Surviving the bereavement

 

He complains of pain. Quietly. But only to the psychiatrist and to the soul. The others are more than physical, the others are the pains of existing beyond the body. They call them pains of the soul. Because he has already asked his angel to let him go. First it was the mother-in-law, then the wife, then the daughter. And he didn't want to tell any more nightmares. That tore his plans for the future for a past that he continued to relive and that feeling of orphanhood and injustice stuck to him, especially during the day, when he laid his head on the pillow, or when he walked in the streets, trying to guess the ambitions of humanity, which still existed, in the eyes of others. At night he worked, making bread, clubs, assorted cakes with a team of three other people. He drank coffee as if it were gall, to quench the bitter pains. They survived. In the streets, in the centers, in the hypers, there were people, animals, children who continued to live together and smile, it was good to see happy people, but their fault would avenge all the smiles and conversations. He kept studying and comparing his pains with those of others. His words lost expression at the doors of hospitals, at the doors of cemeteries, but when the time came to put her head on the pillow, there was no way to crumple it, shut it up, gag it, and she gained all the space, to the point of falling asleep in exhaustion, while he squeezed his parietals, clinging to his head, trying to silence the voice of conscience and, days and days without sleep, nights and nights making bread, weaving dough, squeezing them, with that depression imprinted on his jaws and flowing eyes. He didn't look anyone straight in the eye, but he felt that everyone was guessing his woes, and behind his back he felt the pity. Poor Zé Miguel. Poor him. He was me, the poor guy who had had a beautiful, well-structured, simple life. Happy. He was happy, wasn't he? Yes, you were happy. But when happiness starts to have its place inverted in our lives, when it starts to be in the past and not to be claimed in the present or planned for the future, there, around the corner, the animal, that ugly and hairy animal, would stick to our body and devour our soul. Slowly, in an invasive way and without any respect, he ate the sap of life, reduced us to a ghost. And it threatened to stay forever. And in the process of pain, forever is a quick and unflinching euthanasia. And while I didn't meet this ugly and hairy animal, I was fulfilling an endless number of small dreams that when I was a child, I believed to be huge. Like going on holiday abroad, going on a ship, climbing a mountain in the Perineus, buying a top-of-the-range car, staying for fifteen days in the Algarve like lobster, sunbathing and sleeping whole afternoons, having lunch out and dining out, which was tiring, dreaming of the day when Sara would grow up and get married and have children and I would have grandchildren, imagining Irene getting wrinkles and always sweet and quiet. Visiting wildlife parks. So did my Irene. We fulfilled some dreams. My Sarah hadn't been given much time to fulfill them, not even to draw them, and even he couldn't fulfill them for her. First, news had come of the loss of Irene's mother and Sarah's grandmother. Ana Mendes. A cardiovascular accident. Sad. Because she was a gem. Because she offered herself to everything and everyone. Because she was a dynamo and multiplied into a thousand. And she still had time to dance folklore and sing in the choir and cook at the fairs and design posters at the demonstrations. I understood Irene. An orphan of a huge mother. It was like losing the whole family, for my wife. I tried to give her strength, but I myself felt empty without her mother-in-law's laughter. When you are joyful and occupy yourself in this way the whole life of others, emptiness is the inevitable and predictable place of those who are left. My Irene had tried. I even saw her draw a smile or two in the nursery, when she took the meals to the kids' canteen. And sometimes I would take half of her sentences, the sentences she couldn't finish and ask about the boys, the nonsense that the educator told, the drawings they made for the teacher to give to the cook, to my Irene. But what did the teacher say, then? And my Irene tried to resume, but if I was careless, sometimes for a second and she had already slid her gaze to the floor or to the frame of her mother's photograph, next to the lamp. He didn't even dare touch the photos. Irene fled to the bathroom. She would even lie down with me during the day and the alarm clock would wake us both up and she would say: Zé Miguel, don't go to work today! But she turned the other way and he pushed himself to the pastry shop and she was improving, Sara had finished the fourth year of her degree, she was already putting together what would become her thesis, her last act of life and writing. Irene snatched. We stopped going to the cemetery. I let go. She continued to go on the sly, on the way out of the nursery, on the way back from the market. And the pains push people away, people's conversations, people's looks, sighs begin to be a way of living with others, without us having to resort to screams of anger, pain, handkerchiefs of grief, to the kicks to the walls and the direction of our tears, to the endless questions that began "how" and "why" to replace themselves with the predictability that grief brought. That it was one day after another. Waking up tired and incoherent. And wonder if it hadn't all been a nightmare. And to realize, every day, that the nightmare was this place where he lived and crawled. And it was. The hell deprived of the pain that kept him alive when all he wanted was to sleep forever. 

