Tom is Dead Read online

  The signs. For example, the children’s plane is really late and we receive no news about it. My worst nightmare, as the English say. In the end, Tom and Vince arrive, name tags around their necks. As always when my offspring go on a plane without me, I was afraid of losing them, of losing them both in one go, my two sons. The terrible news. The plane from Paris that never arrives. Tom was only just old enough, and we’d had to insist, point out all our accumulated frequent-flyer miles, and the fact that Vince was used to long-haul flights. In a few days time, Stella would join us accompanied by my mother but, on top of all the other disruptions, we didn’t want our boys to miss the beginning of the school year. Stuart could’ve brought them with him, but I can’t remember what excuse he used, just as I did, to get out of a twenty-four-hour trip with two small children.

  Those last days of solitude in the sun, were they the last two beautiful days of our lives? Do we ever ask ourselves this? I was on the edge of my old life, I was on its foamy crest, before landing violently. Two worlds unaware of each other, but, between them, similarities and echoes. This is where the territory of suffering is, in this impossible juncture, in this never again, because Tom stayed on the other side, over there.

  Stuart and me, at the airport. If we’d been a real family, like in Enid Blyton’s The Caravan Family, if we’d got together and organised for all five of us to leave at the same time, we wouldn’t have lost either one, or two, or any of us. And if we hadn’t moved to Australia. Madness is in the conditional. Go back in time. Relive those wonderful early days with Stuart but don’t fall pregnant with Vince. Or Tom. Or Stella. Another life. Or if Stella had been born second. I ran laps around this, ad infinitum. Was it Tom or our second child that was meant to die? And if Tom, I don’t know, had not been called Tom? Or if I hadn’t chosen this address, Victoria Road, the address of Tom’s death.

  Tom lands; he’s exhausted. He says his sentence about Nemo. They watched films, they slept a bit, they ate a lot, drew and played, but as far as the hostess who brings them over is concerned—I can see it in her eyes—we are monsters. ‘Shit,’ Stuart says to me, ‘it’s not as if they travelled in the hold.’ Half-mad dogs go past in cages on wheels. Tom arrives at Victoria Road, he whinges, we put them straight to bed— we’ll take care of the jet lag later.

  The signs. Tom gets up in the middle of his jet-lagged sleep. Stuart and I have been asleep, but for how long? It’s dark. Tom is standing in front of me, very pale. He says, ‘Je veux’ ‘I want,’ I can’t get him to say what it is he wants. I take him back to bed, his new bed. He walks weightlessly. He repeats, ‘Je veux’, he shakes his head, he’s strongly endorsing his own mute wish. I’m tired, I’m already annoyed with him, he’s never been a good sleeper—is it about to start all over again, here, in Australia? ‘What do you want, Tom?’ I wave my hand in front of his eyes. He looks straight through me, stares at a point behind my head. A fear rises in me, nocturnal, absurd, that a part of Tom has stayed behind, in the northern hemisphere. We have received the body, an aspect of him, but a whole part of Tom is missing. Tom, at four-and-a-half, has already set foot in three continents.

  Ten years on, the image of Tom and Vince’s bunk beds remains; Tom in the one on the bottom, where I try to put him back to bed, to fold him like you fold a stiff body. But I’m not so sure about the scene at the airport. Maybe I’ve superimposed several scenes, several landings. The reality has disappeared. All that remains certain is Tom’s sentence about Nemo, I’m sure about this sentence—it was Tom and not Vince who said it, and it dates the scene and predicts the city, the child, and so Tom’s death.

  In another world, I carry Tom on my back. I climb up a river, I look for a patch of loose earth. I dig with my hands, I place him at the bottom of the hole. Handful of earth by handful of earth, I bury him. The rest of the world is in turmoil but I’ve found a peaceful spot, between the gorse bushes, the water-lilies and the moss. A flood will carry him away, he will have a cradle of algae, a water tomb, like dead children since the beginning of time, and the living children as well, the ones that were saved. I am the mother, the sister, the nanny; I am the Pharaoh’s daughter.

