With the sunset sharpness was lost, and like mist rising, quiet rose, quiet spread, the wind settled; loosely the world shook itself down to sleep, darkly here without a light to it, save what came green suffused through leaves, or pale on the white flowers by the window.
– Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
My mother’s bedroom was at the far end of the house, toward the edge of nothing. From the window is the garden – bluebells, the roots, a dove’s wing.
Her room was downstairs in the childhood house, perched at the top of a hill. From an upstairs window, there’s a view of slate rooftops, glittering and silvery when the sun is going down.
In June, the days stretched long, filled with a golden light. Outside, the elderflowers and honeysuckle are in full bloom. In the fields behind the house, orange-red poppies and blue cornflowers sway in the wind.
To reach my mother’s room, you walk through the kitchen door into a narrow hallway. Your feet step onto a faded magenta carpet that reaches to the middle door. That’s the one my mother slams at night when the fighting with my father starts. When she slams it, the sound echoes through the empty house. They argue because my father has his own lady friends and my mother has been drinking.
Outside, there’s a call of blackbirds against the hum of bees. The hush of dusk wraps itself around the windows.
On the other side of the door is another narrow hallway. There are five small rooms. On the left is my small bedroom, with the apricot coloured walls, where a bed is covered with a threadbare cream blanket. I lie there with my legs up the wall, tick-tocking back and forth like the hands of a clock, watching the light through the window changing. Voices come through the thin walls. Words blur together, rising and falling.
My father’s tiny study is next to my room, with plain wood bookcases and a small wooden table under a window. The bookcases contain books about maps because geography is my father’s favorite subject. A typewriter sits on the table, its matte black paint wearing away. When my father is at home, you can hear the typebars flicking up and down, striking the ribbon in decisive snaps, until the return lever is pulled with a swift motion, rolling with a mechanical whirr, before the snaps resume again.
On the right side of the hallway is a bathroom, always cold, with frosted windows and a white bathtub. On Sundays, my mother runs a bath for me and my sister. In the water, the bubbles go down, dissolving slowly, so there’s only our thin pale legs to see.
In the right corner of the hallway is the tiny green lavatory with the green peeling paint. That’s the room that makes the whole house feel derelict. Above the toilet, a tiny square window is set high in the wall, its glass pane always tilted open even when it is cold or raining. The rain trickles in and runs down the wall making everything damp. Black dots form along the baseboard. The night air drifts through the window, cool and weightless. I hide in there when the shouting reaches its peak; the tile floor is cold and my feet go to sleep folded up underneath me.
Outside, just before nightfall, swallows cut the sky in frantic spirals. Light begins to fade, the sky sinks into a darker grey.
Straight ahead, at the far end of the hall, is my mother’s room. There’s a door to it, always closed, painted with white glossy paint. When you stand close enough, you can see the brush strokes. On the other side of the door is my mother’s dark room. She has a deep pink bedspread. The curtains are always drawn against the daylight.
In the early morning, I stand outside my mother’s room. My child body trembles. I am afraid to open the door but also to walk away. I want the woman lying in the bed behind the door to get up and become my mother.
Her room is bigger than the others and square-shaped. In front of the window is the dressing table – its mirror gathering dust, a dull film settling over objects: lipsticks and perfume bottles, Pond’s Cold Cream and Olay Beauty Fluid, my mother’s dark sunglasses. There are two wardrobes – one each for my mother and father because they don’t share anything except the four children. They don’t really share the children, they divide them, each taking two, the choices based on hair and eye color.
The two daughters, red-haired and wild-eyed – one oldest, one youngest – trail behind my father, their hair like strands of fire, eyes sea-blue. The others, my brother and my other sister – dark-haired and pale, eyes of moss and sunlight, remain tethered to my mother, as if by an invisible thread.
*
My mother has another room. It’s at the far end of a hospital corridor, inside the cancer ward of a hospital. The room has a sea view. There’s a blue curtain around her bed. It opens and closes with a pull of the wrist. In the hospital, my mother gets treatment for the lump my father told me about.
“Your mother has gone to hospital. She has a little lump. The doctors are going to remove it.”
The operation sounded simple, like having your tonsils taken out. But still, I was worried.
“Is it cancer?” I asked. It was the worst word I knew.
“Is she going to die?”
My father looked down, his fingers tapping against his legs, grasping emptily for something to say.
He says the treatments will make her better but that’s not true. When she comes home she has to go back to her room to lie down. The curtains hang heavy. The room is swallowed in shadow. On her bed, my mother folds herself up, tucked into a small ball. I want to go and sit with her but my father says to leave well enough alone.
In the middle of the night, a small yellow moon finds the edge of her, watching through the window.
