Tom is Dead Read online

  The hospital morgue kept calling and asking us what arrangements we were making for the body. I remember that. The phone rings and it’s the morgue. Time passes. Time presses. Time decomposes the bodies of little dead boys. I remember, as I screamed, the measured voice of the assessor assuring me: ‘The worst possible thing that can happen has happened to you’; and me somehow learning it. Hearing it. Listening to it. She was putting forward words, the first words, expert words. She assured me of my grief. She validated it. I was right, to be in this state. In this rage. It was expected, documented, it fitted into a framework, a scale. It was normal.

  There’s a lovely little cemetery in Souillac. It’s my grandparents’ town. I hadn’t attended my grandfather’s funeral; I claimed to ‘hate funerals’. Poor darling. But, after everyone was gone, I went to reflect in silence by his grave. So much more chic, I guess. And it allowed me to avoid seeing my father in tears, it allowed me to avoid having to hold his hand, to say I don’t know what. I’d come alone to say goodbye to my grandfather who, he too, had always hated funerals—I’d come alone to support a departed one in his ordeal, shed a few tears and intoxicate myself with death. As I was already there, I’d visited the abbey, and bought some postcards.

  Does Tom come from a particular land? Where do you bury your four-year-old son, what is his landscape, where does he feel at home? He didn’t tell me. He’d only just begun to find his way around, to name places, to tell the difference between a city and a suburb. He counted time as well as distance in ‘sleeps’, it was his unit of measurement: the night, the length of sleep. No, Tom left no last wish. Tom died illiterate, ignorant of death. A few questions, yes, and we gave him fairytales. That was it, his preparation for death.

  If we’d known—but you don’t know, you don’t know. The signs. Souillac Abbey is known for its depiction of the sacrifice of Abraham. This sculpted pillar had affected me so deeply that I kept postcards of it, pinned up from one apartment to the next. Abraham holds Isaac by the hair. Abraham’s grip is firm, his other hand holds a dagger. His eyes are wide open, possessed. Isaac, hands clasped, has an empty look, his eyelids half-closed. He looks four, ten, twenty years old. An angel bolts from above, head first, a bomb. He offers up a ram whose astonished eyes are more expressive than those of the humans. The ram is most honoured to find himself mixed up in this whole affair, though he got more than he asked for. The angel hollers, mouth an O, hollers at the madman, the fool. On the side, you can make out bits of hooves, tails and claws. A bestiary; I pinned up the four sides of Souillac’s masterpiece alongside each other in my different kitchens. A descent into Hell, if Hell is infested with devouring beasts, wolves, griffons, monkeys and vultures. Tom was afraid of this bestiary, he was afraid of wolves, like Vince, like Stella was from very early on. And this amused Stuart and me: where did these little civilised creatures get this atavistic fear from? Where, so far from forests, had they sensed wolves?

  But then Tom was born in Vancouver, in British Colombia, amidst the Canadian forests. In a way, Sydney and Vancouver are close, in that they’re both so far from Souillac. Of France, Tom knew only Souillac and Étretat, my family. He had no memories of Paris. Vancouver was the city where he’d really lived, four-and-a-half years, the entirety of his conscious memory. But to bury him in Vancouver made no sense. He’d spent most of his time hanging around my skirts, and to bury him in my womb would’ve been the only obvious thing. Me, his native land. Me, a grave. If I’d buried myself, him curled up in my arms, me dead or alive, what difference would it have made?

  The signs. Everything spoke to me. Or, everything suddenly went quiet; I was in total emptiness and silence, but I still preferred chaos.

  We say ‘the sacrifice of Abraham’, but it’s Isaac who is seized by the hair. The sacrifice of Isaac. It would have been completely useless, at the time, to tell me that every Romanesque church has its sacrifice, or to try and reason with me by saying that postcards…I always had dozens of them pinned up all over the place over the course of the moves. Hokusai’s waves, Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, Greek temples and theatre posters. At the time of Tom’s death, all those cards and knickknacks were, in fact, still in a box. But I had to invent a higher power. I had to have, in some way, enraged an avenging God, to have called death upon my son, to have offended the signs. I’d been deaf to the warning din.

