“Memorial”
Requiescat
Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
From ‘Requiescat’ by Oscar Wilde
Death in the young is always far more tragic than death in the old. I think it is the unorthodoxy that we loathe- the feeling that only the old can greet Death as a friend, and the young are torn away by His cold and unforgiving hand. The young have more to live for, though they have so little of their life established. In the years of time I have had to truly ponder my sister’s death, I have concluded that this tragic notion is a reflection of a sort of ‘doubled grief’. At twelve years old I knew no better than to grieve for the loss of the pigtails- the golden hair that rushed past like a breeze, and pooled around her pale face while she slept. I mourned the loss of the small girl I loved; the loss of a playmate. Now that I have seen thirty-four summers without her, I grieve in a way lost on the simplicities of youth, and lament for the life that was destined for her- a room prepared with no waiting occupant.
I don’t believe anyone truly knows what to make of Death. He is a creature unlike any being we can imagine, until we meet him. In my dreams after Isola’s death, I saw Him as a hooded skeleton, draped in a cloak made of midnight. He lurked constantly- the proscenium to every dream and every nightmare. Bony fingers stretched around my bed, growing from underneath me and taking root above my blanket. Tightening leatherlike, they bound me to my bed and even when my eyes were open, He would not relent. In his inconceivable enormity he took hold of my shivering frame and kept me encased in his grasp, claws of translucent skin locked above me. I could not reach to pinch myself, so I would screw my eyes tight shut and wish for it all to go away- for Death to release his grip and allow me to wake up in the morning. When I opened my eyes, He would be gone, and I would not tell my mother what I had seen.
I think becoming a writer was the only natural progression of my life. The vision of something so abnormal in a young mind lurks and festers, and must be given an outlet lest the person becomes insane. I started to write at twenty years old but could only commit to the hidden pages of a journal. It was my first year at Oxford, and I noticed my distance from my sister more than ever. I kept her close to me with my words, and she lived, for a brief time, in the pages of my diary. Isola never left my heart, and certainly not my mind- for everything I tried to write in the earlier years came out as a pessimistic longing I couldn’t help but oblige. It was inside me, completely and wholly, and I determined early on that I would like it to come out in my writing, and not in one of the many horrific ways in which I had imagined it physically emerging. I had visions of it ripping my skin from the inside out- sharpened nails piercing my stomach and parting it like a pair of curtains. I wasn’t sure at the time what it was, but it felt like a funeral. Like the combined symphony of grieving wails that all amalgamated inside my chest and wept and sobbed in my ribcage. I understood it only when I wrote about it, and even then, it was a poor attempt. A bandage over a burst pipe.
When I was back in Ireland, it would reassure me enough to sit with her. She took on the form of a stone slab engraved with her name and erected in the local cemetery. When I was younger and far more naive I would talk to her as if nothing had changed. I would tell her about school, and what my friends were doing, and what I thought she would be doing if she was still on my side of the soil. I would bring a flower, when I remembered, and spend the first part of my visit describing the colours. I would ask her if they were a different colour on the other side of the ground, even though I knew they probably were, and that she couldn’t have opened her mouth to tell me otherwise. I began to forget what she looked like. I would grapple with the dichotomy of it all- trying desperately to understand that if she was older now, she would look it. She would be forty-three, if she were here. She would have her own children, with their own pigtails, and she would be old. Yet to me, she always seemed impossibly young- younger even than she was. A baby. Walking, maybe. But just… small. And still. And uncomfortably cold. That is why I choose to picture her as she was when I last saw her, and I cling tightly to that perspective. It is, and has to be, the only one.
To me, she was, and always had been, a ray of sunlight. When she was alive she would dance and smile and play, a blur of golden hair with a small body attached. There was a time in the summer of 1859, when Isola was barely an infant, when the two of us were playing together in my father’s garden. In the south corner there was a small patch of grass that always grew a ring of brown mushrooms. I was the superstitious child of an Irish mother, and so I dare not get too close to the fairy ring. I was taught, very firmly, not to break it, cross it, or disrespect it, so I taught Isola the same. She would have been just two years old, so I cannot be sure the message was properly relayed, but I told her everything I knew about the fairies, and why it was so gravely important to respect and protect their spaces. I told her to be careful where she stood- but I think, at her young and unpredictable age, she hardly knew where her legs were in relation to the rest of her body, let alone the rest of the world. I didn’t watch her for long, I couldn’t. I did not want to be in any way complicit in my sister’s fate.
I don’t know why I cared so much. Such things are the product of an overactive imagination, and not something to be genuinely believed in. I do think I should have changed the part of the garden I taught her to play in.
