish. Tom died illiterate, ignorant of death. A few questions, yes, and we gave him fairytales. That was it, his preparation for death.

If we'd known—but you don't know, you don't know. The signs. Souillac Abbey is known for its depiction of the sacrifice of Abraham. This sculpted pillar had affected me so deeply that I kept postcards of it, pinned up from one apartment to the next. Abraham holds Isaac by the hair. Abraham's grip is firm, his other hand holds a dagger. His eyes are wide open, possessed. Isaac, hands clasped, has an empty look, his eyelids half-closed. He looks four, ten, twenty years old. An angel bolts from above, head first, a bomb. He offers up a ram whose astonished eyes are more expressive than those of the humans. The ram is most honoured to find himself mixed up in this whole affair, though he got more than he asked for. The angel hollers, mouth an O, hollers at the madman, the fool. On the side, you can make out bits of hooves, tails and claws. A bestiary; I pinned up the four sides of Souillac's masterpiece alongside each other in my different kitchens. A descent into Hell, if Hell is infested with devouring beasts, wolves, griffons, monkeys and vultures. Tom was afraid of this bestiary, he was afraid of wolves, like Vince, like Stella was from very early on. And this amused Stuart and me: where did these little civilised creatures get this atavistic fear from? Where, so far from forests, had they sensed wolves?

But then Tom was born in Vancouver, in British Colombia, amidst the Canadian forests. In a way, Sydney and Vancouver are close, in that they're both so far from Souillac. Of France, Tom knew only Souillac and Étretat, my family. He had no memories of Paris. Vancouver was the city where he'd really lived, four-and-a-half years, the entirety of his conscious memory. But to bury him in Vancouver made no sense. He'd spent most of his time hanging around my skirts, and to bury him in my womb would've been the only obvious thing. Me, his native land. Me, a grave. If I'd buried myself, him curled up in my arms, me dead or alive, what difference would it have made?

The signs. Everything spoke to me. Or, everything suddenly went quiet; I was in total emptiness and silence, but I still preferred chaos.

We say ‘the sacrifice of Abraham', but it's Isaac who is seized by the hair. The sacrifice of Isaac. It would have been completely useless, at the time, to tell me that every Romanesque church has its sacrifice, or to try and reason with me by saying that postcards…I always had dozens of them pinned up all over the place over the course of the moves. Hokusai's waves, Courbet's
L'Origine du monde
, Greek temples and theatre posters. At the time of Tom's death, all those cards and knickknacks were, in fact, still in a box. But I had to invent a higher power. I had to have, in some way, enraged an avenging God, to have called death upon my son, to have offended the signs. I'd been deaf to the warning din.

So I waited for the signs to finish their work. I waited for them to point out to me where and how to bury Tom. But I'd been abandoned. The signs were unreadable.

The hospital called. I was at fault, like a child. I was irresponsible. I was abandoning my little boy in death. I remained deaf. They told me off in an official way. They understood, but they told me off just the same. In English, though I was losing my English anyway; I understood nothing—had they spoken to me in French, I wouldn't have understood anything either. Make arrangements for the body. I'd found apartments all over the world but I didn't know how to find a grave. Stuart was working, Stuart was earning, as they say, our living. The housekeeping. And I'd kept house, kept the kitchen washed and scrubbed, up to scratch, as best I could. But I wasn't good at anything anymore. And neither was Stuart. Vince and Stella's hunger made him go out and buy hamburgers to cook for them. As for Tom's grave, Stuart was like me: he waited.

In English, they say
coffin
, a false friend, not a
couffin
, French for bassinet. I struggled with this word, coffin. Not with the word, with the reality of it. Tom in this reality. ‘I should make it by hand, it's up to me to make it.' Stuart announced this to me. I loved him for saying that. There were flashes,
bright spots
literally. Right from the beginning, paradoxical moments. Not what you'd call happiness. Moments of love. I imagine Stuart in a timeless forest, sawing planks of white wood, assembling and polishing them, a bit more than a metre long and how wide, the width of shoulders? A box made of rough wood, without embellishment, Tom. What does Tom's death look like? What death looks like him? It looks like this. We would've dug a hole in the forest. We would've gone back, following sources and streams, to an obvious place, where we'd have laid him down, in peace, beneath the humus and the leaves. But we would've needed time. We would've needed ten years, perhaps.

You have to be ready so quickly, so suddenly. Tom went backwards and forwards in and out of his body,
hors de son corps
. What to do with Tom's body, with this body? An empty shell. A slough like animals leave behind, that you find curled up on a path or clinging to trees, useless, translucid, a little disgusting. Or sometimes it was a cumbersome object, a bit of refuse, and, just like after a crime, an accomplice would get rid of it for us, would do the dirty work.

And at other times, I thought of Tom as in this body. Trapped in this body. Tom-body shut away all alone in a drawer in the morgue of a foreign hospital, far from everything, far from us. Alone. In the cold. I looked at Vince and Stella sleeping in their little beds, and I cried, that's when I cried. Tom alone in the drawer—to this day I can't handle this, the image of him slipped in there. Tom was there. He needed to be taken care of, not left all alone.

Two ideas were foreign to me: the idea of vigil, and the idea of burial. As if I'd remained innocent of the millennia of funerary knowledge. The Greeks, the Jews, the Christians. The first graves, and the graves before them, those without writing. The beginning of History starts there. I was innocent. New. A baby just out of its mother's womb. To watch over a body in a morgue, to have a chair brought to you next to an open drawer—I didn't even make enquiries. Though there must be protocols, a way of grieving your dead without upsetting the service.
Keep your coat on, it's cold
. I didn't know where Tom was. I couldn't believe that he was there. I was looking for him. Don't leave the body to animals. Come up with a way of passage, a place. I wasn't there yet. Historically, I was a barbarian; along the path of humanity I was in prehistoric times. I knew nothing about the gestures, the shrouds, the anointings. I had no idea about the ritual candles and the prayers. Even the weeping, I knew nothing about. Weeping is a job; professional mourners get paid.

At the ages of four and seven, Tom and Vince took death more seriously than I did. They witnessed the death throes of flies, pondered over cuttlefish bones found on the beaches of Vancouver. They asked where the cat had gone, when the cat died and, little by little, day after day, its absence gradually confirmed—they'd surrendered to this mystery of death's lack of evidence—and concluded that cats were mortal. For Tom, death defined cats. Death separated the cat from the human. ‘Cats die,' explained Tom. Vince, he tapped into the sadness of death—he'd grieved for the cat—he weighed up the difference between objects and us, the inert and the living.