A couple of nights ago, an episode of atrial fibrillation woke me up in the middle of the night. It’s an unpleasant sensation, not painful but uncomfortable enough to make me aware it’s happening. The added bonus is that the more I worry about it, the worse I feel it’s getting.
I got up to go to the toilet and I didn’t fully shut the bathroom door. I didn’t want to wake the kids. There was moonlight coming through the window so I didn’t turn the light on either. The pull cord makes a loud clonk.
Nothing wakes Dylan once he’s fully asleep, plus he now sleeps with his bedroom door closed. It’s Nathan that’s the problem. I was sneakily trying to avoid him waking up and then wanting to come and sleep in my bed.
Even though my super-king-size bed has plenty of space (the me-shaped dent in the mattress barely takes up a third of it), I am trying to wean Nathan off this habit, as he is fast approaching his teens. Plus he talks in his sleep and, while it’s occasionally entertaining (“I EXIST!”), for the most part I prefer not to be jolted awake by his loud ramblings.
I was sitting on the loo concentrating on slowing my breathing to ease the Afib, when I heard the click of a light switch somewhere in the house. The slice of light I could see through the crack in the door brightened. Then another click and it darkened again. I held my breath, expecting to hear Nathan padding out onto the landing, but instead there was nothing.
The next day I asked Nathan if he had gotten out of his bed and turned his light on. He said not that he could remember. He has occasionally sleepwalked, so it’s a plausible explanation. But it then got me thinking about spirituality, and The Radio incident after J died.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I don’t believe there’s anything after death. In the same way I can’t remember anything before I was born, I think I am just going to die along with my body. I can’t get my head around the logistics of how crowded it would be if all our souls/auras/spirits/whatever, continued to exist after our death. It would be like a soul soup and, to a mostly-introvert like myself, it sounds like hell – you wouldn’t be able to hear yourself think! But J did believe, he wasn’t religious but he thought there was something out there. He couldn’t explain it, he just felt it in his bones.
J died in the garage, and I found him in there. The following day, I made myself go into the garage several times, and continued to do that on most days. I wanted to confront it and reclaim the space, to open the door up and deal with the feelings and flashbacks and mess.
I didn’t want to close the door and never go back in there – then it would become a dark cavernous lair with a monster hiding inside. Is this normal? Maybe I’ve watched too many films where the bedroom of someone who has died is kept shut, and no one can go in there. The room stays trapped in time and becomes an anchor, holding everyone back, forever attached to the past. I wanted to move forward, forward, forward. So I doggedly went in and out of the garage, tidying up the debris from the paramedics, rifling through boxes of papers, looking for notes and diaries, throwing out broken, useless things. Then, three weeks after J died, the radio switched itself on. Here’s what I wrote in my journal to J on that day:
I let Larry out at around 7:30 this morning and instead of running out into the garden like he normally does, he made a beeline for the garage. I followed him there, as I had to go and get the Riverford boxes to put out for the delivery. When I opened the door, the radio was on. How is it possible? For that split, glorious second as I opened the door, I heard the music and thought you were going to be in there. And then reality came crashing down, even harder than normal because of that tiny hope that had just flickered through my mind.
The radio had been on when I found you. I didn’t turn it off until me and Rachel were sorting stuff in there on the Sunday after you died. Since then I have been forcing myself to go in there on most days. My bike is there and I’ve sorted a few things out for the bin collection. The radio has never been on in the last three weeks, I haven’t touched it. Why did it randomly switch itself on today? My logical head says there’s a rational explanation, I just can’t quite work out what it is yet. And for the moment, it has sent me backwards.”
When the boys have asked me if I think J is still ‘with us’ in some kind of spiritual form, I have always flatly said no. J and I had had multiple, quite animated discussions about what we thought happened after death. If J’s soul had continued existing, he would have been so gleefully smug to be right, he would have wanted to send me signs so he could gloat: “I told you so!”
Anyway, I’m not sure how I feel about the concept of him still being here with us, in spirit. Is he around all the time? Does he follow me from room to room? Can he leave the house? Does he sleep? Does he watch me sleep? (shudder). Or maybe I am thinking about it too literally? Ultimately I’m more comfortable with my version of things, where you die and that’s it, done.
That still doesn’t stop me wishing that – back when we were having those conversations – we’d agreed what signs he would send me from the afterworld, if it turned out he was right and I was wrong.
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