For a long while, the sunlight was the only way I saw her. The refractions on my walls in the middle of summer, the translucent blankets draped across my furniture in the crepuscular glow. In winter she was the brightness of snow, the near-blinding reflective layer that sits on top and waits for the right moment to strike and debilitate you. She was always gentle in her intention, but often blinding in her manifestation. My Isola- consistently pushing away those that cared for her, even in death. I used to wish for her often, in the darker months. Beg for her to come back to me, to bring light to my life again as she did when she was alive. The firelight was never comparable, though I tried to make it so. I lit them everywhere: in every room in my house, so that she might be welcomed by a kindred spirit and come to me in the colder seasons. I always saw less of her in the Winter.
Though I could not see her, I felt her once the weather turned. She was the chill on my back, the reddening of my nose and the tips of my ears in the December frost. She was my breath, a whistled cloud exhaled from my chapped lips. I felt her in the Winter. Her presence wrapped firmly around my shoulders, a vice-like grip begging me to remember her. To cherish the warmth in my blood while I still had it.
I was twenty-seven years old when I started to hear her. I sometimes thought I heard her in my mind, answering my rhetorical questions with imagined giggles, but this was different. The sound was weighted- it was concrete. A hard rock, splashing into a river. A solid and tangible sound. A sound that came from outside of my head. It was incredibly present, but undeniably unstable- a feeble wheeze without a host. But it was her- that I was certain of. In the earlier days it was just that- a slightly laboured gust of wind. I checked my rooms for cracked windows but found nothing amiss, and drew the only natural conclusion. My sister was communicating with me once again.
The morning after I heard her first, I could think of nothing to do but write it all down. What had happened, what it meant, how I felt… all of it. My pen scratched furiously across the paper and I tried desperately to hold on to the specks of memory I had left. That was the start of the Requiescat- my journal for Isola, where I would note it all down. I wrote in it retrospectively, trying hard to remember times when the light had struck me, or particularly memorable encounters with the refractions. I hoped that it would help her find some sort of peace. In actuality it did quite the opposite- but I couldn’t have known.
Only ever in the dead of night. Only ever in darkness, when I had blown out every candle and closed my eyes to sleep. Only ever when I did not expect to hear from her did she wail as she did. Her voice rang out with the chimes of the clock, in the early hours of the morning. It wasn’t a cry of pain, or grief- it was the strangled wails of a near-dead infant, the cries of a child longing for affection. Longing to be held. Longing to be remembered.
The words came when I was thirty. She started with vowel sounds, as children often do, and it took almost a year for her to build up to full words. When I visited my home, I would sit in the garden and write to her, for as long as I could keep hold of the pen. The more I wrote, I noticed, the stronger she became. Her voice got stronger and more stable, whistled groans giving way to sustained phonics. She was becoming my sister again, growing back into her old body and existing with a vigour I had not seen for years. She was alive, more alive now than she had been before. Not just living, or surviving; clinging to the fraying whiskers of existence and hoping they recoil to draw her back in- she was alive, and she was with me.
These encounters forced me to consider an aspect of my sister’s death I hadn’t entertained- how she would grieve herself. When someone is forced to sleep eternally, we often assume that this reduces them to nothingness- they can no longer influence our actions, and so they have disappeared. But with my sister back in my life once again, after two decades of absence, I was confronted with a second perspective. Do the dead mourn as the living do? Are they present enough in their own souls to recognise the shift from above to below the ground? When they are consumed by the afterlife, do they miss the solidity of their body? How much of themselves do they take with them, and how much of it do they miss? I think of this now, more than ever. Paris is a beautiful and lonely city, and whilst bedridden I am forced to see only the darkness. Whoever or whatever it is that makes Paris so beautiful obviously neglected to effect this room. It is hideous, and the wallpaper dulls the senses in a way that is too close to numb to be comfortable.
She followed me to Reading Gaol, though I asked her not to. It was no place for a small child, but she was more than that by then. She was conscious, and she had the freedom to talk and exist as any child would’ve done, in the confines of my mind. I never feared her, but I feared what she was capable of as she sat inside my mind. Isola was reborn a glimmer, a refraction on a water’s surface and grew into the whisper that extinguishes a candle. When she gained a throat, she croaked with the floorboards and echoed the sounds of my footsteps when I walked. When she spoke, she was a trick of the mind, a misheard call from a distant acquaintance. It was easy to explain her away, to make logic her enemy- but she knew about the fairy ring, still. I was sure she wouldn’t have remembered, but I don’t think They let her forget. I am old enough to have lost my belief in fairies, but not old enough to deny the vengeance of something bigger than ourselves. Isola learned to sit in my brain, as They had sat in hers. They crawl under the lining, stuff Themselves into the membranes and grow- expanding ever further and further until it becomes too much for the body to handle. They call it meningitis, but nothing so medical is to blame.
My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go.
