Firmament

I am not the first person to lose someone. Those gone before me leave their mark on the house, the walls, the paint.

So, I buy a house in a dilapidated corner of the province.  It has sloping floors, windows that don’t quite open, and a basement I am vaguely afraid of.

Out in the garden, disused and wild with grasses, among the rotting boards of once-raised beds, I find marbles. I pocket them, taking note of the action of garden silt on glass. A bright swirl behind a white opaqueness.

All things are signs. All manifestations of robin, rain, garden dirt, mountain, cars driving by. Everything means something.

Or it doesn’t. And I am making something out of nothing. Signifier, signified, moving increasingly and constantly away from each other. A memory of a boy with his marble treasures, receding into the past.

But back to the basement. I was speaking about my fear. I force myself to go down there. In my slippered feet on the steep steps, turning on the light at the top, and climbing carefully down to a concrete enclave. This is where the furnace lives, with its various ducts and chambers, clanging on and off with what, from upstairs, seems a wheezing exhalation. Also, in a dark corner, is the hot water tank, mysteriously quiet by comparison. Beyond that, a separate concrete room lined in shelves with a flickering fluorescent light.

The floor has been swept clean, but still, I wipe my feet on the mat at the top of the stairs as I climb back into the living space, the relatively warmer mud-room that holds shoes and the washing machine, a cramped add-on to the house that connects to an ancient kitchen, which the building inspector has sagely informed me is falling away from the main, even more ancient part of the house.

A giant bolt must be put through the rafters of this kitchen, to attach it to the upright rectangle that is the original house.  All this I jot down on a list of things to do. I feel I am living on top of a casual dilemma. 

Yet, I am house happy. Content to while away the days thinking about paint colours, (I stand in the hardware store contemplating the infinitude that are shades of white), the germination of happy seeds in the cold soil.  I catch myself looking at tea towels in the housewares section, and I feel guilty. Guilty to be distracting myself with the temporary pleasures of being a person, a person alive and engaging in the aesthetics of household. Tea towels that match the trim.

If I don’t practice my grief at all moments of the day, I feel like I am forgetting my son.  The more I forget him, the more he disappears from even existing.  If I have my sadness, I still have something of him.

The paint in my bedroom, I think, is contributing to me not sleeping well.  The room is long and narrow, with a small square window near the door. A bed and a bedside table are all that fit width-wise. A small dresser sits opposite the foot of the bed at the wall by the door.

The walls are painted three colours on plaster that has been spackled to conceal the cracks and holes.  Two walls and the ceiling are an aging ivory. The colour of old bones.  The wall on the north wall is light blue. And the wall at the head of my bed, facing west, is a dark, hollow blue that empties the room of light. As if my room were a tomb, and I were laying down my head for the last time.

I think a lot about who ever lived here before me. In general, the house is a hodgepodge of a century of efforts. There are some vestiges of textured wall paper, most of it painted over. The dining room is painted two shades of grass green and a pastel pink. And both the front and back doors and entry ways have been slathered with a dense, mineral-red that I saw also applied to machinery in the shed. 

These colours, these paints, reflect someone’s effort to see this place a certain way, just as I now attempt to vision the place according to my dream of myself. We are separated by decades, a century even, by the living and the dead. I see versions of myself walking the property, stepping into the house from a wet, late spring day. A geranium in a sunny window, slate-blue rain clouds on the horizon. Each of us distracted by our hopes and plans for a future, our griefs receding behind us.

Gaston Bachelard said, “the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”

I think most people are vaguely afraid of their basements, and that association of going down into the cold, dark ground.  I no longer fear death as I used to. In fact, death holds out a sort of hope for me—that I might see Aubrey again. But if there is no reunion, if there is indeed only cold, endless time, then I feel doubly sad.

Despite this, it is good to feel the late spring sun on my face as I open the back door of the mud room and step outside into a green world.

I am not the first person to lose someone. Those gone before me leave their mark on the house, the walls, the paint.

Many of my more nostalgic items are still packed. It seemed important to get the day-to-day objects into their places. So, there are boxes of photographs and familiar things that are now hidden from my thinking, and so I forget about them. 

Aubrey’s cremated remains sit on a low cabinet in front of a random assortment of photos of him at different ages: a few weeks-old, eyes still turned toward the mystery; two years-old and mischievously eating pizza; his grade 7 school photo with plump cheeks; the adult, tousled-hair, Nirvana-shirt photo that has now become iconic of him.

I never know how to say it: his ashes. His remains.  What once was his generous body. 

I’ve kept him in the white cardboard box from the funeral home, with the sticker on the side that says his full name.  The box has heft to it, I think, because it represents his entire 6’2 body.  The box and his remains are important to me, and though I have thought from time to time that I might bury it, and him, and plant a forsythia on top, I can’t bring myself to do it. And I don’t think I will do it any time soon.  Aubrey is still real to me. I can think about him in my mind, and I can remember things that happened only months ago.  So, he must still be real, I think to myself. 

Every once in a while, I open the box. When I close it, a few powdery grains fall from the closing lid, dusting the cabinet, the floor. I have licked such dust from my fingers, or wiped my hand on my shirt, dissipating his body into my surroundings. 

I’m not lying about the paint. You can see yourself below. I’m not lying about anything at all. This is how it all seems to me.

I thought briefly about keeping the dark blue wall at the head of my bed, and painting the rest of the room dark blue. To this dark blue I’d add an overarching firmament of tiny stars. Like an Egyptian tableau.

In some stories, the sky is the body of a gigantic woman stretched above the horizon. Her legs and arms, which reach down to earth, comprise the four pillars of heaven. Her hair hangs down over her head, and she stands on tiptoes. Her body is decorated with stars. Each morning, the newly born sun travels westward along her body and disappears into her mouth, to be re-born the following morning. 

This is the way my mind works now.