Checking In

At first glance, it doesn’t look too bad. It certainly seems to have changed since weekly visits to my grandmother filled my teenage Sundays. The bright and airy reception space resembles a conservatory, with its comfortable faux leather seating, contemporary coffee bar, and sunlight streaming in through the floor to ceiling windows. Various dracaena, yucca, and bamboo plants shield the cappuccino ladies from view, but the rich coffee aroma wafts through the air and the wall-mounted signs direct people to various places, including the Garden Room and the Rehabilitation Centre. As we move down the institutional corridor, with its colour coded lines etched into the vinyl, and turn a corner past the obligatory chapel, where candles are lit to alleviate suffering, the belly of the monster reveals its hideous truth.

There’s more glass here, but this time the continuous line of windows exposes the wards where motionless statues are denied any last shred of privacy by a moving audience of busyness. On the other side of the hall, single rooms resemble cells with small windows almost at ceiling level; dishevelled beds; lonesome faces. We enter the second ward through the shabby, teak-stained doorframe. On the opposite wall, matching exterior windows face us, sitting high above the clunky radiators with much of the daylight blocked by dreary window boxes. As if a bird’s eye view of the outside world would be too torturous for the prisoners within.

Six single beds are lined up, three on each side, in a space originally designed for four. When the extra beds were moved in, no adjustments were made to the frames holding the paper-thin privacy screens, so the middle patient invariably finds themselves sharing their bed with a curtain. The cheap wooden unit beside each bed comprises a single wardrobe, an open bedside table, many of which are positioned on the wrong side of the bed rendering the shelf space useless to bed-ridden patients, and a few drawers lined with a thick layer of dust and the scent of death. The beds have thin mattresses, lumpy pillows, and an assortment of sweet wrappers, used tissues, and rosary beads, primarily because the patient next door has forgotten which bed is theirs. An over-the-bed table with a wooden top and cold metal legs glides easily on castors, and three times a day holds a plastic tray with food best avoided. And finally, beside each bed, a wooden-framed chair with a high back and padded armrests fights for space with mobile blood pressure monitors, wheelchairs, and labelled Zimmer frames.

As I take in my new surroundings, four sets of eyes watch me intently; two of the women are smiling, one is semi-comatose, and the fourth lady is beating the bed table with her walking stick while roaring ‘NURSE!’ continuously.

ʻWhich colour would you like,’ asks one of the paramedics who had moved me the short distance from the local general hospital, ‘red, or purple?’

And so, my preference for the armchair in the muted heather tones decides my fate, and I end up sitting next to the bed where my grandmother took her last breath thirty-four years earlier.

by Marie Lavin

Good Grief

An Essay

If a jellyfish becomes too emotionally damaged it starts over. Turns out they start to regenerate their DNA and, in a process, not far from mortality they go from full-grown jellyfish to polyps. They may do this as many times as required until they feel they’ve lived a satisfying and peaceful life.

At this stage, they sink towards the ocean bottom’s soft bed of sand. My mother told me this on a walk once. In my next life, I want to be a jellyfish.

Joan Didion lies in front of me. Her blue nights untouched. My aunt is dead, and they’ve given me a book. I’m 21 and hers is the second dead body I’ve seen.

Four years ago, when my sister succumbed to her illness, they gave me endless hours of therapy.

They gave me obscure looks in the hallway at school. They gave me a box of her belongings.

I only kept her old bathrobe, emerald green and woollen, still with the smell of her cigarettes woven into the fabric.

My father places a cup of tea beside the book. The tea only he knows how to make.

What will I drink when he is gone?

I normally like sitting in the kitchen. The cream-coloured cabinets hug you from all sides like a blanket. Now they merely remind me of the suffocating pillow I scream into every night.

‘I don’t feel well’.

My father stops and looks at me.

‘Are you sick?’ he asks, with a kind of worry you only hear from parents who have already lost one child.

‘I don’t feel well in the head,’ I say.

I sip the burning tea. It’s a sharp-edged sword on the tip of my tongue.

‘That’s normal. You’re grieving’.

‘What if it takes four more years before I’m alright again? Like it did when Sonja died. And then when I’m finally happy again, someone else dies’.

We sit in silence. Even the rain has quieted.

‘I always thought people from your generation were better at embracing themselves. You can freely choose who you are. Sexual orientations and all’.

‘It’s not a choice, Dad’, I snap. ‘Alright, but these are your beliefs?’ I nod stiffly.

‘Yes, I believe people should live as they are’. ‘Yet, you don’t allow yourself to be who you are’. I swallow the last mouthful of tea and stare down at the black leaves on the bottom.

