Granddad dies in October. When I get the phone call, I am not surprised. He had been dying for weeks, or maybe years, depending on how you look at it.
I do not grieve at this point. I have to wait for the ocean for that.
So I take the call, eyes dry. Finish washing the dishes. I go to work the next day and my line manager tells me I should have taken the day off. I can’t work out how to explain to her that now just isn’t the right time. She doesn’t understand, but lets me stay and silently brings me a cup of tea.
Even at the funeral, I do not weep. I come closest when I see my mother, front-row, dabbing her formerly perfect mascara with a tissue. My father hands her a hip flask and she takes a gulp. That’s love, I guess.
Time goes on, and people stop asking how I’m doing, and there are things in this world far more tragic than a dead granddad. It is still hard on the big occasions—the empty seat at the birthday party, the spare Christmas cracker. My uncle almost breaks down at his 50th, but then he smokes a cigarette about it and feels better. He used to keep his addiction secret, still scared his dad might tell him off. It was a running joke, how he’d say he was just going outside to get fresh air. Now his dad is dead and buried and he lights up out in the open. It’s a sad thing to lose a secret.
Mum sells the house but I know she still drives past it every day, just in case he’s there, watering the roses. I walk past it once, out of curiosity more than anything. The door used to be blue, this bright aqua shade that was totally out of place in the small English road. The new owners have repainted it green. I’m sure the neighbours are delighted.
The months pass. I have not wept, I cannot. It would be wrong to do that here, where the land is steady beneath my feet, where the wind carries only pollution. You cannot truly grieve in a city.
It is June when I reach the ocean for the first time. A holiday to the coast, long overdue. I’m exhausted from working full-time and pretending the sea hasn’t been calling to me all these months like wind echoing in a conch shell. That first evening I stand at the land’s edge, wriggling my toes in the sand. The water is cold, I want to recoil from it but force myself to stand firm like it’s a challenge, look out at the horizon
—the same horizon he saw from the boats in Greece, skimming the water recklessly, mum described it like a rollercoaster, stomach-churning, ecstatic, between islands and smaller islands, spinning fractals of safety between the vast expanses of water
—the same water she sailed across, all the way from the other side of the world, it took three months back then although surely it’s faster now? I’ll have to look that up, she must have been so alone and so brave, not knowing what life might await her on the other side
—where she met him, though it wasn’t romantic at all, he was already married and it was a whole ordeal but it worked out in the end, she gave birth to my mother in a small flat overlooking a pond
—my mother, who gave birth to me in a private hospital, no poetry there, though she tells me the service was incredible, Evian all the way
—and me, my earliest memories him teaching me how to swim, practising how long we could do a dead man’s float until my mother told us to cut it out, all the different strokes, even butterfly, which I could never understand, until I was old enough to swim laps around him and he could no longer do much better than doggy paddle, still good for his age, after all
—until my grandmother died and he stopped swimming altogether
—until he went into hospital ten years later and they removed his IV, the doctors said that at that point saline wouldn’t help, and we fed him water by the droplet, slowly so he didn’t choke, because we couldn’t bear the thought of him dying thirsty
—and I get the phone call and don’t cry
—and it’s half a year later, and I’m on the shore and months worth of tears pour out, freezing, salt-ridden. I let them come, stand there for hours until I have nothing more to give and just gaze out at the blue, blue ocean. Wondering if it really stretches to the other side of the world. Wondering how cold it would be if I jumped in. Wondering if wherever he is, he is swimming once more.
