Grief
Three weeks ago I took a long walk during which I was passing a scene from a possible fiction story through my head. Repeating it over and over to see how it could fit together, how the language in dialogue and description might change the feel. Whatever the variations it always ended with one character, lying in a hospital bed, saying "I need my big spoon."
By the time I came home I thought I'd sorted it in my head but wasn't ready to write it down so I set it aside and got on with other things. It was hours later, after dinner, that I suddenly realised where that line came from. It wasn't fiction. It was something that had been said to me, that had real meaning and context, that I had self-plagiarised from the screenplay of my own life.
Thirty-nine years ago in 1987 I decamped from the south of England to the North-East to attend what is now a University to get me some tertiary education. For the first weeks I lodged with friends of friends half an hour's walk away from campus. Theirs was a first floor flat; the ground floor flat was occupied by four graduates who all had reason to remain in the city after college. Among them was Dom. That autumn he was 22, I was 24 and I fell head over heels in love.
Nothing is ever simple. I have loved many people in many different ways in my time. But I have never loved so instantly, so passionately and so hopelessly as I loved Dom. Because of course he was straight.
There were evenings in the pub and shared late night takeaway. Giant onion bhaji large enough to share dipped in leftover sweet and sour sauce. Chips with gravy or curry sauce. My accommodation had become another shared flat a further forty-five minute walk out of the city so each night out was negotiation about where to end it and most times that would be his place with me kipping on the sofa. But one night in December when there was a gale blowing and snow already thick on the ground with more falling we chose to walk on to mine for no reason that I can remember now.
When we got in the flat had been empty all day and therefore cold so we huddled around the gas fire in my room for a while finishing the last of the beers. Then it was a matter of logistics. The sitting room with the sofa was freezing, quite literally with condensation turning to ice on the inside of the windows. The spare room was worse and there was no bed made up. So I asked if he would sleep in my bed, with me but not "with me" as it were. He had no hesitation. Quite the opposite as he said "It would be good to cuddle."
I feel as if I really kept my cool at that point, although if I am honest with myself it is actually unlikely that I managed that. But I did ask "Big spoon or little spoon?"
He knew what I meant and immediately replied "Little spoon."
Two days later it was more deliberate. Dom suggested that we take the extra walk. I played along. This time the flat was warm and I'd cleared the box room and made up the spare bed. We ate, we drank, we talked. We went to bed. Separate beds. All entirely normal. But not five minutes had passed before Dom came into my room without a knock, pushed the door shut behind him and climbed into my bed, curling up little-spoon wise for me to curl myself around him.
That's what happened every time thereafter until Dom got one of those offers you can't refuse; a job too good to pass up in a city on the other coast of the north. There he met Michelle, the woman who would become his wife. Mish who knew the whole story. I would visit for a weekend and more often than not Mish would contrive to be elsewhere for one night so Dom and I could have our cuddle. There is more empathy and kindness in that woman than can be told.
A few years later work took me away, back down to the south and visits became harder to arrange. I managed to get up there once most years while Dom, who by this time was a father, came down every second or third year. It didn't matter so much because we always seemed to be able to take up exactly where we left off whether it was six months or two years before.
Then in 2016 the phone call came. Pancreatic cancer, late detected, aggressive, advanced. Dom was in hospital. Palliative care was all that could be done. Would I come?
Of course I went.
Mish met me to give me a hug and tell me what little there was to tell. The she took me into Dom's room and sat me down by the bed and left me. That woman has such grace.
There was me holding Dom's hand, trying to make conversation while desperate not to say any of the dreadful trite things one is prone to say to the dying simply because you're in no state to think and all the while holding myself tight so I wouldn't break down. Eventually I reach the inevitable "If there's anything that you need, anything at all…"
He replied, "All I need is my big spoon."
With those words he utterly broke me.
Two days later he was dead.
I cannot now conceive how twisted my mind has become that I could have forgotten the context of those words. Or why they came to me at all virtually on the tenth anniversary of Dom's death.
Or why after these years the grief should hit me again so forcibly with uncontrollable weeping more than several times since I realised what I might have put into my story.
Writing this I'm weeping now, tears dripping on the keyboard.
I miss my little spoon so much.
