Embracing destiny

we know what we are here for, even if its a shock.

That I got to join the ranks of well known fictional heroes occurred to me early on when I became an orphan. It was a cover up line, to distract inquiries about my ‘terrible state of affairs”. When asked about my parents I could just lightly say oh they died and then before I had to deal with acknowledging how excruciating it all was I would end with yes, just like Harry Poter. Or the Fossil sisters, Peter Pan, Huckleberry Fin, Cinderella, Spiderman, Batman, Oliver Twist take your pick, in other words pick the ending where I was destined for something other than sympathy.

The truth was far more mundane than James, Harry and the rest. No death by hippopotamus or wizardly duels over good and evil. Instead my parents checked out in a far more normal way, through illness. The grim reality that my mother, who, after my dad died suddenly, already knew that she probably wasn’t going to recover from her returning cancer and had to die knowing that she was leaving me and my brother alone.

Although my parents deaths were unexpected and shocking it was almost as if I had already known this would happen -it had been a secret and terrible fantasy of my young life, that my parents would die and I would become something incredible like all those heroes. This weird fleeting daydream, something that I would have been terribly ashamed to have admitted to and even now seems a bit off, was given a new layer of reality when I saw it enacted out in front of me at boarding school.

Myself and another girl, Scarlet, had gotten up at five am to finish homework - independently and out of the norm. I often think why that day? The boarding house was this old nunnery, having been built upon over a couple of hundred of years in a vaguely haphazard way whilst still holding the bones of thick limestone walls and curved arched windows and a large landing that was atop of a sweeping set of stairs leading to the ground floor.

Three of the dorms opened onto the landing as well as the old bathrooms and the forbidden corridor that led to the housemistress apartments. Getting out of bed, not being where you’re meant to be, was a punishable offense but our year was generally let of lightly for even though we were devilishly naughty we had an air of innocence and roguishness about us. We were an extremely creative lot, most of our mischievousness being around drama, cards or improv, dancing or singing and gymnastics, disobedient in a very playful way that was hard to stay angry with. So even though Scarlet and I found ourselves on the landing at five, sitting quietly over our books in small tidy heaps, we weren’t too worried about getting into trouble. We weren’t keeping anyone up, we were being quiet, focussed in that early morning kind of way and we were doing homework which seemed hardly punishable. But almost immediately there was a sudden flurry around us. Someone arrived at the front door and the house mistress was out and about and on the move. Scarlet and I, frozen in indecision about what to do as Miss Maple whisked past us, barely giving us a glance as she retrieved a fellow border from our dorm.

This was strange and there was a deep grimness to the air, Scarlet and I sat still and quiet, embracing our invisibility while the abnormal unfolded and we became the silent witnesses. Miss Maple bustling into our dorm and moments later a disheveled and alarmed Fiona was led down the large sweeping staircase into the library below. We knew something serious was up.

Then came the screams. Piercing screams that echoed and curved up the stairway. Terrible screams which were quickly shushed and murmured and coddled back into the nothingness from which they came as Fiona was hurried out the front doors and whisked away in a large black car, still in her pyjamas. Screams that I can still remember for the unforgettable quality of horror, for their very un -Englishness of raw emotion.

We found out at breakfast that her parents had died accidentally on a skiing trip in Abu Dhabi. It was so eerie that I had chosen that day to park myself on the landing and to have felt the full force of her despair that held all of her anguish. That for some reason I had been party to a tragedy that would play out for myself just a year later. Not that our year was immune to death, we were somewhat cursed having endured a suicide and cot death in other families, but nothing that matched the heroic storyline of my little fantasy quite so accurately. And then the strange collective response when Fiona returned. The weird popularity that she gained, even though she wasn’t a particularly popular girl. How she suddenly became someone else. How her story became her.

I now had a direct script for my own escape of mundane. My parents would die and I would be born again as well not me. Of course I didn’t want this to happen, nor were the chances likely that it ever would and I certainly knew that my need for escape wasn’t something that gave me the power to make it so but for sure I was waiting for something like that to happen.

It took me almost forty years to realise that all of this felt familiar because it had happened before, it had happened when my young mother gave me up for adoption. An adoption that was a celebration of love essentially, a sacrifice so that I could be cherished by loving parents. While I certainly didn’t expect for my parents to die, strangely I wasn’t surprised that they did.

I remember clearly being taken down to the office and given toast with margarine while I waited for the taxi to take me to my grans house. Remember thinking that my mum had died or was about to given that she had been ill during the Christmas holidays, in Paris where we were living at the time, even once yelling out in pain so much so that I had to call my dad at work. How nobody said or told me anything, what was to become a running theme. My mum had gone to the hospital and then came home and that was that. She had come back and Christmas happened as normal, me laughing at my dad who couldnt help talking really loud when wearing my Sony walkman head phones on, a Christmas present that year. The parties where I snuck alchohol and walked drunk through the Arc de Triomphe, my main concerns being that I felt far to big for my body and almost died with embarrassment when there was a tampax commercial at the movies.

