When someone is terminally ill what is there to say? Can language express everything we need it to? Some people have a stream of comforting words to offer, but of course the words ultimately can be of no real comfort. The language that does exist can become a torment in itself; people talking of false hopes, miracles that may occur but never will. Struggling with words of the future and the present, the inevitable language of the obituary hangs around the person each dying day; by the time it is actually time for the words of obituary they are so well worn that they no longer seem meaningful. It seems like we can bang on the door, but never find the words to open it and pass through.
Little wonder that I’ve always found myself quite tongue-tied in such situations. After losing someone, I’ve found myself worrying about whether I said enough and whether what I did say was the right thing to say - you can tell yourself not to dwell on such thoughts, but they’ll stalk you and leap out at some unsuspecting moment regardless. But unlike when someone is rude to you in the supermarket and you come out and think, ‘ah! I know what I should’ve said,’ no such moment of possible resolution ever presents itself.
As a sometime-writer I have often struggled and been troubled by my absolute failure to be able to find fitting words to describe the grief which has stalked me since my father died after a year and a half of progressively and painfully dying. Recently I had a bad dream which led me to thinking I didn’t say enough whilst he was still with us. But the reality is that I’m still no closer to having the words to make sense of it all than I was in the earliest days of the cancer taking hold.
The truth, I have come to accept (though find scant comfort from) is that there are no words available to me within our language which can express the feelings of my grief or adequately describe what cancer did to my father.
In this I am reminded of something Primo Levi said about his induction into Auschwitz. His group of Jewish Italians had just been delivered from the train to Auschwitz, taken from their homes and then separated from their ill-fated women and children at the camp. They had to hand over all their documents and personal items and had to strip naked and hand over their clothes, which were carried away by strange phantoms. Later their hair was shaved off. They looked at the figures in the mirror and realised that within hours...
“We [had been] transformed into the phantoms we glimpsed yesterday evening. Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this, no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so.” - Primo Levi, IF THIS IS A MAN
We bang on the door, and I suppose we must, but certain things remain impossible to adequately say with the language we have. There are no words to express the true realities of the demolition of a man.
And so, to those of us left in grief, we get on with our lives and as time goes by we are distracted more often from that grief but it never heals, never lessens, when it enters our minds. There is no tonic to be found in language to understand the trauma of seeing such misery and such lows of the human condition.
On the day that I had the bad dream, which brought the unanswerable spectre of grief back to my mind, I had witnessed something in the back garden - the paradise and sanctuary, where sparrows nibble on crumbs and collared doves flap heavily overhead. The sight gripped me and knotted my stomach - ah! the realities of nature are gruesome, I thought.
Here is a video I filmed of a Sparrow Hawk ripping a Blackbird to bit.
My dream had not featured any birds, but I woke up with the above images very much in my mind. It struck me... the Hawk is the grief and I’m the Blackbird; just as the Hawk was the cancer. You can not be released from its grip, it is too late anyway; and it just rips and rips at you inside. The Hawk doesn’t visit regularly, but what it does when it is here never leaves you no matter how many pleasant but forgettable days you watch the Sparrows nibbling on crumbs of cake you’ve dropped for them.
...ah, but the words have failed me and now I beat on the door with a Blackbird’s carcass!
...ah, but the words have failed me and now I beat on the door with a Blackbird’s carcass!