  My mother senses that I’m drowning. It’s too soon. Leave me be. Take me away.

  Later, on one of those days when the living children get up and make demands and go to school or stay home, the telephone rings, and it’s her. She says that my father is having a ‘delirious episode’, he yells and thrashes about, he’s in a private hospital. My father has the only conceivable reaction, sensible and coherent, in the midst of all of us, the paralytics. My father proves himself equal to such a disaster. Me, having exited the scream, I no longer know what to do, with myself, with my children, with my hands.

  Later still, she asks me: ‘Have you called MALF?’ MALF is the insurance company the whole family uses. When I think about it now, I suspect my mother called them herself first, to inquire, so she could give me the right number for the right person, out of tact, or some unnervingly practical frame of mind, or some formidable sense of psychology. So that I would take action. My mother gives me things to do; from ten thousand kilometres away she gets me to buckle down to work. I need to get a move on, unlike my father who howls his suffering shut away in a private hospital. My mother’s suffering overflows the oceans, the tidal wave reaches all the way to me: move.

  Am I dead or alive? I have this Post-it note in my hands as if she’d handed it to me across the ocean, with a telephone number in France, though I don’t remember writing anything down. ‘Call,’ my mother said to me, ‘you have rights, they can repatriate the body and pay for the burial, it has to be taken care of, it has to be done.’ And I obeyed, under hypnosis. During those first few days (she’d just left, after having brought Stella over to us, Tom died just after she left) she would have had to command each one of my movements, to tell me, as I said hypnotically to Stella: Eat. Sleep. Shut up. Come to me. Stay alive. Breathe.

  ‘Well,’ I said with a firm voice, as if my mother spoke through me, ‘my son is dead, he’s French-Canadian, he died in Sydney.’ I remember—my firm voice is inscribed in my memory—I remember the beginning of the conversation, that beginning. Afterwards, nothing, not whether it’s a man or a woman who replies, nor what he or she says to me. Because I had the right to something; it was at that moment that the idea of rights came to me, with regard to my mother, to the idea of suicide and to—what turned out to be so wrong—the ultimate disappearance of Tom’s voice. Maybe all the ideas—I don’t know how to talk about this—maybe everything there was to think about this unthinkable thing, Tom’s death— maybe everything came to me in those first rough days, then afterwards, all that was left was to unfold this unknowing and lug it around, year after year. And memory doesn’t wear out, it gets worse with time. Those first days, so raw, and so blurred, glowing, murky, hallucinated, impossible…there was suffering and I was at its point of impact, and bearings no longer existed, time was dead.

  Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki say that there needs to be another word than the word ‘destruction’. Another word than ‘disappearance’ when not even a trace of what is missing remains. Streets and trees were missing, more than just houses were missing. The city was missing. They also had to endure the absence of places. The birds, the hospital, the post office, the parks, were all missing, locations were missing. Nothing left. The vitrification of streets at the point of impact and, just beyond that, rubble. Being outside, completely naked. Another word than ‘destruction’. For the first time: it was an ‘unsheltering’. Space disappeared, disintegrated, and time fell away with it.

  Time was no longer with me. The walls, the fridge, the beds remained, the apartments had only been temporary, we didn’t give it a thought, it all went on without us. But time. A reverse beginning, where objects don’t just turn into nothing, but rather their negative equivalent. A spiral in which galaxies curl in on themselves till they become invisible. Nebulous, unthinkable things, though they’re still there
around us and create a place somewhere. And Tom is there, in the reverse side of the world.