That November, bread ceased to smell, hot bread ceased to ask for butter, ceased to ask for hunger, ceased to be made in the same way. I believed, at one point, when my employees asked me for orders or had to meet with them and the accountant, that something didn't work the same way anymore, maybe he saw me not being a baker anymore, I thought that maybe they could look me at me as being a stranger, an absentee, because I stopped looking them in the eye, I stopped even wanting to see their faces and I started to feel that maybe I should take a vacation or go about the business or run away. If bread didn't even taste like bread to me anymore, only the pain, I began to believe that even the customers, when they ate them, would taste like mold or something other than bread. Were they crying? Did they eat? The sale hadn't slowed down, the orders kept coming, but I came to believe that maybe they felt the same way I did. A feeling of abandonment washing over me. Irene was depressed, sick. Not even half a dozen months after Ana left, until the first sign of collapse was when we received the call from Sara's internship. A fainting, a weakness, an unusual fall, an unforeseen faintness. In the emergency room, a week later, Irene and I tried to understand why we were going to be our Sara. There was that reason in me and it stayed with us. Sara was hospitalized for two months. The prognosis was the one I least wanted to think about. I only took refuge in hope. It will heal itself. How many do not overcome diseases, why not her? And Sara finished her degree, amidst a lot of worry, anxiety and hope. I believe that we, the mother and I, gave her hope back, even if it was false, but it was hope because we wanted it intact, because we needed it, every day, every night, always, like injectables that did not come to replace those of pain, like the morphine. But as long as there was life, there was a way. I stopped doing nights. I became Manuel Varandas as head baker and began to give assistance, twenty-four hours a day, to my Irene, to my Sara, and to myself only when I sensed that they were both asleep. And when we sleep, it doesn't hurt, not anxiety, not expectation, not physical pain, not pain at all. When we sleep, it's sweet relief. And my insomnia became face-to-face and nocturnal, the pain became the protagonist of the days and nights and what I was going to do with my life, with my Irene mourning her mother and already anticipating Sara's inglorious struggle. Ours. I began to go through different phases and, unintentionally, to be present in physical body and absent in spirit. And the opposite was also true. Pain is not a runner with a way out for a clear day. It seemed to me like a corridor that narrowed my faith every day, that cornered hope, every day, a little more. Fatigue overcame me. However, the smile kept it, for them. The appetite has diminished and even our houseplants have died. The disease is life-threatening. It lurks between books and chores, in the news and in hospital conversations. We cease to live. Survival began soon after the death of my mother-in-law and worsened with the discovery of that cancer that would lead us to all internal abysses. We start to make short plans, plans that are not very flat, they are more ways of escaping what we know we do not control. We cannot domesticate life. Nor what's left of it or after it. And I looked at my fingers, my hands that stopped baking bread, inventing sweets, hugging with joy, squeezing and greeting customers. To joke and smile with the staff who were a kind of family. Oscar himself went from a happy dog to a sad dog. Everything changes around a disease. Everything is depressed in the lack of faith. 

