I will not simply turn my face to the wall and die.

— John MacInnes

I attempt to read and write this. Find myself lost. In fetishism and Freud. Modernity. Materiality. In real stories of rat-ravaged corpses found crushed by piles of ancient newspapers. Neighbours gathering to whisper violently. Psychiatric journals pathologising. My brain swims. I am struck by contradictions. Conflict. Catastrophe. All that is placed and held within objects. What even is an object? At which point does object meet subject like this, enmeshed in their feelings, memories, thoughts and wishes? The objects with which I am concerned are simultaneously of absolute worth and absolute worthlessness to the subject, with whom I am also concerned. I am reminded of the multiplicity of being. Of selfishness. Drinking to cope. Heightened by shaken foundations. By unimaginable loss. Think of the dislocation. Struggle to disentangle the stuckness from generations below. Crane my neck toward the sky.

Later, I remember that I was there. That I have always been there, for as long as I’ve been here. For as long as we continue to be here.

I looked after my grandpa in his last seven months of life. We didn’t know that’s what it would be, but it was. I say ‘looked after’ almost ironically. He was as astute as he’d always been. Happy to walk miles every day, as long as he had his stick, and still drinking me under the table. I won’t glorify the drinking, but that man was made of the islands, gu dearbh (for certain). Yet, here I was, being paid a hundred pound a week by social care to be there.

It was the same flat I’d always known him to be in.
It used to be them.
I was closer to my granny as a child. Inexorably close. Her rough palms

stroked down my back with care, in the way only a granny can, after all she has shouldered. Without a father around she became my other parent. My mum, young, single and working, would send me there for fortnightly stints during my childhood. Her relationship with them was complicated, her childhood torturous and wild but full of love.

Around 2006 my granny began drifting away. I didn’t know it was a drifting at the time, only in retrospect. It was small at first, her own secret. Then, no matter how hard she and we tried to cling to her whole self, dementia took all her parts and carried them off. Our grieving was endless and then never ended. Strong in body alone she kept on and kept on living. That woman was made of the islands, gu dearbh. Over the course of fourteen years, she tailed away gradually into sleeping whispers. No full stop, no big finale. Much the same in death as she was in life. Overshadowed.

To read full essay see Stinging Fly issue 52 here.