April
I was sewing a new dress when I found out, white flowers on a dark blue ground. I read the whole message from my brother twice through, then sewed another seam. Then I switched off the sewing machine. Then I turned it back on and sewed another seam, like some sort of maniac. I put all my pins back in their container one by one and called out to Rhys, who came in straightaway.
April is the month that Owen died. He was the first person I loved to die unexpectedly, distinctly in the middle of living. He was not especially old, or sick, or feeble. In fact, he was hit by a car while riding a bicycle on a Sunday morning. He spent a day in a coma, with all the parts of his body bruised. They said he would wake up, if he woke up at all, with severe mental disabilities. He did not wake up.
There were about 400 people at the funeral, people standing all around the sides and back of the church, accepting siu mai and caramel slice on the same napkin in the side room afterwards. The priest spoke about celebrations and heavenly bodies and better places and rest. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit! I yelled inside myself. He was alive and then he wasn’t, and now somebody has to go through all his possessions, the unfinished architectural plans and the hundreds of LPs and the battered carpet slippers and the dog, and remember with each one the not-hereness of him.
He set the front room of his house up just for listening: turntables, enormous speakers, a single, comfortable armchair. He was good at other types of listening too, absorbing the interests of everybody he spoke to. He is the only person I’ve ever known who followed up on every single book I mentioned. During my childhood, I can remember him being excited about almost everything, including Bach, Cuban cars, phrenology, Machu Picchu, K-pop, and smoking his own salmon. He kept a blog about sound systems and bicycles. He was always late, which is now a terrible joke. He loved Instagram and took many thousands of photographs, mostly of the faces of strangers, whom he always befriended while travelling. He was an architect. He made excellent bread. He had a perpendicular pinkie finger from a long-ago cycling accident; always-surprised eyes; Obama ears. He was remarkable for his absolute lack of conceit.
We go to yum cha the day after the funeral, the whole family, including the cousins over from Sydney, three enormous tables of us. We make loud conversation so successfully, an outsider would not notice the silence in each of us. The trolley stops and dispatches haa gow, lor mei gai, cheung fun, in a cloud of steam and shouted Cantonese. All the food glows. Everything is defiant.
I am worried about writing about him for many reasons. Death seems like a rebuttal to writing, a reminder that real life happens in the real world, not in words I have chosen. I also can’t say what I mean. It seems to be simultaneously true that other people have said it better, and that nobody has said it at all. I have no wise or clever words. And I am not interested in making things beautiful, which frightens me because it means I didn’t know myself properly.
I lie in bed after Rhys has fallen asleep and wrestle with love, as if it were a maths problem, something that could be sorted out if only I were better with numbers. If one person dies leaving behind a sourdough starter and three turntables, what is the cubic area of their absence? If death happens every day, what calculus keeps the cities running?