11th May

The Obsessive Diary

My father’s birthday. He would have been 103. Hi exit was full of grace as I remember it, though the end was rattly, is it always that sound? Chloe can tell me. She’ll know. I missed his last breath by minutes, I’d got the call, I think it was a text, I was up at 5am with twin babies mewling. But what I remember most that was different to my mum was how his body looked after he left it. That he left it swiftly. That it was so clearly a husk, I remember not being bothered by it at all. We kept talking to her long after her last breath, she was so clearly still there. She didn’t want to leave. She clung on even when the pulse was over and only her pace maker showed signs of life. Her hands were no longer the fists they’d been all week, there was that. For days her nails had dug into her palms, her brow was furrowed, those lines between her eyes determined and deep. But she had no faith in the great blue yonder being most of what she was, that the pristine self made up the majority, that it existed before and would after. I spoke to her of the death prayer, the borrowed clothes of our faces and names, but she had so many of both and wanted to keep them all. When she breathed her last, she remained.