LOVE AT THE END OF HISTORY

There’s always a funny way to tell a sad story. I’d like to think I’m, if not an expert, at least an aspiring ingénue, a dark horse in the Oscar race everyone would secretly like to see win gold. Big potential for her future. There’s a certain, “It’s fine!” that I’ve got down. That je ne sais “No, really, you can laugh, it’s supposed to be funny, I’m telling you as a funny story” quoi. Usually, I can work it into a tight five: My Visit to The Psychiatrist. My Manic Clubbing Episode. My Life From Ages Twelve to Fifteen. I kill at dinner parties. I’m a fabulous plus one. I’m good with parents, babies, weddings, bar mitzvahs, whatever. You wouldn’t quite be able to tell from the morose attitude I’ve taken to mädchen, but I’m good with tragicomedy. There has been a tragicomic plethora of material to choose from. However, my new year’s resolution was to stop writing gratuitously sadistic essays about potentially fractured personal relationships online. Though received very graciously by people mentioned and unmentioned, I have decided that maybe I have put everyone though enough (for now). I thought instead I would tell a funny story. Then, I thought I would at least tell a funny version of a sad story. This did not happen. Despite my best efforts, this may be my most earnest piece to date. I think I am incapable of not being gratuitous online. So this is an essay about love.

How to begin?

It was a long November. A Scottish winter, so eviscerating in its dark cold that I had to move my train back to London a week earlier. I lay still in bed, weighed down with the feeling, and then I got up and tried walking and walking, all over the heath, trying to let go of it; empty and heavy all at once. I have not been like this, so scared of the feeling and what I am capable of doing to myself, not even through that raw January, not since I was fifteen. So scared that I called my parents. It is always in winters, and always in winters like these that I am reminded of my grandfather. It is in winters like these that I realise, in the sacrifices others make at my expense, that I survive on love, on nothing but love, when I cannot get out of bed and I am brought a bowl of soup by my mother. When I am sat on by an oversized, but ultimately well-meaning dog. When I am checked up on in the mornings by my friends.

The point I make is that love is worth anything worse. It is better than all of the trite things you seem to want, or are maybe supposed to seem to need to want as a Young Unmarried Woman. Being swept off your feet, wined and dined, “taken care of” (whatever that means), kissed hard in the pouring rain. Of course, everyone wants to be kissed hard in pouring rain, but I can’t admit to it being particularly interesting to me at the moment unless proffered by someone I’m not particularly interested in telling about my particular interest. Anna asked me while we were in Paris if I was in love. Sure, I had said, I guess so. I wasn’t, obviously. It’s just that sometimes you are in Paris and these things are nice to say. I have been kissed before and I will be kissed again. This is not love, not anything close, not really.

Two years ago I spent a week in January sat by a hospice bed, holding my grandfather’s hand as he died. It’s impossible to articulate what that meant, because it’s impossible to articulate who he was. Aforementioned psychiatrist asked me what he was like recently, and I balked at the question, asked for clarification, fucked up my answer. I will put it into words, but it they will come out clumsy, they will be the wrong ones. I don’t know what to say, except for this: my grandfather was a constant outpouring of love throughout my entire life. He picked me up from school twice a week in a red Saab convertible, he showed me every single Audrey Hepburn movie on VHS, he took me to the ballet. He emailed me all the time, just because I was ten and didn’t get any other emails. He watched me scream in uncontrollable, inconsolable anger countless times and he did not flinch, not even once. He told me off for eating like an animal, he always, always took me seriously, even when I was young and even when I was wrong. He encouraged my reading; he gave me my favourite book of all time. He told me stories from his head. He was the first person who stopped me after I said something and told me I should write it down. He was the first person to tell me I could be capable of writing something.

He was, in a lot of ways, a father, and he was in every way, the person who shaped me into who I am today. I carry him with me in everything I do. I think of him every day. I am so lucky to have known him, to have been loved by him. I am so lucky to have had that week in January to say goodbye. To look at him and to know that it was goodbye in the most final and total completely eviscerating way. That he would never be at my wedding, or see me graduate, or find out if I ever achieved any of the things that he had wanted for me. To watch him drift in and out of consciousness, in and out of sleep, to hold his hand and to keep him company, and to know once I left that hospice I would never, ever see him again. To cry, and to ask him not to go anywhere, knowing how unfair I was being, and how selfish I was to ask that of him, and to not be able to resist asking anyway. Every so often he would open his eyes, and he would look at me and would say Hello darling. And to look at each other, and to both know that he was dying – it was the most wonderful thing I have ever been able to do for another human being. To watch him die, as he’d been there when I was born, to see him out of the world, as he’d welcomed me into it. He couldn’t really speak but the last time he spoke to me he had said it’s beautiful isn’t it. And I had said it is.