  I had the right to something. Give him back to me. Pay up. Reimburse me, compensate me. Listen to me, even if I have nothing to say. Take care of me. Make me shut up, put me in prison. MALF had that power, so they should do it. Straight away. Give the equivalent of Tom back to me, in one form or another, in some currency, the currency of the dead. Tom dead but with me, an agreement, a secret arrangement, I’ll sign anything, exile me, lock me up, but with Tom, in exchange for a life with Tom. Or to be able to, I don’t know, spend a week with him from time to time, to catch up on his news. To catch up on his news from time to time. If only to have the promise of seeing him again when he grows up.

  A few days after this first phone call—very soon after, if I remember correctly—we received three cheques: one for 1,500 euros for us, the parents, and two in our name as well, but intended for Vince and Stella, of 500 euros each. I took it so badly that I refused to cash these cheques. And Stuart held onto them so that I wouldn’t tear them up. That’s how much Tom was worth: 750 euros for the mother, 750 euros for the father, 500 euros for the brother, 500 euros for the sister. Anger, then and at other times, often kept me going after Tom’s death.

  As my mother had predicted, MALF offered to repatriate the body. I remember another call, the phone ringing and a woman’s voice, the women who’d looked into our case. We’d taken out the highest insurance policy. And in terms of psychological suffering, we were in the first category. She understood. She knew what we were going through. She was happy to inform us that, along with Tom’s repatriation (she new his name, from our file no doubt), all the funeral expenses would be paid for, flowers included, and even the cost of a plot if need be. We wouldn’t have to worry about anything. ‘Do you have a family vault?’

  I had a vision, for the first time, an absurd vision of Tom with all the old people in the vault in Souillac. My grandmother’s burial. My grandfather’s burial. The coffin going down, a little white coffin. With all the old people that he didn’t know, with the great uncle who was a fascist, with the aunt who died crazy. Shut in with the ancestors, with strangers, monsters. Not with us. A monstrous error of nature, a monstrous error in the course of time. And even, with my cousin who’d hanged himself, who wasn’t that old, forty-five, my age now, but it was ten times more life than Tom’s. I couldn’t talk to this woman. A bit like with door-to-door salespeople, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, I couldn’t speak to her, she was in another dimension, compassionate, proficient, cheerful, though not excessively, expert. An expert in Tom’s death, and me the novice. If I didn’t hang up, she’d end up selling me Tom’s death.

  Today, when I think back to this phone call, I tell myself that this woman’s voice announced the arrival of the assessors, of what remained of my life after Tom’s death. Stress scales exist, I went looking for them on the internet.

  STRESS EVALUATION SCALE

  (source: Canadian Mental Health Association)

  Life event Life change units

  • Death of a spouse 100

  • Divorce 73

  • Marital separation 65

  • Imprisonment 63

  • Death of a close family member 63

  • Personal injury or illness 53

  • Marriage 50

  • Dismissal from work 47

  • Marital reconciliation 45

  • Retirement 45

  • Change in health of a family member 44

  • Pregnancy 40

  • Sexual difficulties 39

  • Gain a new family member 39

  • Business readjustment 39

  • Change in financial state 38

  • Death of a close friend 37

  •Working in a different job 36

  • Change in frequency of arguments 35

  • Major mortgage 31

  • Foreclosure of mortgage or loan 30

  • Change in responsibilities at work 29

  • Child leaving home 29

  • Trouble with in-laws 29

  • Outstanding personal achievement 28

  • Spouse starts or stops work 26

  • Begin or end school 26

  • Change in living conditions 25

  • Revision of personal habits 24

  • Trouble with boss 23

  • Change in working hours or conditions 20

  • Change in residence 20

  I remember the cheerful voice of the assessor from MALF, and the questions that I asked her:

  — How will he travel?

  — Tom will travel in the coffin that you choose for him.

  — With us?

  — Tom will travel in the hold.

  I remember her clear and patient explanations of the inconvenience of travelling in the company of a coffin, yes, even if concealed beneath a sheet. Contrary to the Warsaw Convention. I remember how she said Tom, and from this conversation I can date my decision to say ‘the body’, because Tom was elsewhere, held up someplace, detained, sorry, he would’ve really liked to be with us but he was late, late for his body, beside it in any case, and no longer inside.

