Grief
My friend who died. That is what I call her when I talk about her to anyone who did not know her. I can no longer say "my friend X" or "my friend from Y" because none of that matters anymore. The most important thing about her now is that she died. She died. I have to tell myself that over and over again. She died. More often during the first months, less often now. She died. She died. Like a mantra, but instead of bringing me into a state of meditation, it has to bring me out of my trance. Beat me back into life. Like a slap in the face. She died. She died. She died.
Portrait of George Dyer by Francis Bacon (1967)
I saw her dead at the hospital. I saw her body a few hours after it happened. I opened her eyes. Brown, light and yellow. Dead. I held her hand for what seemed a very long time. I lay my head on her chest. I inspected her nails. I helped them pick out the coffin (lacquered white, I would have preferred natural wood). Only a month before I was helping her pick out her new signature perfume.
At the funeral home, I fixed her hair. I arranged her dress. I put a white flower under her hand. She was as cold as a piece of meat. Her jaw had receded. She was ugly. Although decent looking for a corpse, I guess. Her whole face was stretched across horizontally, as if her cheeks were pulling towards the shoulders. She was ugly. She would have hated it. Curiously, the undertaker was very proud of his handiwork. After the funeral, my hands smelled of whatever chemical they had pumped her with. I kept smelling my fingers. I googled embalming. I imagined her lying naked on a cold metal table somewhere and the mortician looking at her and her scars before sucking out her blood and guts with a metal rod. I thought about writing a will and leaving instructions not to embalm me. I don't want to lie naked on a table in a cold dark room with a stranger who doesn't know me manipulating my corpse and thinking that that my thighs are too fat. I want to keep all my liquids. If it brings comfort to anyone to see me dead, let them. But I don't want to wear a death mask of paraffin. I don't want my face tautened from some weird post-mortem facelift. I also don't want to die. I'm so glad it wasn't me. So sad it was her.
George Dyer (I) by Francis Bacon (1950)
Grief came in waves. A tsunami at first, swallowing up everything in its path, absorbing me, reducing me to a child-like state with no future and no past, just the painful present. Then I grieved in intervals. Short ones at first, a few blissful hours here and there, then maybe even a day. And then it came back, disfiguring me again. I was not even building sand castles. I was on a beach, stacking up a house of cards that got washed and blown away again and again. Grief drowned me. At one point, I wished that I had never known her. A few years of friendship were not worth this. They were not worth messing up my life. I knew that I should feel bad for even thinking this. I did not. At some point sooner or later, self-preservation kicked in, also in waves. I wore her jewelry to bed for months, I got rid of everything that reminded me of her. I hid her pictures, I looked at them for hours at night and cried. I threw all of her belongings in a wooden box and even taped it shut only to put them back a few weeks later.
A silent fear started creeping up on me a few months in. For a long time I could not name it. All I knew was that it was there, putting spokes in my wheels. For a long time I could not explain that fear. The feeling that "this" would change me. The feeling that I had already changed, that I was not myself. I realized what that fear was when I saw a family friend I had not been in touch with for a long while. Her twenty-something year-old son had died suddenly, out of nowhere. That had been a year and a half before. She seemed to have aged ten years. She was so wrinkled and fragile, as if someone had taken a chisel to her face. That face haunted me.
I was afraid that it would happen to me too. That people who had not known me before would see pictures of me from six months ago, and not recognize me. I thought of Francis Bacon's portraits of his lover, George Dyer. Dyer is there, you can make out his aquiline profile and widow's peak, but his face is warped, violently distorted, almost as if Bacon decided mid-way that he was not happy with the portraits and smudged them out. Dyer is still there, but all askew. A man staring at you from the other side of the looking glass. This was the feeling that I could not describe. The fear of being myself but not quite. Recognizable but not in focus. Fragmented like broken glass.
Study for Head of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon (1967)
It was spring when she died. I plucked a blossom from a tree in the hospital courtyard when all of us were standing there, half an hour after it happened. Tiny, bright, yellow. It would remind me that this was real, that this happened. It now lies in a carved wooden box next to a lock of her hair that I tied with the red ribbon from the Christmas decorations I inherited. It's dry and frail. I wanted to throw it away but didn't. I wanted to throw away so many things but didn't.
It has been over a year now. Grief is now the kitchen sink. I no longer know whether I cry because of Grief or whether Grief is just the last straw that I throw on my camel's back to reach a point of release. I do not know anymore. All I know is that she is dead.
She is dead. She is dead. She is dead.