My mother came back to England to spend her January birthday with her mum, which was also odd and I was meant to join them for the weekend but she had again been ill so I knew something was off and I remember looking down at the hateful margarine which we never had to eat normally, seeing it as a picture in my mind, already disassociating, as it puddled on uneaten toast. Miss Maple saying nothing, just that I had to go home, and me feeling the terror that my mum had died and here it was finally happening. The last thing I really expected on arriving at my grans house was being told, by my devastated mum, that my dad had had a heart attack coming home from work and had died within 3 hours after not responding to treatment in the hospital. The strange dislocation of my ill mother in England and out of the blue dead dad abroad. The weirdness that my older brother, only 16, was the one who had to go to Paris and somehow navigate getting my fathers body home. Nothing was normal.

The next 6 months became a weird limbo and in classic English style everyone decided that the best thing would be that I was told nothing so that I wouldn't have to worry. It was very clear to me however that something was terribly wrong and so I got to worry about exactly what that might be as well as how we would cope. Of course I never asked either, having needs would have been far too much. receiving sympathy and support was completely beyond me. Grieving for my dads passing paled in comparison to the looming unknown. His death, where our whole family grieved together, was sudden and unexpected. A short sharp shock.

With my Mothers sickness I was not old enough by any means to take advantage of the time given to us in chronic illness to say goodbye to my mum. To treasure watching the last time our loved ones move through this physical plane. To be there with them as they labour with death. Instead I was to continue on as if everything was normal while anxiously worrying about what the fuck was going on while pretending that I was fine.

So it was an odd relief when my mother died in June, a month after my thirteenth birthday. Things had been getting too stressful. It was clear that my mother was in agony, and even though I couldn’t comprehend what it was like for her still grappling with her husbands death and the knowledge that she was leaving two teenagers far too soon, I did know I couldn't help her. Couldn't help her as she cried in front of the mirror looking at her misshapen body after unsuccessful surgery. Cried at how broken she had suddenly become and how completely fucked things had turned out to be.

I was kept on at boarding school and not privy to any meaningful conversations. I listened to Dire Straights and the Eurythmics on my walkman and absolutely hated the way I was getting attention out of pity. I think it was finally my brother who told me after a hospital visit a couple of weeks before her death that she wasn't going to recover, the relief that someone was voicing the fears, as my mother lay, drugged to the eyeballs unable to speak but able to squeeze my hand.

At my fathers funeral my mum and I had gone to get our black dresses together, and helped with the food for the gathering after and kept busy with all the things you need to do during death. We had supported each other in the important rituals and ceremonies that help ground us and mark intense transformations that occur in life. At my mothers funeral I was just a mess. Literally. I had on my school uniform, a particularly horrible version of our summer dress, one that I had no doubt gotten from lost property as somewhere in all the chaos it had been forgotten that I didn't have access or wherewithal to upkeep my wardrobe and I had taken to going to lost property to replenish my clothes. I remember clearly standing there at the grave looking at myself, not in black, but a nasty rayon version of white and blue, three days worn, and an egg-stain down the front knowing that things had gotten pretty bad.

I can only guess that I was impossible to talk to and that everyone else was also overwhelmed because I can’t remember anything being said or decided or discussed. I was shocked to the core when my mums best friend, a wonderful American who we had lived next door in Switzerland came to the funeral and gave me a big huge hug. Being left alone to deal with what ever you had to was definitely the tactic being employed and the relief of being held for a minute was palpable. I spent most of the time in my bedroom so that no one would see me cry. My mother apparently had not told anyone she was dying apart from maybe my gran who shortly afterward came to live in our family home, a terrible decision that I could only guess had been hatched out while my mom was mad with grief, cancer and morphine. My brother, being 16, could behave somewhat independently but it was my gran and me, both not able to drive, who felt the full brunt of reality as we were left to rattle around the house that only held painful memories of what it was meant to be and now clearly wasn't.

That summer I realised very soon that I had to figure out what to do with myself or go insane. I felt mad, thirteen years of age, not able to have any control yet being extremely resentful of anyone who tried to tell me what to do. After all they had no right. If I was going to be left on my then I was bloody well going to figure it out by myself, thank you very much. So I sat and watched tv and simmered in despair at just how hideously pissed off and stuck I felt. At just how tedious and painful the reality was compared to the fantasy. It certainly focused me.

It took a minute of that long endless summer imprisonment before I rode the surge of power that comes after death, certainly not a word that I would have used at the time but one that is the only way I can describe how I felt, for the rest of my teenage years. I got to experience the full potential that happens when the tower crumbles, to experience the cosmic wind that comes to you in sudden and extreme transformation. I got to experience the choices that lay there, in the place of nothing left to loose. I got to consciously understand what it was like to be left behind, abandoned and lost. I often tell people that its the thing that saved me from the essential cruelty of boarding school where at least 80% of the teenage girls had severe body dysmorphia and either an eating disorder or some other form of self harm. I was plucked, taken out of all those concerns, during those chaotic six months. Being popular, liked and needed by my peers became completely irrelevant. What table I sat at and with whom didn't matter anymore. The girls could tell. I became untouchable, every now and then hearing really strange rumors and stories about me as I just didn't give a shit about something as irrelevant as high school when I was experiencing the utter loss of my family framework.

My main concern was how I was going to look after myself. Not really the practical things, I was fortunate that I wasn't starving or homeless or being abused but the emotional concern, the very sanity of my being, where indeed I was starving and homeless. I knew in my bones that I was at a choice point. I could either become a victim to my circumstance and blame others for how I felt or I could try to be true to myself, despite my circumstance and become irresponsible from the place of choice. So I chose. After all what was there left to be afraid off?