The Blue Tit
On Coping #146
More frequently these days I awake to existential confusion.
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What I mean by that is this:
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There is a large silver chimney outside my bedroom window. It is the means of smoke extraction from the fire in the kitchen below. Now it is Spring and there is a Blue Tit (or at least I think it is a Blue Tit but I know nothing of birds so I may be wrong; and I think it is a single Blue Tit as in the same one but again I could in fact be seeing multiple birds coming and going and repeating the same behaviour – but for now let’s assume it’s a single same Blue Tit) and this Blue Tit flutters around and around the silver metal tube, entranced, seemingly, with what I can only assume it thinks is another bird but is in fact it’s own reflection.
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And I watch this Blue Tit from my bed, our bed, and I pity it. I don’t know the lifespan of Blue Tits but I don’t imagine it to be more than a few years at most and yet with so little time to exist it is choosing to spend precious moments preoccupied with the inconsequential actions of another bird which in actual fact is itself.
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On other mornings, I become lost in numbers. The billions of lives that have come before mine and the billions that will come after, and my own life in that context like the proverbial grain of sand objectively practically weightless yet to me the mass of a pyramid.
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These thoughts and the many more like them are imbued, of course, with the spectre of death.
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I think I thought witnessing the act of your dying would give me answers when in reality all it has done is leave me with more questions.
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In your final hours you were in a light sleep, a kind of half waking dream; your body propped up by seven (or was it eight by then?) pillows but with so little muscle left and the cancer marauding through your organs even at rest, your frame barely registered on the feathers and foam.
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Your mouth was slack and your eyes half open, but you weren’t visibly conscious. Your breath came in short, shallow inhalations through your mouth but I never heard it come out again so I’m not sure where it went.
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At some point, one of the nurses came in and told me it will be soon now so I dragged my exhausted and yet still alert self from the depths of my chair and I began the final phase of my 21 day bedside vigil as I told you I love you you are safe I love you you are safe I am here, over and over again. I watched oh so carefully the tiny undulations of your chest and shoulders. The only visible evidence that there was still life inside you.
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And though I wasn’t aware of it at the time I now think that I was waiting, searching, hoping for some sign – some glimpse – some sense even, of your soul leaving this now unfit for purpose vessel behind.
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This beautiful soul that I had chosen to love. This soul that was kind to strangers, and quick to laugh, and ferociously loyal, and fiercely independent. This soul that liked swimming in the sea and the taste of Ramen and reading Grazia in bed.
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Because it wasn’t this body that I had given my life to. This body that nevertheless I had held and caressed and kissed all over and which had by some biological process simply explained and yet miraculous to me still given birth to our three children.
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No, it’s not this, this corporeal form, a brandmark at best - or rather just a system to bring forth and make visible to the naked eye the soul I love.
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It can’t be this because what I see before me is unrecognisable from what it was. You’d barely know they had been one and the same body.
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And so if the body is fundamentally changed and yet the soul - by which I mean the way you danced in your bed with your hands yesterday, or the joy you radiated when you were told your sister had been approved to adopt by her panel, or the gentle curiosity you showed towards your nurse about her daughter‘s day at school - the soul remains, then in this way, I know you are still you – even now beneath the shallow breath.
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So where will you be in a moment when you stop breathing?
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I desperately do not want you to die. But you will. In a minute. Not at some unknown future time that can therefore be ignored. But momentarily. Shortly, you will simply not take another breath. And at that instant your body will begin to decompose. But you? Where will you be?
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So I watch as closely as my sleep deprived and caffeine-addled brain will allow. I watch for and I know it’s a silly but I watch to see your soul leave your body.
