Running In Squares
Navigating grief with Raymond Carver
Give me your hand for a time, hold on
to mine. That’s right, yes. Squeeze hard.
Time was we thought we had time on
our side. Time was, time was, those
ragged birds cry. - Raymond Carver
We moved to our village five years in December. My grandparents left twenty or more years before that, but still there is a plaque to my nan by the bus stop.
I trim back the planting when I remember. I walk past it almost every day. She’s buried in the church half a mile away. I save that for Christmas and anniversaries, birthdays.
The bus stop has a book swap. The unwanted or finished-with books of the village. A regular rotation of gardening manuals, romance novels and, every few weeks, the same copy of the Joy of Sex comes and goes.
Shortly after mum’s diagnosis I found a copy of Raymond Carver’s final collection at the bus-book-stop. His name was distantly familiar to me but that was all.
Poems written in the final year of his life. He died of lung cancer; the same diagnosis mum had just received. Alongside poetry, quotes collected in that final year, mainly Chekov.
I had never known mum to reflect on his or any of the other’s work but the act of reckoning with the diagnosis through literature and poetry seemed a humane one. I did not tell mum about the book and I don’t know why.
I picked up Carver expecting Chandler. I’d read neither. I remembered one was known for fishwire prose, I didn’t know which. These final poems my first touch point. Only later did I read of his biography, his stories. A reluctance to know more.
I didn’t read much, if any, of Carver in the five-hundred-and-twenty-five days it took mum to die of the same cancer that killed him. It sat a couple of shelves below her for another two years. I had expected a blueprint for acceptance. A roadbook to grief but I had not consulted it. As if I was too close to the ground to use a map. At too oblique an angle to see the fish below the surface.