Trompe L'Oeil

When I saw him, the night before, he looked his usual size. He was in his armchair, the reclining one the grandchildren always liked to play in. His twitchy leg rose slightly and fell, at regular intervals, of its own volition. His hair, what remained of it, was slightly disordered. There was a small, pale soup stain on his brown pyjama jacket.

He was silently cross with me and my mother. The GP had come and was dithering about whether to send him back to hospital. He’d only come out that morning, pleased at having escaped after twenty-four hours. It was usually a couple of weeks at least, followed by a couple of months in the rehabilitation unit, at the mercy of physiotherapists and occupational therapists and brisk nurses who insisted on using his first name. My mother and I urged the GP to re-admit him. His breathing was bad, he was retaining urine again, his mobility, never good, had deteriorated further. The GP weighed it up and decided that my mother and I were the scarier team.

I offered to go to the hospital with them but it was getting late and they said that I had to think about my daughter and getting to work the next morning. I picked up my coat and bag. I looked at him. He said, more in weariness than in rancour, that he was bloody pissed off. ‘It’s for the best,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you on the ward tomorrow.’

Which I did, just after nine o’clock in the morning. He was laid out on the bed where he had died two hours previously, his mouth slightly open, his eyes just visible under the not quite closed lids. A muted, greying colour. Chill, but not yet icy. Still in his brown pyjama jacket.

After the shock; after I held one of his hands while my mother, shaking and weeping at the other side of the bed, held the other; after I stared at the soup stain made at the end of eighty-three years of life; after I heard my mother cry, ‘Where are you? Where have you gone?’; after this I said, in wonder, ‘He’s so small.’

I have lost count of the number of times I saw my father in a hospital bed, but he never looked small. He always looked the same as ever, the same height, width and depth, displacing the same amount of air, occupying the same space.

His body was five feet eight inches long. His hands and feet were small for an adult male and his arms and legs had, indeed, become quite stick like in old age. People shrink with the years, they say, so I suppose that if, that last night, you had measured him against the man in his thirties who taught me to swim and to sing the harmony line to ‘Sparrow in the Treetop’; or the man in his forties who taught me to jitterbug; or the man in his sixties and even his seventies who played silly buggers with his grandchildren and had them helpless with laughter; I suppose yes, he was smaller. But that morning, before any physical change could have taken place, he was to my eyes smaller than the night before. And I couldn’t understand that.

I next saw him in his coffin. Icy, this time, and shiny from the embalming process. Himself, but like a carving of himself. My son, probably more nervous than he had ever been in his twenty-one years, but determined to see his Grandad, visibly relaxed when he saw that there was nothing frightening or macabre. Just Grandad, in his best suit, looking rather as he did when my mother made him scrub up for family birthdays or Christmas. On the way home my son said, ‘I never realised he was so small.’

Even the coffin looked small, laid on the bier in the crematorium chapel on the day of the funeral. Family flowers only, donations to the Royal British Legion. Inside the coffin, my mother had placed pencils and paintbrushes, for the rather good amateur artist; I put in a photograph of the ship his own father served and died on in the second world war, for the son who never forgot and the rather good amateur war historian he became; my son put in a programme for the first play his proud Grandad ever saw him in (‘Bloody hell lad, they’re right, you can act!’); and my daughter drew him a picture of a rainbow, like the one he once drew for her, complete with instructions for the magic spell to fool the leprechaun and nick the gold. Gifts for the dead. Perhaps not; we none of us believe in an after life, so maybe the gifts were for ourselves, the coils we threw around him in our attempts to keep him anchored here, with us. Let us pretend that there is still the someone to whom these things mattered. Let us pretend that there is still the someone to whom we mattered. Let us not be left with the void where his love used to be.

In due time, we interred his ashes in a nice spot in the Garden of Remembrance, not far from the river. The young man who led us solemnly over rather muddy ground, carefully carrying the rather industrial looking container which held my Dad, assured us that in the spring the garden would be lovely, but the snow and ice had left it a bit of a quagmire, and the river being so high hadn’t helped, and this year there’d been a terrible problem with the moles. In the midst of death there is indeed life, splendid, absurd, uplifting life. We watched as he emptied the container into Dad’s - hopefully mole proof - muddy cube of earth, and thanked him as he retreated to let us say our last good byes.

‘Not a lot to show for it,’ said my mother, looking at the very small, very white, pile of ashes.
‘We’re here to show for it,’ said my daughter.

I have thought a lot about the old, fragile and alive body that housed my father on that last night, and the dead one that housed nothing the following morning. The diminution of death bewildered me. The replacement of presence by absence. The abrupt and complete obliteration of all the memories, thoughts and emotions that made this person who he was. My puzzlement when confronted by this reminded me of standing before one of those paintings known as trompe l’oeil: a physical composition which persuades the brain to perceive a dimension that cannot actually be there. Even when the composition itself is no longer visible, the memory of it is sufficient to convince that the extra dimension must still exist, somehow, somewhere.

But of course it doesn’t. My father is dead, and his ashes rest with the raised water table and the moles. All that he was is gone. Genetic echoes remain: the way my son laughs; my daughter’s instinctive feel for colour and form; even my own ability, when needs must, to turn in a half decent job of DIY with the minimum of tools and those the wrong ones for the job. We continue to love our own versions of who he was, and we will learn to cope, eventually, with the absences, the silences, and the bewilderment, his going has left behind.