All Alone, In The Dark

He lay on his bed in the relative coolness of the hour past Dawn, wondering what to do with the rest of his life. Only yesterday he had been there, crying, at her funeral, and this morning, in the hour before Dawn, he had awoken from his fitful, restless, sleep to think of her, and to feel his guilt at her dying. He was not an old man, but he felt it, now in the days of his grief, and even the Dawn Chorus of early June did not please him, as it had previously done. For the past two years she had been his life, and all his plans, his hopes, his dreams, his love, were for her or involved her. So he lay, grieving, thirteen days after she took her own life.

One week ago, almost to the hour - as the hot Sun sweated him - he had walked slowly, head downturned, into the meadow fields of the Farm carrying the few items he needed including his favourite photograph of her, leaving a note on the desk in his room. He could not cry, then, as he had cried in the days since her dying, suffused as he was in that moment with guilt, feeling, knowing in his very being, that he was the cause of her death. For she had relied on him, in those last weeks and he, selfishly, had left her even after she had pleaded for him, to stay. She had relied on him - and he had let her down; betrayed her. There were the words he said; those arguments of their weeks in York in her small, ground-floor, Apartment near that city's centre. There was his expectation, often voiced, of his need for her love, her commitment. There was the knowledge that he obviously had not loved her enough or as she needed to be loved, as she should have been loved in the months, the years, of her depressive illness: loved in a selfless, undemanding, peaceful, way. Had his expectation of her love, his need for her commitment, his hope of physical intimacy, been too much for her, breaking the thread by which she had clung to life? Yes - he felt. So the guilt, the remorse, the anguish, had grown in him, day upon day, hour following hour, until he had chosen to follow her.

Why, then, was he alive, now, when she was dead? She had the courage he seemed to lack, and for a few, brief, moments, he got up to kneel before his newly purchased crucifix and pray to the God he once believed in. He was trying to believe - he needed to believe - and every day for the past ten days he had prayed, crying out in his despair and guilt. Was it this burgeoning faith that saved him in that moment in that field of Meadow grass? Or simply her mother, who - when he had telephoned from his mobile 'phone to say his farewell as he sat on a fallen Oak branch, his two simple implements of death nearby - had launched into telling him, in a loving way, about her own feelings concerning her daughter's death? So he listened as she had spoken, and began to feel the sorrow he might add to her burden were he, also, to take his own life - and the sorrow he might add to the burden of his dead lover's sister, and to a close friend - feeling deeply then that he had to live, at least for a while, to bear his own burden of this tragedy, the burden of his guilt, as a penance, justly imposed upon his life.

So he lay down again wondering what he should do. He desired, almost desperately, to give some meaning to her death - to redeem it, in some way - but he did not know how, and the silent Retreat, to be undertaken according to Ignatian spirituality, was still two weeks away. Could he, should he, survive until then? How could he make sense of her life, her suffering, her death, if not through God, through a belief in an after-life, through the redemption of faith? There was a comfort, there, in returning to the Catholic faith of his youth, as there had been a feeling a release, even a brief peace, after his Confession on Monday. But doubts remained - doubts which he pushed aside, hoping, prayying, for some guidance, for a simple, submissive faith.

Instead, as he lay on his bed in the warming hours of a humid if overcast day, his doubts returned, stronger than before. Was he being a hypocrite, hoping, trying to believe, but not fully believing? His own death would end this agony - as her death had brought her own anguish to an end - and he removed from the drawer of his desk his two simple instruments of suicide. He stared at them for some minutes - torn between the peace of his dying, and the torment of his living - until that feeling of penance returned. Would it be a just punishment for him, for his guilt, for him to live, in anguish, as she had lived in anguish for almost two years? Would this be atonement, enough? For was death, for him, an easy way out, and just how, through his dying, could he redeem her death?

He began to realize, slowly,  how his own life had been a failure, and how much he had lost, in her. He needed love - her love. But she was dead; gone, and he had not woken as he hoped from the nightmare of her dying. Why did he not have the patience to wait for her love to return, to grow? Why did he not just accept her indecision for the agony it was, for her, and so suffuse her with the gentle, unassuming, love she so clearly needed but which he in his arrogant stupidity, his selfishness, his ignorance, did not find, then, within himself? All his life, given his nature, he needed a personal love, and he had had the good fortune to be loved by four women. One died, of a terminal illness, to be leave him bereft, for a while, and he had lost the love of the first and the third by his own self-absorption, by his selfish seeking, his selfish pursuit, of life in abstract forms, often political, which he in his ignorance assumed to be idealism but which, in truth, were the causes of inflicting suffering upon others. The fourth had killed herself, probably, he felt, because of his impatience, because of his utterly selfish refusal to wait for her love to return, to deepen, to grow.

Suddenly, a deep knowing of his mistakes suffused him, and he understood the profound beauty, the profound simplicity, of human love - the love between two people - knowing it in that moment for the essence of human life that it was. The means of strength; of joy; of personal happiness. Through his own stupidity, he had lost all this, yet again. Was he therefore hoping to find, now, a perfect love, a perfect relationship, in and through God? Was that an answer - even the answer? Was this love of, this desire for, God - this desire to supplicate before the Blessed Virgin Mary, this feeling of the Passion of Christ as an answer - the desperation of someone weak, lonely, desolate in their tragic loss? Or was it something more? Something of which human love was but a reflexion, an intimation? Should he - could he - surrender to the perfect love beyond human love, to the perfect joy beyond human joy? Was that reality - or self-delusion?

Thus he began to think again; to question. And this held back his wish, his desire, for death so that he able to wash himself, and dress, and stare out of the window to where the hills rose above the flat land that went down to the sea. He even noticed, for the first time in weeks, the adult Swallows swooping down from the nest they had made in the eaves of the roof above his window. Then, he smiled, for the first time since her death. But his moment of re-connexion with the world did not last, and he sat, looking out but without seeing, guilty at his so brief moment of happiness. How to live, between the moments of sadness? How to live, with the deep sadness that found him again on his knees weeping as a lost very young child might weep, all alone in the darkness of some vast confusing city?

Then, a memory of the opening of JS Bach's St. John Passion suffused him, bringing another imitation of the Divine and lifting, for an instant, the grief of his soul as, outside, on the lawn below his window, the young Rabbit nibbled away at the clover and a Blackbird hopped, as Blackbirds do, for the flow of life flowed on.

DW Myatt