In Trinity term of first year, my grandfather passed away. It shouldn’t have been sudden, or even unexpected, but mortality has its way of sneaking up on people. At the time, it seemed unfathomable to me that he would leave us. Yes, he was ill, but in my nineteen years of life I had only ever seen illness as something to be recovered from. Loss existed only through my childhood cat, the loss of which I had felt could never be paralleled or surpassed. Surely, I thought to myself, at the graveside of a cat I could not remember life without, it doesn’t get worse than this. Yet, life always finds a way. Or rather, death does.
It was bad luck that the funeral coincided with my coursework deadline – I spent the two weeks with half my mind preoccupied with Sianne Ngai and Harvard referencing, and the other half conceiving this brave new world forged in the wake of grief. I thought of my father and uncle, who had lost a dad. Then, of the great-uncle I knew distantly through yearly birthday cards and Christmas wishes, who had lost a brother. Reunited again with my sister in the throes of our grief, I tried to imagine a life without her. To say I failed entirely would be a massive understatement.
When I first read Auden’s Stop All the Clocks – in the midst of bare-boned, teenaged comprehension – I found it firstly evocative, and secondly melodramatic. Untouched by loss, it was easy for me to be a pragmatist. Now, I instead find the poem’s expression of emotion an intensely familiar feeling. Rather than wanting to throw myself into my work, I wanted the clocks to stop, to rewind, for GMT to suddenly swap with whichever American or Australian time zone would coincide with a time in which he was alive.
I wanted to push my way through the hats and scarves of my childhood and emerge, unscathed, in the body of a girl who knew grief and death only as the abstract words in books and television. To live in a land where time would stop and I could be forever twelve, unburdened with terrible knowledge.
For once, I wanted to laugh without feeling guilty for my own joy.
There is an absurdity to grief which can only be experienced firsthand. The world remains unchanged — a fact which is both unchangeable and detestable. I was reminded, strangely, of the Queen’s funeral. At first the criticism surrounding our day off from work, jobs and life was understandable – why should the nation stop for one person? Now, I feel there’s an element of jealousy – if it could stop for her, then why not for my grandparent?
There is a sickening realisation that comes with the knowledge that time is a relentless creature. That I would keep ageing, keep growing and the dead would stay dead. It was incomprehensible. For all my books and education, death seemed distant and separate to ordinary life.
I write this, aware of the privilege of having only an aged relative die. And to be able to complain that my coursework alone was affected. Grief is problematised by our own intense knowledge of tragedy. Personal grief is always deeper, yet when compared to the atrocities which have happened, and are happening around the world, it almost seems insignificant. Especially in Oxford, a city of protest and progress, the innate human need to stop and mourn can seem almost alien.
There are always deadlines to meet, tutors to appease, prelims or finals to sit (and pass!) and all the while, grief stays with me. Inescapable, it’s a murmur in the background, almost drowned out by the overwhelming buzz of termly life and work.
There are times I catch myself forgetting (usually when the deadlines are dawning), and other times when I cannot escape from memory. I listen to rain fall on autumn evenings and it sounds like laboured breathing; other times it reminds me of running home in the rain with my friends. I listen to the songs I was told he loved; I hope for heavens filled of blackred roses.
I passed my Prelims. I still laugh. I turned twenty and toasted two long decades with a few too many shots. Everyday I accommodate myself more and more to grief. It takes a particular shape, a certain distinctive flavour. It becomes a memorial, rather than a melancholy – an undercurrent, rather than a tidal wave. In the words of Andrew Garfield, I hope this grief stays with me. It’s just love with nowhere to go.