  I’d never envisaged Tom’s body in this way before: a container. An inadequate, unsuitable container given that a mere accident had let Tom spill out. It was me who had been a container, me who had contained this body and who’d then offered it up to the air, skin first. This damp body gifted with life and capable of growth, a body that was Tom, a Tom-body, white skin, black hair, blue eyes: the only one of our children not born blond, a unique child. This was no longer a baby, the calf and thigh muscles were well-defined, four-and-a-half-year-old Tom ran fast and was proud of it. The round belly beneath the rib cage, the small of the back hollowed, the shoulder blades and the shoulders wedged back, head straight: standing was a given, but the feeling of a recent victory remained, especially since Stella was born. A little boy not much older than four, upright and walking, making his first decisions, asserting his first preferences, formulating his first questions about death, about the difference between the sexes and about the birth of children. And Vince joined in with his own answers, stepped in and directed, while Stella watched and became Stella.

  The image of my three children all together, when none of them was missing, when nothing was missing: this is where I feel winded. Ten years on, what I’m missing still makes me breathless, literally, beneath the sternum. I’ve never really got my breath back. People who survive with a bit of lung missing say that each breath requires thought, must be calculated, planned for, as well as the movements that go with it, anticipating walking, sleeping positions.

  That’s all it takes. An instant of letting go, of carelessness, and I feel that I could lose my balance, breath, sanity, never again to find the thread. Maybe this state is called mourning. I’ve often been served up this word but it never satisfies me. How could this whole thing be contained in a word that goes in a dictionary, a word that everybody can use…? I would like a word for myself, a word for me alone. You should, when you lose Tom, be able to enter into a new vocabulary, you should have your own personal dictionary delivered to you, in a new language. Stuart says I’m obsessed with words. It’s not so much that there should be a new word (though a specific word for this mourning would at least be a small relief). I don’t mind not asking for more than those who satisfy themselves with the words loss, grief, horror or mourning. But that we be allowed, we the grieving, to reserve them for our sole use. That nobody should come to me and speak of their grief at the death of their dog, unless they’re four-and-a-half years old. That words stay new, available, that there be no need to exaggerate them, to reinforce them, to put ‘great’ or ‘huge’ in front of them, because that adds to the exhaustion and the powerlessness.

  The word ‘waste’ is the one that comes to me most easily now, all this wasted time, all this time without Tom and taken up only by Tom, all this time not being together, Tom, Vince, Stella, Stuart and me.


  I don’t know how it works, in the brain. Not much is known about this. I read an account written by a man who lost his arm, his whole arm, up to his shoulder. His phantom joints hurt. At night as he rolls over in his bed, he anticipates, like we all do, the presence of his two arms. But the absence wakes him. The absent arm hurts. When he goes through doors and past obstacles he takes into account the width of two arms, as is natural, and he’s never learnt to do otherwise. Apparently, the brain can take an entire lifetime to learn that the arm is no longer there; to disconnect the neurons that looked after this arm. There is, no doubt, neuronal work associated with mourning, detours, dead ends and short-circuits, a whole electrical system to see to, synapses to revise. I would have given my arms and my legs to see Tom again. I would have given Vince and Stella.

  The assessor from MALF must have done a course in psychology. She’d learned how to talk to me, how to be patient and to listen, how to handle my moods and my incoherencies, my mental disorder. They call that support. It’s increasingly difficult, especially in the English-speaking world, to get people to listen to the fact that you’re not happy when you’ve lost someone close. ‘Close’ is also one of their terms, these professionals of compassion. The way they take charge is impressive. They take charge of you all the way. The assessor from MALF remained completely calm and compassionate when I screamed at her. And in a way she was right to do so. Because her suggestion stayed in my ear. I was obsessed with her suggestion. Repatriate Tom’s body. The Souillac vault.