The first dead person I ever saw was my grandmother. She was 89 years old, and she died one month after her birthday. I remember the odd chilliness of her hand as I stroked it one last time. My mother had told me about it.
"It's a strange sensation", she had said. "A living person never gets that cold. I felt it lingering..."
My grandmother had been a widow for more than 40 years when she died. The last years of her life she was madly senile but happy where she was, I was convinced she was with my grandfather who I had never met. My father's father, who had died of a cardiac arrest in the forest behind their house. She had gone out too look for him because he took so long coming back, and she had found him dead. My father was 25, his brother only ten, soon he has outlived his own father by 40 years.
Death has never been a secret where I grew up. In fact it has been talked about openly. My mother's grandmother fell over from another heart related cause of death, my grandmother on my mother's side had constant heart troubles after she retired, but, said my aunts, when she died she stretched her arms out – as if someone was coming to greet her.
My grandfather who's woolen knees would chafe against my bare thighs as I sat in his lap, who called me his little dove, and carried sweets in his pocket (on box each, in each pocket for me and my brother) died in his car. His heart stopped right outside his garage, although he was vainly alive when they found him.
I remember calling his landline right after my mother told me he had died to see if he wasn't home after all. I was seven years old, and I can't remember what number I dialed.
My brother and I got his striped woolen cap and his red scarf, for months it smelled like him, a dark peppery perfume.
I wore a black plaited skirt and shiny patent leather shoes to his funeral, my older cousin couldn't stop crying behind me. The golden lettering in an equally golden frame behind the coffin read JESUS, the only altar needed for Pentecostals.
I remember wanting to cry because it would show I was sad. And going home with a friend of the family after the ceremony with my brother and my younger cousin who was only six, to eat Basset's Allsorts and take our Sunday bests off. My aunt wrote the verse in the obituary, about the wind swaying in the trees. A deep green forest that would never end.
The men in my family have been woodsmen, the forest a refuge for heated thoughts.
I eat dinner with my father in a noisy urban restaurant and he leans in over his plate and tells me.
"Christine, I have found this spot. Where the forest meets a meadow and a hill, like a triangle... and when it's all done, I'll build a little cottage there, and I'll go lay down, and you know where to find me."
I am not sure my father will ever do this. But I am certain he longs to.
My father's mother, who outlived her own husband for longer than they had been married, resonates in me now. I see her in the structure of my cheekbones. My smiles. I see my father and my mother's mother in the shape of my face, and all of them in my curly hair.
Perhaps I indulge so much in death and its concepts sorrow, loss and anger, since it has never been hidden from me. And perhaps it is so since I have been brought up believing that death takes us where we are destined to be. That we are called home. That we are greeted and hence reach out to the one coming towards us.
I am a constant subtle reminder of death where ever I go. My body is a reminder that you all will decay, that human life is fragile, hurtful and full of failings.
I was brought up with a notion of having conquered death before I had means to speak about it. My brother made the V for Victory sign in the incubator, it is true, I am not telling lies. I am certain we knew we had survived, but were clueless when it came to living.
The reminder of death that my body is is hard to escape. It is a constant weight dragging on behind me, sometimes smaller sometimes larger, but constant. It is a shadow of life lived on the fringe that has nothing to do with what I do, who I love, where I live – only the fact that I am.
I cannot help but be fascinated by the way my body works. I look fairly normal, I am short that true's, but none of me is disfigured. Still I marvel sometimes, and often it takes proof in the form of photography to spark it, at my upper arms, the muscles around my neck, my boney fingers. They are each other's contrasts, the representations of force and stiffness. Movement and confinement.
I marvel at a lot of things when it comes to my physical form. Small stuff, like the dry patches on my hands that come from pressing them down onto the padded handles of my walker in infinity, the slightly more bent joint on my right little finger.
The fact that the tension in my inner thighs can give me full blown orgasms without any other stimulation. If I am really in the mood.
One could assume that such a culture that mine has been, with constant reminders of sorrow and death. With a religious context and conversations of life and death as sincere as open windows to the afterlife, would have made for a gloomy childhood. One full of dark clad somber old aunts who sang chorals with shivering voices. But it was one of mad dances in pouring lukewarm summer rains, in our knickers, my aunt me. One of sheep with little golden crowns on their heads for my brother's and mine's birthday. One of constant stories of ecstatic relatives and mad childhood mischief such as painting cows and riding pigs. But with a frankness about mental illness, disability, grief and starvation that taught us.
Memento mori
But most of all
Memento vivente
My brother's and my body are slowly decaying. As with the half life of nuclear waste, we are withering, you all are - we have just gotten a head start.
My physical composure has landed me a place in a social structure of discrimination that I couldn't choose, but see all so clearly now. I am frightened; I am terrified that it will cage me in.
It is a porcelain white panic, the notion that this is my state, for as long as I live my body will hinder me to live a life free from help. I can be independent perhaps, but never truly autonomous. It is a condition that I cannot fight but musr accept, a notion I bear with me wherever I go, and sometimes it hits me. Bluntly over the head.
It is unfair, but life is unfair. I was lucky to be brought up with the lessons of love and bravery, of force. I was lucky to live in a home where nothing was hidden. Where the truth would truly set us free.
I was lucky to meet a man, a Norwegian wonder of nature. A talent in the truest sense. A teacher who taught me what no school would ever, a lesson I too often forgot.
He said that I had an eye for detail, that it was good that I sought a career in this, so few women did.
I didn't think of him yesterday shivering between my sheets but I think of him now, when I have come through to the other side of despair.
"Be small he said, be small but never frightened."
So I accept my fragility, I accept decay and I accept death. I accept my smallness as well as my force but I won't accept how structures frighten and rattle me.
My father's mother, the only dead person I have touched knew the true meaning of loss. Although as I touched her body her chilly bones knew nothing, had no stories to tell, spoke no language. Showed only, as a map, the trails of life lived.
In my father's photo albums the young woman who I resonate wears a soft flowery cotton dress, she is strong and healthy but she looks shyly into the lens of the camera.
There is something that always draws me into that picture, her hips, underneath her dress they seem to glow, like iron. My father's mother had glowing hips, my mother's mother only one eye and I have shivering thighs that grant me pleasure without touch.
