“Because I could not stop for Death —”

The unreality of time strikes hardest, I think, at the moments around life entering and exiting a body.

I have now been a carer for three and a half months. I have some clients who I see regularly. One of them, one who I visited on my first day of work, one who has been a fixture of my rota pretty much the whole time I have been at this job, died on Saturday night.

I had known it was coming — we all had, she was 91 and had been bedridden for months and declining steadily for several weeks — and this was my weekend off, so on Friday I left her sister my phone number. She telephoned me on Sunday morning, close to midday, to tell me the news. Despite having lived in France for most of her adult life and being very French in many ways, she is fantastically English in the way she tries (and mostly succeeds) to hide when she is crying. It was a short call. There was very little I could or can do. My job is about the physical difficulties of living, not the emotional difficulties of dealing with death.

I have one living grandparent. I have never been to a funeral. Both my parents have spent the majority of their adult lives distanced from their families in some way (geographically, emotionally, communicationally). At the end of last summer, an uncle of mine who I had met twice as an adult died of lung cancer. It was sad, of course — all death can feel like loss — but I had never watched someone's life slip away day by day. These deaths, even though they were my family, did not affect me particularly deeply.

This one, though . . . I don't really know how to write about it. I barely know what I'm feeling. On the one hand I feel a massive relief that she is no longer in pain as she had been for the whole time I knew her. On the other hand I do miss her. She was strong-willed and had a very interesting life that she told me bits of from time to time. I feel privileged to have known her even for the few months that I did. I hope she is at peace now.

When someone dies, everyone else's life around them goes on. It has to. We have to process our grief and give ourselves time to do that, but we also have to continue our lives as best we can. Today I am working. On Thursday I have D&D again. Soon, hopefully, I will get the COVID vaccine. And so it goes.

Title from the Emily Dickinson poem.