‘Then tell me what I am’.

My dad laughs so powerfully it sounds like thunder.

‘You are sad. Allow yourself to grieve’. That night my father’s voice circles in my head. Allow yourself to grieve.

Allow the waves to swallow you. Drown.

I hold on to my bed sheet. I have been holding on for the past few months. If I let go, I fear that grief will take over. Spread through my body like the illness that killed my sister and then my aunt.

If I let go, I’ll drown.

Waves of black hair. Hair that once belonged to Sonja. She had an earthquake for a belly laugh. She never felt guilty for taking up space. That’s why there is so much space left.

So much emptiness.

She drank coffee from an I-heart-Patrick-Swayze mug. I wonder who kept the mug.

When they said it was terminal, I wondered if there is a connection between terminal death and the terminal you go to when waiting for an aeroplane.

‘You are sad’, my dad said. I am broken, I think. I am a glass vase.

You drop a glass vase on the floor, and it’s broken. You glue it back together and we can pretend the vase is whole again. But you can still see all the cracks. You can always retrace exactly how it was broken. It will never hold another flower because the cracks make the water leak.

The vase is crying.

I release my grasp on the bed sheet. Warm salt bubbles run from the corners of my eyelids and the fairy lights above my bed blur. At last, I do not drown. I sink.

Cancer.

The word crackles between my lips. Cancer sounds like bones breaking. It sounds like worlds crashing. A word I identify right away. Cancer- An itching birthmark might be a sign of cancer, though it likely isn’t.

Likely just isn’t good enough.

A hand grabs my elbow, and our eyes meet. Piercing green behind the horn-rimmed glasses.

‘What are you up to?’ he asks.

‘Nothing,’ I slide my phone out of his view.

‘Are you googling your symptoms again?’ His voice isn’t accusing; it’s almost understanding.

We’ve just exited the College cinema, after a screening of Vanilla Sky. Except I didn’t watch much of the movie. I was too busy checking an odd-looking birthmark in the sparse light from the screen. The itching of the birthmark is quickly replaced by the feeling of guilt. I can’t even enjoy going to the cinema anymore. I can’t even allow myself a few hours of distraction. I can’t even give my partner the presence and intimacy needed in a healthy relationship.

Through the relationship I was constantly burdened by my grief. It was especially my inability to enjoy the present out of fear for what might come. Whether it was the prospect of cancer from an itching birthmark or a possible breakup. The biggest lesson I learned from death is that nothing lasts forever. When my partner eventually left me, I came to realize that I knew exactly what to do. I knew how to grieve, and somewhere in that pain I learned how to move on. Life is like the waves on the ocean or the heart monitor. Whenever it settles to the middle, we flatline.

Perhaps that is my way of regenerating?

Like a jellyfish, I start over with new life experiences. A different kind of rebirth.

After all, I am thankful for what my five years in mourning have taught me about living.

I know now that every ending is a new beginning, and I can tell you that anything worth grieving over is everything worth living for.

‘Do you ever think about the soul of the person when you’re doing an autopsy?’

When my mother, a forensic pathologist of twenty years, on a radio show was asked about the concept of a soul she answered this.

‘Never.’

‘So, you can’t feel it?’

‘No, because the soul is not a thing of the body. Your soul is the people you’ve loved.’

by Liv-Andrea Banner

Beachy Head

we used to drink in this pub what will you say when you hear what will you feel i raise this last one to us

by Sharon Keely

Toiréasa

Sister, you visit my house in search of silence, but your arrival fills my heart with sound. Taking care of you allows temporary motherhood, and I will forever accept. Spoil you, scold you. My lucky figurine and millions of hairbands. Steal my trinkets to have your memories, your coffee stains remain in mine.

Sister, complain, laugh and cry. I’ll bear everything. You’ve seen so much in your time. I forget that you’re a child. You met loss before you turned fourteen. When father fell, I wasn’t ready to take the mantle. Your visit allowed me to understand that now I am. We live in a world where danger surrounds us and you simply wish to be a child.

Sister, the nights I keep you safe are nights I treasure. You’ve added colour to my ghostly white. I have never felt closer to you, farther away from you. So much older yet so much younger. This house will never forget your presence. You have left your crescent mark on my walls. You hug me tight, a golden rarity. Dearest sister, I would die for you and I would live for you. I am your guardian now, but you are the angel.

by Maria Hamill Michelle Gannon Summer Illustration

Clock

Time circles within Infinitely, it jumps and indicates Even when one sleeps or moves on, From desire or sorrow

It keeps flowing and following, This invincible notion That all souls strive to hold.

by Stefano De Sciscio