Sometimes my mother gets up to be sick in the tiny lavatory with the green peeling paint. I’m worried about her but she is used to this sort of thing. She kneels in a hunched position, as her body gasps and moans. My mother is becoming derelict, disappearing inside herself.
The treatments cause her hair to fall out. I find the soft brown clumps in the sink.
Then the cancer spreads further, ravaging her body, like a fire burning through a forest.
When I am eleven, I learn words like malignant, mastectomy, and metastasis, but I don’t know what they mean.
When I come home from school, my mother is in her room, cradled in the sheets. I quietly open the door. It smells like sleep and rain. She is asleep in the darkness. I stare for a while, to see if she will lift her head and turn to look at me. But her sleep is too deep to wake from.
On the bed stand, there’s a small brown bottle with a white label. It contains the small blue pills my mother takes – something for her nerves, for the bad days.
One day, my mother comes back from the hospital. She has a peach coloured box that she takes to the room. I follow her and watch her hide the box in the wardrobe. She hides other things there, in the shadows of the swishing colourful dresses she doesn’t wear any more – green and blue glass bottles and letters from her long lost love who she met before my father.
The following day, she opens the box. My sister and I are sitting on her bed. Inside, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, is a strange object – a skin-coloured anemone-like thing, filled with some sort of jelly. A nice moment follows. My sister laughs a little and my mother smiles, playing with it in the palm of her hand. I think everything will be alright but then her voice turns.
“It’s a false breast. I’m supposed to put it right here!” Then she slams her hand against the flat side of her body.
She tells us to leave, looking suddenly smaller, as if she was going inside herself.
*
My mother goes back to the hospital but we don’t go to visit her. I think about the view from the room. Perhaps she could see the sea or only rooftops of houses, or a church steeple and the train station in the distance. It is June, so perhaps she watches the sunlight reflected on the windows.
I wondered if the windows glimmered as if they were made of silver or gold, like the windows of faraway palaces. Perhaps my mother, lying in the hospital bed, felt as if she lived in a magical city, watching the pinks and golds as the sun sank into the clouds.
Perhaps she never looked out of the windows; perhaps she closed her eyes and counted the days she had left.
My mother returns from the hospital, to her room at the end of the house. Her cardigan is too heavy for the weather. Her footsteps are unsteady because she is learning how to move in a body that no longer belongs to her.
Outside, the sky darkens, clouds roll in and turn the air heavy. Night falls quickly, the mist creeps in, swallowing the road to the fields behind the house.
By morning, my mother is gone.
*
My father buys a pair of black shiny shoes and a dark suit. At the funeral, my sister and I sit in the back of a church, our older brother and sister sit closer to the front. Shadowy figures stand up then sit down again. A song plays but I don’t know the words and find them difficult to understand.
ㅤㅤㅤ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Abide with me. Fast falls the eventide.
After the service, people come to visit the house, eating small cucumber sandwiches and minding their manners.
I feel detached, as if something is overtaking me. Time becomes a dark oval.
I wake up in a place my mind has reached – the far end of somewhere, the edge of nothing.
*
After my mother died, my emotions are finite episodes with objects I can name. I feel afraid when there is a gale, happy when there is a sunny afternoon. My grief endures for longer, sometimes about something specific – my mother’s blue raincoat, but then encompassing everything like a black tide.
In the days and weeks that follow, no one speaks about her. I am supposed to acknowledge she is gone but I still experience her presence as if she were alive. This tension will be replicated in other relationships throughout my life, in the deep entanglement of love and loss. My mind tries to tidy things up but other things rise to the surface. I learn that grief outlasts the simpler emotions, like anger and sadness, and the deeply complex ones like longing and nostalgia.
Eventually, I understood my mother’s life was not confined to her body.
I wanted to believe that time was linear, longing for it to move in only one direction – always forwards, never backwards – away from the dark corridors of the childhood house where I felt afraid. But time does not follow a straight path. It moves in repeated patterns, fragmented and disjointed.
I learn my grief is a kaleidoscope – a constellation of scattered, broken pieces, turning glittery and silver when they catch the light. Grief turns time, memory, and loss, like pieces of colourful glass, casting moments in a strange refracted light edged and bound with a darkness toward the edge of nothing.
From my window is the garden – frost on grass, the hush, a flickering wing.
Sarah Harley is originally from the UK. She works at Milwaukee High School of the Arts where she supports her refugee students in telling their own stories. Sarah holds a BA in Comparative Literature and French, as well as an MA in Foreign Language and Literature. Her essays have appeared in Halfway Down the Stairs, Idle Ink, Glassworks Magazine, West Trade Review, and elsewhere. You can find her online here: https://www.sarahharley888.com.