  So I waited for the signs to finish their work. I waited for them to point out to me where and how to bury Tom. But I’d been abandoned. The signs were unreadable.

  The hospital called. I was at fault, like a child. I was irresponsible. I was abandoning my little boy in death. I remained deaf. They told me off in an official way. They understood, but they told me off just the same. In English, though I was losing my English anyway; I understood nothing—had they spoken to me in French, I wouldn’t have understood anything either. Make arrangements for the body. I’d found apartments all over the world but I didn’t know how to find a grave. Stuart was working, Stuart was earning, as they say, our living. The housekeeping. And I’d kept house, kept the kitchen washed and scrubbed, up to scratch, as best I could. But I wasn’t good at anything anymore. And neither was Stuart. Vince and Stella’s hunger made him go out and buy hamburgers to cook for them. As for Tom’s grave, Stuart was like me: he waited.

  In English, they say coffin, a false friend, not a couffin, French for bassinet. I struggled with this word, coffin. Not with the word, with the reality of it. Tom in this reality. ‘I should make it by hand, it’s up to me to make it.’ Stuart announced this to me. I loved him for saying that. There were flashes, bright spots literally. Right from the beginning, paradoxical moments. Not what you’d call happiness. Moments of love. I imagine Stuart in a timeless forest, sawing planks of white wood, assembling and polishing them, a bit more than a metre long and how wide, the width of shoulders? A box made of rough wood, without embellishment, Tom. What does Tom’s death look like? What death looks like him? It looks like this. We would’ve dug a hole in the forest. We would’ve gone back, following sources and streams, to an obvious place, where we’d have laid him down, in peace, beneath the humus and the leaves. But we would’ve needed time. We would’ve needed ten years, perhaps.

  You have to be ready so quickly, so suddenly. Tom went backwards and forwards in and out of his body, hors de son corps. What to do with Tom’s body, with this body? An empty shell. A slough like animals leave behind, that you find curled up on a path or clinging to trees, useless, translucid, a little disgusting. Or sometimes it was a cumbersome object, a bit of refuse, and, just like after a crime, an accomplice would get rid of it for us, would do the dirty work.

  And at other times, I thought of Tom as in this body. Trapped in this body. Tom-body shut away all alone in a drawer in the morgue of a foreign hospital, far from everything, far from us. Alone. In the cold. I looked at Vince and Stella sleeping in their little beds, and I cried, that’s when I cried. Tom alone in the drawer—to this day I can’t handle this, the image of him slipped in there. Tom was there. He needed to be taken care of, not left all alone.

  Two ideas were foreign to me: the idea of vigil, and the idea of burial. As if I’d remained innocent of the millennia of funerary knowledge. The Greeks, the Jews, the Christians. The first graves, and the graves before them, those without writing. The beginning of History starts there. I was innocent. New. A baby just out of its mother’s womb. To watch over a body in a morgue, to have a chair brought to you next to an open drawer—I didn’t even make enquiries. Though there must be protocols, a way of grieving your dead without upsetting the service. Keep your coat on, it’s cold. I didn’t know where Tom was. I couldn’t believe that he was there. I was looking for him. Don’t leave the body to animals. Come up with a way of passage, a place. I wasn’t there yet. Historically, I was a barbarian; along the path of humanity I was in prehistoric times. I knew nothing about the gestures, the shrouds, the anointings. I had no idea about the ritual candles and the prayers. Even the weeping,
I knew nothing about. Weeping is a job; professional mourners get paid.

  At the ages of four and seven, Tom and Vince took death more seriously than I did. They witnessed the death throes of flies, pondered over cuttlefish bones found on the beaches of Vancouver. They asked where the cat had gone, when the cat died and, little by little, day after day, its absence gradually confirmed—they’d surrendered to this mystery of death’s lack of evidence—and concluded that cats were mortal. For Tom, death defined cats. Death separated the cat from the human. ‘Cats die,’ explained Tom. Vince, he tapped into the sadness of death—he’d grieved for the cat—he weighed up the difference between objects and us, the inert and the living.

