Free Tom is Dead by Marie Darrieussecq

of the two children asleep, when, despite the sleeping pills, I got up to see them. Night after night, image upon image, this fixed image, suspended in time: Vince up the top to the left; Stella to the right in her cot. I suppose Vince brushed his teeth, put his pyjamas on and read a story by himself. I don’t remember any bedtime from that period. We were absolutely useless. Did I explain, later, what was implicit in the words ‘Tom is dead’? It wasn’t like an announcement, but was it like a marker in time, like a before and an after, like a blow to our language?… It was before Tom’s death …No. That’s not how we talk. Too big a swear word.
    No church service. The coffin must be closed. Here we are, forsaken in front of our son’s corpse. What we are witnessing is so brutal, so silent, that I think I know now what purpose priests and ministers serve: to intervene. Somebody to go between. To keep our minds busy. To stop us from seeing. Or someone, I don’t know, a friend, to officiate, to do a reading, anything, a text, the death of Gavroche, the Little Matchgirl or even the death of ET, a text for Tom, the Tom that we had known. Sound, words, to occupy the ears—so that the eyes don’t see. To distract our gaze. Not understanding, not explaining, knowing nothing. Where I am, what’s happening, what’s around me. There is only Stuart’s presence. He’s not got his back to me anymore, he’s beside me. Tom in front of us, lying in a box; a coffin—we chose, Stuart chose, a coffin then? To burn, with Tom inside. His face is purple. His mouth is black. His lips are swollen and cracked. He has no hair left but a kind of fur patch, like an animal squashed on the road. The only constructive thought I have at this time is that we’d waited too long. We’d done this to our son: waited too long. This indignity. But we didn’t know. We didn’t know that death does this. We stand before this, but this is not Tom.
    I’m only hanging by a thread, swinging. In the moments when this is not Tom, in the moments when Tom is not there , I am not there, I have become a child’s corpse, a piece of human meat deprived of meaning. There’s a word in English— roadkill—for what you find squashed on the road. But when it’s Tom, I’d like him to get up and take me into his world. To offer up my life to his teeth, to hold my flesh up to his black mouth, to open my arms as I would to nobody.
    Later on, I’m sitting somewhere. When I think about it now, someone must’ve dressed this thing, Tom. With the little white clothes we chose. Time moves on without me. Time kills Tom. Roadkill. Become a carcass. Before and after Tom’s death. Time passes. I’m sitting somewhere on a chair. Nothing happens. No music, no nothing. Tom’s cremation takes place somewhere and in silence.
    I realise now that we were very hard on ourselves. We didn’t take care of ourselves. Tom was no longer there, anyway, was no longer there as Tom, the ceremony was for us . But we didn’t know that. We should’ve tried something, a ritual, a few words…got somebody to speak or sing for us. But which songs? Which lyrics? Organising all that. I struggled with this. Somebody other than us. Vince, at the age that he is now. He’d know what to do, he’d know how to choose for us, like he’d known how to choose the Zorro costume.
    Stuart comes back up from I don’t know where. He was the one who gave the order to light the flame, I understood afterwards what they were suggesting I do, and he went down there, alone. That’s good. Stuart needed to find a moment to be with Tom. I think he also found him those first few days, when he went out to find food for us. I think back to the sculptor in his studio. Stuart got to have the very last moment. And Vince is the one who looks after me. Stella sleeps in my arms. Vince