There’s something about disconnected moments suddenly becoming connected. It’s like a memory abruptly becomes taut and won’t ever loosen again. So last week was my mother’s funerals (one in England, one in Ireland) and this week I’ve briefly been moving out her furniture. I’ve a cut on my hand from when wood scraped across it as I took down a decades-old wardrobe, and before then, for a minute my ear held an impression of the handle on my mom’s coffin from when I was carrying that.<\/p>\n
Here’s the thing. You cannot carry a coffin by yourself, you really need six people to do it, the whole pallbearer business is not for show or ceremony, it is a practical necessity. And when the coffin is on your shoulder, the weight is shocking, and the thump of wood against your head feels like the only real thing that’s going on.<\/p>\n
Yet when you all then lower the coffin to hand height, it’s easier to carry. I did stumble by the grave, we were negotiating such a narrow line toward it, and I did shove my knee onto the corner edge of some stone work, but still carrying it around waist level was substantially easier.<\/p>\n
And then when we had wide, cloth-like ropes and were lowering it into the grave itself, it was easy. Okay, not emotionally, but physically, it was fully and simply straightforward.<\/p>\n
The same burden is totally different depending on how you carry it.<\/p>\n
And if that is a snap-shut obvious perspective, it was new to me and I kept coming back to the thought a lot lately. <\/p>\n
Until last Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Listen, one of the things I have carried around with me since I was a teenager is guilt over how badly I assembled a wardrobe for my mom. I have this memory of guilt generally circling around everyone at the time because was I was supposed to be studying for some exams or other. I don’t know which ones, I barely paid any more attention to exams then as I do looking back now. Which may be why I did them so badly.<\/p>\n
But what I carry is that there’s no excuse for how badly I made up that wardrobe. Two wardrobes, really, with a third centre section of drawers and a mirror.<\/p>\n
I swear to you that I have always known the truth that if two people happened to breathe out near it at the same time, the whole thing would shatter. There are few things I have done in my life that are as shoddy and shamefully bad as that, and the fact that my mother pretended to be happy with it always strained credulity.<\/p>\n
But on Tuesday I had to take that wardrobe down and, god in heaven, it turned to be so well built. It took hammers and full-swing temper to take it apart, it took judicious kicks, and the whole thing fought back by scraping me wherever it could.<\/p>\n
For decades I have felt that wardrobe threatening to crumble and reveal me to be as bad a furniture assembler as it had always told me I was. And for decades it has actually been as solid as if I spent my life standing there, holding it up.<\/p>\n
The same burden is totally different depending on when you look at it.<\/p>\n
Unless, of course, I’m just substantially weaker at swinging a hammer now than I was as a teenager. I’ve only just thought of that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s something about disconnected moments suddenly becoming connected. It’s like a memory abruptly becomes taut and won’t ever loosen again. … Continue reading