  I did what I could. You only have one mother, just as you only have one death. Tom was stuck in the morgue, under the ceiling, looking for a way out. The badly buried ones, the ridiculed ones who howl to the wind, the grave-less ones who bump up against windowpanes, these were now his gang and they had come back to haunt me. Tom demanded that we get it over with. It was with compassion that I began to think about his poor body. Tom was hanging about, hovering around his body.

  For ten years, I’ve blamed myself. Now I’d like—not to breathe, not to rest or to forget, but—to relax the jaws a little, the talons and the claws between which I remain motionless, not struggling, held tight by the pain and maybe by a vague glow from above: I don’t believe in signs anymore, but the pillars aren’t the only things that have stayed in my mind from my visit to Souillac Abbey.

  Putrefaction. In Vancouver, I read books by Patricia Cornwell, stuff about medical examiners, six months in a dry climate for mummification, eighteen months for a clean skeleton; for children it’s quicker—how are you meant to cope with that? To be alive while Tom was beneath the earth…I think it was ghosts that presented me with the notion of the air. Not the Greek world, nor that of the Bible, but Anglo-Saxon fantasy. Stuart’s heritage. That Tom’s molecules drift freely in the air. Today, I regret this. As if grief had authorised me to make such blunders. Neither in my family nor Stuart’s are the dead cremated. We want slabs, yew trees, plaques, weight. I would’ve liked to be able to visit him, I think. To sit down and tell him what’s been going on in our lives. To change his flowers like I changed his nappies. To plant jonquils and boxwood. To water, at the edge of the desert, a grave in a temperate land. To drop by and see him. I would’ve known how to do that. How to earn my way back in, maybe. A good mother, after the event. A good mother in the hereafter. But I didn’t know.

  Not that I believe that he’s anywhere; apart from in my mind, and in the minds of Stuart and the children, and our parents. A home where he survives, that radiates from us, that’s bigger than us. He appears all of a sudden, and I think of him. He appears all of a sudden from nowhere. I see him. I raise my hand gently, and I caress the air.

  I had a look on the internet to see where the crematorium is. When you move house, you worry about shops, schools, bus stops, and, if necessary, hospitals. The crematorium is more than an hour out of town. But they took care of the transfer of the body and all we had to do, the father and I, was to choose the clothes for the ceremony. They used the word ceremony instead of the word cremation. The clothes, on the other hand, were considered very important, and in this area, I must say, they employed a sophisticated level of psychology. Because the whole affair with the clothes kept Stuart and me very busy. The choice of clothing was the subject of our first real discussion, of our first talk, as they say. About Tom’s death.

  You tell yourself that flames are clean and quick, that there won’t be weeks of insects and decomposition. The purity of flames. In fact, it’s just as difficult. Ideally, you’d instantly become ash. My first thought was that Tom be naked. But it’s just as difficult to imagine your child’s body delivered up to flames as to worms. Now there’s something I didn’t know. Today, westerners know how to burn a body. This can no longer be ignored. The tales of the Sonderkommandos. The descriptions of the bodies in the ovens. The internal organs and the eyes explode first. I was incapable of forgetting this. This thing that I’d never seen, I saw it. Tom’s eyes. Tom’s entrails. His soft belly. It would need to be very quick, instantaneous. But at the crematorium, they’d warned me: two and a half hours for an adult, one hour for a small child. They must have a time per kilo, the speed calculated by the rule of three.

  I spared Stuart these images. They came to me the day I called the morgue to inform them of our decision. We were starting to lose hope, one of the employees said to me. Sentences like that you never forget. The images hounded me, in fits. Maybe Stuart has the same ones. These aren’t things you can talk about. So we talked about clothes. I wanted Tom naked after all, but it was Stuart who told me no. It was his way of saying that the flames shouldn’t touch him. I think Stuart would’ve liked to wrap him up as hermetically as possible, his little Tom, to keep him intact, in a kind of petrification by flames. An incandescence. An ecstasy, for evermore. I understand the rich and the crazy. Those sort of space capsules, at minus 200°C, those portholes through which you can see the face.

