The Mystery of Love

In which I think about one place at two different times

Sometime in the last few months, our neighbour, who has been hanging on to life it seems, for many years, finally went into the hospital for the last time. Several weeks passed, Yoko called him, and he seemed depressed on the phone. He kept saying he was coming home, but then he wasn't. Our neighbour who is looking after his house told me that he had been moved to a care home for the final time. She asked if we wanted to sign a birthday card for him, so Yoko and I went to Marks & Spencer’s and found an appropriate card to give to her to pass on to Lyn.

Over the last few weeks, people have been coming to his home and taking the things he hoarded over many years. The bin strikes are continuing in Birmingham, so the rubbish piled up in front of the house, and the neighbour asked if we could take some of it to the tip. Eventually, a father and his sons speaking a language I couldn't quite place, came and removed the last of it. I've asked how he is, how Lyn is, and the neighbour says he is lying on his back in the care home unwilling to move. She says he is not actually that sick but feels as though he is very sick, and she mentions that the house was full of different medical records and information about various diseases he's had over the years, some of them real and some of them imagined.

As they have come and taken things away, I’ve been curious about the nature of his hoarding and asked the various people what’s in there, what sort of books he had, what sort of records, only to be met with the sort of detail a writer doesn’t want to hear: Oh, all sorts.

All sorts? I want to say, to press them for detail. What sort of sorts? What exactly?

The clearing out of the house is a good object lesson for how, when death draws near, your possessions mean nothing. I immediately apply this to myself, and how eventually this will be me and my siblings sorting through my parents things, and then my children sorting through my things, although I suspect for them it will be more a question of what do do with this digital footprint I have, how long to pay for the different domain names, which of my 100,000s of emails to save and which to delete. Everything that Lyn had kept over the years is now removed, but he will not ever be back to see it removed. His niece will sell the house and the other neighbours and I will pay careful attention to the price to decide how much our own home is worth. In the autumn, we will have new neighbours, better ones than the other ones we've gotten recently, I hope, people who know how to be real neighbours, people like Lyn who can read a party wall agreement.

It’s strange to think of my children caring for me in my old age now as we transition from me caring from them in their youth. My daughters are on the verge of no longer being children and I'm starting to do the old man thing of being wistful, melancholic when I remember holding them suddenly and feel that regret of having not properly appreciated them. My parents have said that they did their best raising their children, and until I had teenagers, I accepted this, of course — we are all just doing our best. But the older I get, the more I see that it is rarely true, that it is almost never true. We are constantly not doing our best, we are constantly missing opportunities that we can clearly see but don’t take because we don’t want to, or don’t have the energy, or the right mindset, or we aren’t paying attention. I’m never the best father I can be — it’s almost become a joke, a weekly ritual of listening to dad reflect on the mistakes he’s made, and his apologies, which are in themselves selfish because they are about him, aren’t they. About him feeling bad because he’s said something he regrets and he wants to feel like he’s not created any lasting pain.

This last week, Yoko and I left our children for the first time overnight, something I had been looking forward to, if I’m honest, since they first came into our lives. This anticipation has shifted over the years in the same way that my homesickness for the States has faded, like a desire for something I used to be, rather than an experience or a place as it exists now, in reality.

Now twenty years later, we were alone again. We drove up to Bibury, this village that we’d been to once before, when the children were very young, so young in fact, I couldn’t remember if we had all three of them. Naomi, our eldest, was very sick on this trip — she had Scarlet Fever, which felt like a surreal dream, being in the UK and my daughter with this Victorian disease. We had made the non-refundable reservations for a hotel before she got sick, so we went. As I think about it, Mia, our youngest, was born because I was eating sunflower seeds, something I had picked up when we were in Istanbul the year before, when Yoko was very pregnant with Mia. I had started eating sunflower seeds and on this occasion had a cup where I was putting the shells for some reason while I was driving. At some point, of course, the shells came out of the cup and ended up everywhere in the car. I had remembered Yoko saying in English, ‘I knew that would happen.’

Yoko did not remember any of this. She remembered of course the kids being sick, but she didn’t remember the seeds or the trip being terrible. She remembered that it had been okay, it had been fun — yes, the girls were sick, but they were okay, we had a good time, hadn’t we. I agreed as I thought about it and we walked into the field and took pictures and watched, in the woods, a pair of swans make a nest for a half hour, and I wondered how they managed to coordinate their lives, if instinct was really so strong that they could simply do whatever swans do and a family of swans would create itself.

We drove to a glamping trailer we had rented for one night and I tended the stove for the wood-fired bathtub after texting the children. When the water warmed, I lay in it, the rain barely falling, the darkness of the forest around me. The day after we married, we spent one night in a place like this, an inn on the edge of Niigata. At dusk, we had looked for lightning bugs as we walked on the road, holding hands, in geta and yukata and I insisted we call out for them hotaru, hotaru, like you’d call out for a lost puppy, and we dissolved into giggles like children.

I wonder now how much is done, what’s left of the thin, unbreakable thread that connects this moment to every other moment, to the moment when we did find the hotaru and we sat in the onsen together like our love was still a miracle. I hear the door of the trailer open and close and look up to see a woman, a bible verse appearing from the shadows of my childhood, ‘Let thy fountain be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of thy youth,’ a woman whom I have seen daily for all these years, whose body knitted together three other bodies, the woman who has suffered the years of plans, whom I stand next to and wait, to whom I still have so many things I want to say. Here we are again. We are swans, we are building a nest; forgive me, please, for worrying.