Today
Snow Light Water Light by Frances Horovitz
Today, I was walking back up to my studio after lunch, back to the routines of daily work and of thinking for others. Today was not a good day to be doing this. Today, twenty-six years ago, when I was twelve, my mother, Frances Horovitz, died.
I thought I was past the point of being overwhelmed by this; the old lie you tell yourself to keep on keeping on. But today I called in at Dennis Gould’s stall at the Shambles market in Stroud and he said: “Adam, I’ve got something for you.”
Dennis is a poet and printer; he creates fine, anarchic letterpress prints of beat poems and gnomic sayings, football haiku and hymns to garlic and cycling. I assumed he had one of his latest prints for me. I was wrong.Dennis opened up his rucksack and drew out a pamphlet. “I saw this in Oxfam and thought of you,” he said, passing me the pamphlet. I took it and looked at it. It was Snow Light, Water Light, the last pamphlet of poems by my mother that she saw.
I had first seen this pamphlet twenty-six years and two days ago, when I went to the Royal Marsden hospital with my stepfather. It had arrived that day, and my mother, straitened by morphine and pain, had looked at it with us with weary pleasure.
It is the only book of hers I do not have a copy of dedicated to me in her hand. There were other things to think and talk about that day and she was too weak to write, having saved all her strength just to see me and to be coherent when she did so. It would have been stupid and shallow to ask; I was saying goodbye without admitting that I was saying goodbye.
Still, as a teenager, I felt a curious angst about the unsigned book – one of my mothers’ closest friends, the poet Gillian Clarke, who had turned up out of the blue to see my mother the next day, driven by a suspicion that she had to do so now or not at all, had a signed copy. I felt pangs of foolish envy of this for several years, always acknowledging the foolishness but unable to suppress the emotion entirely.
Today, I wept as I opened the book and Dennis apologised. But he could not see, and it was too much for me to explain to him then, that this was the most perfect present I could have asked for, with the most serendipitous timing.
If you live long enough, there often comes a point when you think that you can live past the blistering hurt of absence and hunker down to the abstract wonders of routine and money-earning, growing up, growing out, becoming something new and independent. You can’t, it’s impossible. I tried for years and buried too much beneath drink and food and more besides.
Deep at the heart of everyone who has lost someone lies the gaping wound of the grave. If you fence the grave off, or fill it in, you lose sight of the past, the truth, the urge to live well and be happy and be yourself.
Today, thanks to Dennis and his gift, given without knowledge of the day’s significance to me, still less of the significance of the book he gave, I believe am finally beginning to be prepared to live with the open grave, the memories that linger in it, like approximations of hope. Today, I am stronger for the memories, because I can recognise them for what they are; a part of me, of the continuum of living.Somewhere, I will always be twelve and mourning. Somewhere I will always be twenty-five and ill with grief-stricken, unhealthy living. Today I recognise and welcome all of this unblinkingly. Today, I may be able to begin to grow up, un-shuttered, unfettered. Today will live with me for the rest of my life.