  We discussed the clothes, inch by inch. By him being naked, I also hoped to avoid hampering him with talismans, to let him go alone, with dignity, without trinkets. A little comfort, in the oven? Apart from the Winnie the Pooh he sometimes took with him, Tom never had a ‘comforter’. If he’d had one, I would’ve found it inappropriate or, I don’t know, unpleasant, to burn a soft toy under the pretext of keeping him company. Put it in a grave, perhaps. Maybe. In the oven, when the flames lick the coffin, as they say, would the corpse hug the lifeless object tightly in its arms? Yet without warning Stuart would’ve loaded him up for the journey. He even talked about biscuits (Tom’s favourite biscuits: chocolate Prince biscuits, that we could only get in France, and that my mother sent over in bulk.) Let him, at least, wear his favourite T-shirt (Stuart knew these things), the striped one, Stuart said—and if I hadn’t stopped him, he would’ve placed by his side a photo of us, of him, me, Stella and Vince.

  In ancient times, they slid a gold coin under the tongues of the dead for the hereafter, for the passage, to see them through the beginning—a bit like certain migrants who landed in Australia with a pound in their pockets. These skeletons are found, mouth open, the gold fallen amongst the vertebrae.

  I wanted all these fetishes removed from Tom. I wanted him naked, and pure, if this word has any meaning. In the purity of the flames, and in their harshness too. I was torn. No tenderness. It was too late, for tenderness.

  I remember the days that preceded the cremation: eyes dry, heart dry, brain enraged, and the bang of the eyes exploding. He was dead. He was dead. The truth. The end of the world. The vitrification.

  Cremation. Ashes. Air. That’s all. The objects, our whims, seemed more childish to me than Tom’s tastes themselves. Ridiculous, when nothing about Tom was ridiculous.

  New clothes, never worn. Clothes that had no history. A sort of uniform for death, as neutral as possible. Nothing that adds to the grief. Nothing. His approval: we felt that he would’ve agreed with what we chose for him. And with our discussions, our talks, our quarrels. Tom knew so much about us. He was so far ahead of us. We were children.

  A few days ago, on the beach, I watched Vince surf. It seems to me that, at that moment, the fear that I felt was normal, and reasonable. I was the mother of a young man, seventeen years of age, clever, well balanced, who was surfing, a wild coast, medium-sized waves. My view of my son wasn’t blurred by the death, ten years earlier, of my other son. Tom wasn’t dancing between my eyes and Vince. I was afraid for Vince, and for Vince only.

  Fear was normal, and beauty overflowed it. My son’s body a brushstroke, a human silhouette where the water shouldn’t have let him in. Vince nonchalant on his long board, walking on the crest of waves, vertical at the edge of chaos. Tom stayed a very small boy, and his brother grew and grew. On the beach then, I wasn’t wondering, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t wondering, yet again, whether the de
ath of one son was necessary for the life of the other, this triumphant son here.

  It seems to me that, during those two hours on the beach, I experienced a window of sanity. I didn’t spin the fantasy of Tom surfing. Or of a pink and white Tom, covered in sun block, sitting reading under a beach umbrella. Or left behind at home surfing on the internet. An apprentice pâtissier somewhere in Europe. A chess champion. Saviour of the world. Institutionalised schizophrenic. I don’t know. It’s true that on the beach a few days ago, I wasn’t telling myself that Tom would’ve made a proud surfer too. At that time, the question of breathing wouldn’t have been so crucial, so I wasn’t telling myself that, anyway, a different life would’ve lifted us off these shores and away from these forests, brought us back inland. I wasn’t telling myself that Tom would be fifteen now. I wasn’t telling myself that we would’ve, no doubt, been able to breathe anywhere, with our two lungs, without thinking about it, just like other humans.

  The future perfect tense is painful, but much more benign, in any case, than real memories. Images in the future perfect are without substance, like a daydream that leaves me as tired and empty as if I’d watched TV for too long.

  Was it a good idea to bring Vince and Stella to the crematorium? We hesitated. The smell, we’d been warned, can be disturbing. They left us the choice: with or without children. Each new stage required a decision. So we all went together to the shops, at least, the morning itself of the cremation. Our first outing as a family of four. To choose his clothes.