I’m happy to be spending time with you, he’d said.

Me too.

I love you

I love you too

I’m glad

It’s Elliana

I know.

And I really think that even half-asleep, even hooked up to an IV of painkillers, even drifting in and out of reality, he did recognise me. And even then, with considerable effort, at obvious expense to his strength, he told me that he loved me. That with his final days and final words, he wanted to remind me of it. And it was then that I understood what love was and what he had done by loving me. The gift that it was, that it is. By waking up every day and making that conscious decision. That his final gift was to give me his son. This January marks two years since my grandfather died. I light a candle for his yahrzeit every year on the 18th. Light a candle for him then too if you want. Put it by your window, so he can see it. Light a candle for him because every piece of me is owed to his love. Think of him, thank him, mourn with me. I know now that I am made up of love, and it is love from him and for him that made me realise it. I am loved and I love. This, though evident and obvious and boring, is really the only thing worth living for.

I believe in a love of great, grand gestures. I believe in getting on a bus, train, plane for the person you love. I believe in shouting across a station, blowing a kiss out a window, running through an airport, gliding down a flight of stairs into someone’s arms. I believe in throwing a surprise party. I believe in every single scene from a Richard Curtis movie. I believe in every single word Jane Austen has ever written. I believe in Leonard Cohen’s final letter to Marianne Ihlen. I believe in the folder my father keeps in a cupboard in his office, with every essay I have ever written printed out and notarised. I believe in completely devastating crushes, and I believe in telling your friends you have feelings for them. I believe in a love that makes people dedicate symphonies, paintings, lifetimes, to another person. I believe in a love that can end wars, that can stop traffic. I believe in a love that knows no depths, distances, limitations. I believe in a love that stretches to the stars and back, to the stars and back, times infinity and two. I believe in a love like my parents, love that lasts an entire life, that never fades, that is constant, that is patient, that is kind. I believe in a love that is small, that is true, that lasts long after death, that lives on in wild places when I am alone with my dead grandfather. I believe in the power of a bouquet of flowers. I think a bouquet of flowers is the most beautiful thing you can give to another person.

It has been said, over and over, by lots of people far more eloquent and profound than I could ever hope to be, and yet I still need to say it, I still feel like it is the only thing worth saying. I believe that if the world really is ending, that at the end of history, love is the only thing that will exist. I believe that in an increasingly untenable existence, love is the only thing we have left. It is the only thing that has been worth every terrible thing we have done to one another.

How lucky I am to have spent my whole life feeling as though I am undeserving. How lucky I am to have woken up one day and looked in the mirror to see myself glowing golden inside-out, made up of all this love. To contain so much for other people, to be filled with it in return. To have someone to get on a plane for, to have someone to cry for, to cry with. To have someone to ask for forgiveness, to have someone to forgive. To know someone, to really know them, I truly believe, more than anything, is to love them. There are people who you must know if you love me, because so much of who I am is made up of their love. My brother, my sisters, my grandfather, my parents, my grandmothers, my friends. Love despite my failings, my short temper, my selfishness, my constant pestering, my need for attention, my arrogance, my loudness, my sadness.

To love you is pure privilege, to thank a kind of god I had never known existed for your presence in my life. To be loved by you is an honour, a real, true, noble, ancient honour, that I carry like a vow, like a sword at my side, that I bow my head in awestruck humility to receive. Because it is that dramatic, and that wonderful, and that serious, and it is that ordinary, and that quiet, and that simple. It is love. It is me. It is you. Lying in bed watching music videos hungover, getting a lift to the station, sitting at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes, putting your hand out on the dancefloor for the hairclips I am pulling out of my head, spinning me around, getting to spin you, holding you when you cry, stroking my hair, rubbing my feet, looking at you first when I make a joke, making you laugh, asking questions, sharing good news, sharing bad news, sharing a look when a family member says something crazy, taking out the bins when I can’t get out of bed, holding your hair back over the toilet, cleaning up my sick, cajoling me into one more pint, calling me up, paying for your coffee, disappointing you but never failing, pushing your buggy, kissing your cheek, bringing you a present back from New York, thinking of you when a song plays, recording a radio show with you every week, watching the movie we grew up on, telling me I am brave, telling me you are proud of me, that you think I am capable of goodness, liking your Instagram story, letting me talk for twenty minutes about pop music, being in your arms, waving me off from a train platform, buying you flowers, holding your hand as you die, loving you, loving you, loving you.

If you tell me you need me, I will come. No hesitation, no wavering, at every expense and inconvenience, I will be there. I will come if you need me. It is the best thing I can ever do. It is, I really believe, in the most stupid, and obvious, and trite and simple way, the point of everything. I love you. I am yours.