Nothing new under the sun, of course. Still, I hover over the title, thoughts of rights and royalties putting me on pause for a moment. In a way perhaps that’s the point: it’s all been done/said/written before. It isn’t a good time of year for goodbyes – or rather, suddenly they are everywhere, chattering on the edge of reason. ‘Absent Nanas’ Andy adds to our Christmas dinner toast and sets me teetering on the brink of tears.
Our personal losses have been keenly felt: two grandmothers gone this year, and one missing from the Christmas feast due to injury; one good family friend suddenly last month, the one person we thought certain to last for ever. The news that ‘Pops’ – not quite family but almost – had also died in November reached us in a Christmas card. We mourned others known to us who tussled with death and lost, or celebrated those who won, but only just. And then those we knew only by virtue of their music or art or profession but held close to our hearts: you will have your own lists. Phrases or snatches of song we associate with them inhabit our head space in a reverberation of grief. Jack remembers Moby, the sickly goldfish which died a couple of weeks after his dad left. He – Moby – had hardly been with us long enough to warrant a change of water before we found him floating on the surface one morning but, like moss on a flood plain, his passing soaked up all his keeper’s grief.
‘Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye.’ The last word stretches out as if in an effort to hang on just a little longer to what, or who, we had; except that of course, as we grow older, the only wisdom which sticks is that we can’t actually keep hold of anything: try as we might, success or love or friendship, health or wealth, all slip through our fingers, leaving us bereft and alone; and sometimes, if this doesn’t trivialise too much, miffed by our lack of readiness. Most last times have already happened by the time we notice; we can bid farewell only in retrospect.
The days after Christmas are always faintly dissatisfying. The push to make the holiday happen as we wish leaves us exhausted and out of sorts, with an irritable desire to do things better, if only we knew how. What did the Magi say? – ‘no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation’. There’s time to catch up on reading, though. Revisiting Margaret Drabble after what is probably a twenty-year gap, I am absorbed and troubled in equal measure by ‘The Dark Flood Rises’ and its reflections on ageing. After the ‘roller coaster’ of her middle years and the ‘plateau’ of her sixties, Fran has ‘suddenly taken a step down. That’s what happens. She knows all about it… not a cliff of fall, but… a descent to a new kind of plateau…’ I watched this happen to our mum: without drama but apparently overnight, some faculty, her characteristic elegance, gone without trace and no time to prepare or regret its passing. These last weeks, after another minor fall, I remain wobbly, and wonder if I’ve made one of those inevitable descents.
Moving house epitomises this unsettledness. In fact my goodbyes to Hallbankgate and the small house which sheltered us for almost 20 years from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are well-orchestrated: I even have time for a last fellside walk, and arrive back in Cambridge with roots of roses which I hope will keep the memories alive. It’s a double whammy, though, since I’ve already set in motion the wheels for moving house here also. And things are changing with regard to my bolthole, my brother’s lovely cottage in Norfolk: after the decorators have done, he will replace the huge old bed in the upstairs bedroom and reclaim the space. All those nights of cold sheets, the air smoky from the fire downstairs, and no chance of a last time. As always, the insecurity goes straight to my stomach and I lurch between excitement and anxiety – until I remember the thousands whose moving day in 2016 became weeks, months, even years of upheaval, danger and worse.
How do we make sense of it all? How can we say our goodbyes and reach for a new start without turning our backs on the many whose struggles dwarf ours by comparison? I guess one way forward is to recognise our good fortune rather than dwelling on our sorrow; in his alternative Christmas message, Brendan Cox says his family will try to remember ‘how lucky we were to have Jo in our lives for so long, and not how unlucky we were to have her taken from us’. But he also suggests that the losses of 2016, personal and global, can be ‘a wake-up call,’ reminding us that we all have our part to play. My friend Dan Ellis who does more than most to make the world a better place, put it neatly: ‘There is no one who can tell us truthfully that it will be alright. We have to fight for that within ourselves and keep on doing what we know to be the right thing.’
Maybe I was wrong about the inevitability of love slipping through our fingers with the rest of what the world offers; or at least, unlike those unavoidable drops which Margaret Drabble describes, we can do something to prevent this. Robert Peston, writing about the death of his wife three years ago, speaks of the indestructible ‘intangible connection’ which he experiences as a ‘continuing internal dialogue with Sian in my heart and head’. Reaching out to others in a spirit of defiance of what divides us is itself an act of love and a rejection of hate. We can choose that action and hope that Philip Larkin, who saw in the effigy of a couple hand in hand on their ‘Arundel Tomb’ a tentative cause for hope, is correct in his ‘almost’ truth:
‘What will survive of us is love.’
‘What will survive of us is love.’
Leonard Cohen recorded 'Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye' in 1967, the year before I went off to uni.
40 years earlier, in 1927, T.S Eliot wrote 'Journey of the Magi'.
The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Drabble was published by Canongate in October 2016.
'An Arundel Tomb' by Philip Larkin, probably witten in 1956, was pusblished in his 1964 collection The Whitsun Weddings by Faber and Faber.
All photographs were taken in Hallbankgate in December 2016
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