The one thing they don't tell you about grief is the amount of resentment you flocculate.
Mourning both the living and the dead is an amassed weight of recounting, recalculating and revisiting every encounter you had with them.
In doing this you rediscover the creases in their hands and stories. You unveil the subtle jokes and meanings to the arrangement of playlists and ways that coffee was prepared, presented and pondered upon. You remember the colour of transcendent hand me downs and cigarette stained smiles. The smell of innocence and a blindness to the incense ever burning.
But in mourning there is a slight tension of the neck in the realisations made. Dry tongue flattened with wrath for understanding that bring an adult means removing the veil of naivety that concealed so neatly that your dead father - a young man who suffered mental illness at a severity I feel guilty for not understanding sooner - was not the hero you thought he was. Just confusion encapsulation in the flesh of a rejected black boy. A young man who died a slave to the grief of disappointment. A failure to push past the weight of having nothing. Of having no one. Ultimately being too selfish to realise that my brother and were standing right there.
Mourning the living is a corroding if not punishing reality that human beings were not designed to place others first. Trying and trying to love the dead that share meals with you is origami in the rain. A mother who shares the same air, earth, water and flamming head with you knows nothing about you and add glitter to these open wounds,she has no desire to. Living with the cross denting my shoulders that the feeling is amplified for my brother. Half baked conversations about chores and what needs to be brought. It's a mortuary documenting the survival of the exhausted. My home.
In all of this, - a fraction of what is actually swirling, looming and even sauntering - resentment has laced my grief and reinforced my opposition to playing out this scene.
As usual, I'm tired and want to sleep.
- Clementine Anne Strachan
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