La gueule ouverte (maurice pialat, 1974)
"It's always the same."
Watching a parent die is never much fun. You find yourself at an emotionally dizzying point in your life, and everyone around you keeps asking you questions, or requires you to make decisions. Some people don't want all this responsibility foisted onto them. And some people want to scream in everyone's face. But most of us simply muddle through it all as best we can.
And then there are the hands.
People will approach you and shake your hand, or simply hold your hand(s) in theirs. There may even be a hand on your arm, or one placed consolingly around your shoulders, or placed on the back of your neck. Maybe you don't want all these hands on you, or maybe you do. You wouldn't ever say it, but perhaps you're thinking that you wish those were someone else's hands. Or that those hands would slip to somewhere else on your body. Everyone deals with these things in different ways.
And then there are bodies.
Everything moves into a world of bodies. Your eyes monitor a chest rising and falling as it breathes. You wipe a face. Mop a brow. Maybe you even feed and clean a body. And whether you do these things directly, or have someone do them for you, you become inextricably linked to your parent's body, once again. The weight of their body. Their pallor. The smell of it. The feel of their skin. These were not aspects of your parent that you could easily call to mind before, but you've become all too familiar with them now. Eventually you'll move onto the topic of opening their body up, and closing it again, once everything is finished. But that's not something you can talk about right now.
And then there's intoxication.
Whether you're consciously doing this or not, you'll be trying to get as far away from everything as possible, while also remaining present. There are a wide variety of ways to do this, and you can pursue whatever intoxicant you like, the fact remains that nothing will work and you will be standing there, dealing with something you don't want to deal with, more sober than you've ever been. Your quest for intoxication, to be somewhere else, to change how you feel, will only end in failure as you continue to live in the moment and experience every agonising second of everything.
And nothing feels the way it should.
You've read books, heard stories, and songs. You know what the experience of the death of a parent is. And this isn't it. Everything here is so banal and ordinary. It *should* be filled with an unmistakable drama. But it's not. And even the daylight that streams in through the window seems to be far more normal than usual. You find yourself beginning to notice a world of small details: patterns and colours and textures. Simply because you're looking for something unique to hold on to to identify this moment as special, and not the same as every other moment. Earlier you went outside for the first time in a while, and it both upset you and consoled you that everything outside was continuing as normal.
But of course, it's not just a parent.
For a parent to die it is also likely that someone will lose their spouse, and that a parent will be irrevocably separated from their child. We get trapped into looking at it all from one particular angle, but there are others. All of these things are happening at once, and although it feels like something horrific, it is in moments like this that we should perhaps remember that this is the best possible outcome from a long list of possible outcomes. This is as good as things can get at the end.
So where does it end?
There will be a moment when a last breath is taken. Another moment when a body is lowered into the ground, or ashes are scattered. A moment when objects are hurled into waste receptacles. Does it end there? Does it continue? When does pain end? And does one manage to live with pain, or does it simply dissipate? These are concrete events, but emotions are far more flexible than the closing of a door. In hindsight you'll look back on the last conversation you had with your parent and roll it around in your head until it holds some profound meaning for you. But you were unaware that that was the last conversation when you had it. You presumed that there would be more words and more opportunities, and maybe you were holding something back because you thought you still had time and wanted the moment to be just right before you said it, and that was not quite the right moment. Maybe you'll experience one of these 'final' moments and you'll find yourself wondering what your parent's favourite colour was, or their most difficult childhood memory, or their favourite song, but you'll be unable to answer this because you always thought there would be more time to speak.