Henri Copeland
Throughout the first three years of grief, a sensation gnawed at me. It pushed in towards the core of my body from the outside, coming at me from all directions, squashing my chest with the weight of its questions. When the sensations ramped up, I would close my eyes. The image that came was always the same. I was in a dark room, sitting in front of a three rows deep jury of shadowy faces, trying to defend myself, but with no evidence to bat away their accusations.
“What is the point in being a woman if you never have a baby?” they demanded to know, but I couldn’t find an answer. Silence got stuck in my throat, scratching and twisting into a lump as their questions kept coming through the darkness.
“What is the point in being here if you do not have your own family? If you are the final link in your ancestral chain?”
“What is the point in being in the world if you are alone? If no-one has chosen you? If you are so clearly unlovable?”
Unable to prove my innocence, my head dropped to the floor and their voices became drowned out by the sound of my own question.
What is the point in me being in the world?
*
A delivery van arrives one Thursday. The driver looks vaguely familiar. He rummages around in the van for a while, whistling along to the radio, before jumping out with a parcel.
“Do you recognise me?” he asks from the doorstep, scanner in hand.
“Yes. I do.” I frown as I take the parcel, “But I’m sorry, I can’t place you?”
“I came with a delivery last year during lockdown.” He nods towards the strawberry plants that I’m growing in an old wheelbarrow in front of the kitchen window, “I asked you how you grew such good strawberries. You gave me a little booklet about growing your own, and the name of the company you got your plants from.”
“Oh, yes! I remember now.” I smile. It was such a small interaction, if he hadn’t mentioned it I would never have remembered.
“I ordered some plants, got a strawberry patch on the go and followed the advice in the guide and honestly, I’ve had the best strawberry crop ever!”
“Oh really? That’s great!” I don’t tell him that I wrote the guide. I don’t tell him that I worked with the designer to put all the information together as clearly and beautifully as possible, to make it easy for anyone to grow their own vegetables and fruit, even if they’d never managed to keep a pot of parsley alive before.
“Seriously, my wife and I have been enjoying strawberries all summer, and that booklet has inspired us to try growing some more things next year.”
*
My friend and I walked along the banks of the River Thames, slowly because his children were dawdling behind us dragging their hands against the railings. We talked about how he was coping with a stressful situation at work, with his daughter’s recent diagnosis, his mother’s steady neurological decline, his grandmother’s death three weeks earlier and his father’s stress at trying to cope.
“It’s been shit. But, you know, I feel like I’m dealing with it all really healthily,” he said, “I’m talking about it. I’m letting myself actually face the feelings rather than trying to be all manly and pushing it down.”
“Oh, that’s good, I’m really glad to hear that.” I smiled. We’ve been friends a long time and I know his tendency to soldier on.
“It’s a lot because of you, actually. It’s been really inspiring, seeing how you’ve dealt with not having children and faced all your feelings around that. I’ve learnt a lot from watching you.”
*
On the day that the Beast from the East hit Cornwall, I went for my normal mid-morning walk with my dog. We walked up the drive and to the main road where we cross over to join the woodland path. There was a car parked up on the verge. It had a dent in the back and a long graze running down the length of the driver’s side. I glanced through the window and saw a woman, perhaps in her late seventies or early eighties, looking anxiously at her mobile phone.
“Are you okay?” I tapped on the window.
“I’ve had a bit of a bump. The other driver just drove off.” Her voice was shaking,“I’ve called the rescue team and they’re going to send out a truck, but with the ice on the roads they said it could be a little while.”
Bilbo and I nipped back down the drive, returning five minutes later with a flask of tea and a hot water bottle. We left them with her and suggested she leave them by the gate if the tow-truck arrived before we were back from our walk.
“I’m still waiting,” she shrugged at me when we returned an hour and a half later. She was on her phone, worry filling her pale, tear-stained face. “I don’t understand what they’re saying to me.”
“Shall I speak to them for you?” I suggested, noting the blue in her hands and lips as she passed me her phone. The conversation I had with the rescue services on her behalf clarified that there had been a number of incidents, some heavy snowfall, and that it would be several hours before they were able to get to her. I gave them my own phone number and asked them to call me when they arrived.
“Come on,” I said to the freezing cold woman, “Walk down the hill with me to my cottage and you can warm up by the fire. When they arrive, they’ll call and I can bring you back up to your car.”
*
A friend sent me a message this morning.
“The potatoes you gave me are doing so well! Can you remember which varieties they were?”
I told her the two variety names - Charlotte and Kestrel - and when they would be ready for harvesting.
“Brilliant! They’ve started flowering and I can’t wait to dig them up and eat them.”
*
What’s the point in me being in the world? When the question comes now, as it inevitably does in the midst of a grief wave, I am quicker to find my answer, quicker to provide evidence to the jury. I am here in the world to be me, I tell them, to touch hundreds of peoples’ lives in small ways or big ways, just as other people touch mine.