We started going to the park whenever we could. We were going to go for a walk with the Oscars. Lie, we were going to distract our pain. Sara always carried a book with her, but she hardly picked them up. She would spend hours looking at the lake. Aiming at people coming and going and maybe in intimate monologues that we all have. Sara's friends were the first to feel her loneliness. Through her absence. She was the one who chose it. She refused to be with anyone, feeling that it was not legitimate of her to compromise the joy of others with her poor health. I believe that when we are in mourning, in struggle, we are on alert and in survival. We want to push ourselves towards faith and when we run into an obstacle, we let ourselves dismantle and push ourselves to the nearest precipice. The sighs, as well as the lump in the throat become tics of everyday life, they are added to our personality, wanting to look at the other and fear that the other may read in us the anguish and guilt, the fear and sadness growing, licking our blood, whiting our soul. The business continued to be secured by the employees. It was the breadwinner and nothing else. We had no longer had goals and ambitions and the staff continued to push us, to motivate us, but they knew that in our home there was growing a wild monster that would take care of us. 

Sara died at the end of spring. It took us spring forever. Our smiles and our grandchildren we would never meet. The dreams of a lifetime were with her. She was cremated, just as she wanted. I continued to fight together with my wife, to fight to live, having everything and being nothing. I remember that every now and then I would leave the house, when my Irene had company, and I would come back, some time later, more taciturn, more submerged and enter Sara's room where I knew I was going to find her. she slept in her room with a lot of tranquilizers. She refused to go to doctors, let alone churches. She was disgusted with God. Me too. I started going to the psychiatrist. At first, I said it was to help my Irene, but after a month, I had already admitted to the psychiatrist that it was for me that I was going there, although I needed a manual to relate to a mother orphaned of mother and daughter who was my Irene, after all, my wife. That stranger who lived at home. Sometimes I slept with her in Sara's room, in bed, leaning against the wall, with the blinds always closed, even if it was high daylight, even when it was sunny. Because winters had come into our lives without warning of perpetuating themselves beyond measure. Parents should not outlive their children! 

And, believe me, we didn't survive. They kept us breathing and crying, some superior mechanism, some unknown juggling act, but alive, no!

In a few months, Irene's cancer would manifest itself. I took her to specialists in London, as well as to Sara, for second and third evaluations. Like Sara, Irene set this process in motion quickly.  I knew that with my Irene, coupled with the gigantic loss of my mother-in-law, the loss of our daughter had contributed and her refusal to go to the doctor. My Irene left in April of the following year. She followed in her daughter's footsteps. A religious ceremony where there was no end of people, children and parents and friends. I don't remember anyone, except for Quintanilha and some relatives, except for the employees who, taking turns, so as not to close the confectionery, went there to pay their respects. In less than two years, I was alone, I had a whole family and it all started with Ana, my mother-in-law. And I had even ruminated in the dark of our room, with me and with God if it had been Ana who had taken my girls. God had never dared to answer me.  But who would dare to beg my mother-in-law, who was so missed by all who knew her? I also stopped going to doctors, funerals, cemeteries.

I gave myself over to the bread. I'm a different man. If my Irene can see me, she doesn't even know me anymore. I no longer know how to smile, I don't know how to speak, nor am I coherent. I can't sleep without tranquilizers. I don't live with anyone, except for the staff who have become accustomed to my silence. That can't mess too much with my nervous system. They bring everything close to me, breakfast, lunch, they push me out of work, they try, as much as I allow them, to make me chew an empty hope in exchange for a smile that I don't sketch. I have thought of various ways to annihilate the days, other than by the brute force of work and obstinacy. One day, I'll find out the address of my girls and if life continues to make it difficult for me to find the coordinates to get there, it's going to be brutal. And triumphant, not having to survive this pain. A kind of victory that I aspire to. To be honest, it will be the big win. One day I will do things my own way. Meanwhile, Oscar pushes me to the foot of the lake, where Sara has sunk her pains. Life continues to whiten my hair, my soul and cloud my thoughts, but one day I will take revenge on it. I just haven't figured out how yet.