More meaning

First published in Column 8 on the 16^th February, 1994 

I wrote last week’s column ahead of time, one of those few occasions when I manage to beat the deadline. For once, it was ready before the same week’s column was even printed.

You may recall I was contemplating the meaning of life – as much as it’s possible within this rectangle.

The day after I finished the column, my mother-in-law died in England. Two days later, on the Friday, my uncle, my only close blood relative on my father’s side, also died in England. Neither of these deaths were exactly unexpected, but they gave a new dimension to the words I’d written.

What those deaths bring home is the fact of how difficult it is to express grief at a distance. When there’s a funeral to attend, and ceremonies to go through, and seldom-seen relatives to meet and hug, the process is a little easier, in the sense that it gives our physical beings something to do.

When the funeral has to be imagined, with all the arrangements taking place out of your hands, and all the family talking and meeting, but not in your presence, the deaths take on an unreal, unbelievable aspect, and have insufficient meaning. Because there seems little point in taking time off, our physical beings are forced to get on with the mundane duties of life, and most of the grief stays below the surface.

Grief’s a strange thing anyway. I was very attached to my grandfather as a child – I lived in his house, along with other assorted relatives. He became ill one sunny Saturday morning after church, sitting awkwardly in the back of the Austin, his face uncustomarily uncheerful.

He went to bed, but later in the morning I found him on his hands and knees in the passageway. ‘It’s all right, sport,’ he said, grinning at the puzzlement on my face.

It wasn’t all right.

He asked, ‘Did I give you a fright?’ as the ambulance took him away. I never saw him again.

Forty years later, returning late one night with my wife from a church get-together, something we’d been talking about triggered off the grief I’d never experienced as a child, and I lay on my bed and cried for my grandfather.

Whether or not we live in an age that’s more difficult in terms of loss and instability than any other, I can’t say. I know that the more friends I lose over the years through shifts [shifting houses and towns], the harder it is to try and make new ones. The more separations and divorces I hear about, the harder it is to feel concern – or to know what to feel anymore. The more sudden deaths I’m hit by, the more I wonder if I haven’t closed off to avoid the pain.

Writers have a terrible tendency to take all aspects of life, including death and loss, and file them away for future reference, in case they’re useful material for some article or story some day.

I haven’t got this on my own. I’m reading a biography of Dorothy L Sayers: again and again she expressed a similar concern. While she behaved appropriately, her feelings often failed to match the external behaviour.

Is this callousness, or just difficult in having the ‘right’ feelings at the right time? We often use the word ‘callous’ to mean people hardened to life.

Calluses on the violinist or guitarist’s fingers come from contact with the strings, from making music. Calluses on the woodworker’s hands come from turning rough wood into smooth bowls or carvings. Hardness becomes part of the very hand itself; a thing necessary to protect the softness underneath.

Perhaps hardness, or some form of indifference on the outside, isn’t always a true indication of what’s going on inside. 

Calluses developing on a guitarist's fingers 

 The grandfather in question was my maternal grandfather. I never knew my paternal one, who not only lived in England but died when I was a toddler.

It turns out that a callus is what you get on your finger, hand etc. Callous - with an 'o' - is an adjective describing what kind of a person you might be. It’s taken me many decades to know this.