Giles Blunt - The Fields of Grief

‘No. None of the classic signs. Nor is there a previous attempt in her medical records, although there is plenty of suicidal ideation. But what we do have is an ongoing, decades-long battle with clinical depression, part of her bipolar disorder. The statistics are indisputable: people who suffer from manic depression are the most likely to kill themselves, bar none. There is no other group of people more likely. God, I almost sound like I know what I’m talking about, don’t I?’ Dr Bell held his hands up in a gesture of helplessness. ‘Something like this, well, it makes you feel pretty incompetent.’

‘I’m sure it’s not your fault,’ Cardinal said. He didn’t know what he was doing here. Had he really come to listen to this rumpled Englishman talk about statistics and probabilities? Clearly, I’m the one who sees her every day, he thought. I’m the one who’s known her longest. I’m the one who didn’t pay attention. Too stupid, too selfish, too blind.

‘It’s tempting to blame yourself, isn’t it?’ Bell said, once again reading his thoughts.

‘Merely factual in my case,’ Cardinal said, and could not miss the bitterness in his own voice.

‘But I’m doing the same thing,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s the collateral damage of suicide. Anyone close to someone who commits suicide is going to feel they didn’t do enough, they weren’t sensitive enough, they should have intervened. But that doesn’t mean those feelings are accurate assessments of reality.’

The doctor said some other things that Cardinal seemed to miss. His mind was a burned-out building. A shell. How could he expect to know what was going on around him at any given moment?

As Cardinal was leaving, Bell said, ‘Catherine was fortunate to be married to you. And she knew it.’

The doctor’s words threatened to undo him all over again. He just managed to hold himself together, like a patient fresh off the operating table clutching together his stitched halves. Somehow he blundered his way out through the waiting room and into the gold autumn light.

Desmond’s Funeral Home is centrally located at the corner of Sumner and Earl streets, which pretty much means anyone coming in or out of town has to drive past it, turning it into a daily memento mori for the citizens of Algonquin Bay. It’s not a pretty building, little more than a cement-block rhomboid, painted a cream colour to soften the severity of its outlines and lighten the darkness of its implications. Whenever Cardinal’s father had driven by, he would always wave and yell, ‘You haven’t got me yet, Mr Desmond! You haven’t got me yet!’

But of course Mr Desmond had got Stan Cardinal in the end, just as he had got Cardinal’s mother before him and would get every other resident of Algonquin Bay. The Catholics, anyway. There was another funeral home a few blocks east that got the Protestants, and still another, newer establishment that seemed to be doing a brisk business with recently deceased Jews, Muslims, and ‘others’.

Mr Desmond was not in fact one man but a many-personned entity whose sad but necessary tasks were vigorously carried out by numerous Desmond sons, daughters and in-laws.

As Cardinal stepped through the funeral home entrance with Kelly, thick clouds of emotion gathered in his chest. His knees began to tremble. David Desmond, a neat young man married to precision, shook hands with them. He wore a trim grey suit with just the right rectangle of perfectly starched handkerchief showing above the breast pocket. His shoes were gleaming black brogues more suited to an older man.

‘You have forty-three minutes before people start arriving,’ he said. ‘Would you like to go in now?’

Cardinal nodded.

‘All right. You’re in the Rose Room just over that way, the second pair of oak doors on the right, just past the highboy with the head-and-shoulders clock.’ The directions were delivered as if they were embarking on a journey of some miles instead of thirty feet of pastel carpet. In any case Mr Desmond Jr escorted them, and slid open the doors.

‘Please go right in,’ he said. ‘I’ll be here if you need anything.’

Cardinal had been in this room before and knew what to expect: walls a soothing dusty pink, matching couches and armchairs, tasteful end tables dominated by gauzy lamps that bathed everything in diffuse, benevolent light. But when he stepped through the doorway he stopped, emitting one syllable – actually a sigh, a sudden expulsion of breath not intended as speech.

‘What is it?’ Kelly said from behind him. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘I asked for a closed casket,’ Cardinal managed to say. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see her again.’

‘Uh, no. Me either.’

The two of them stood just inside the doorway. The room stretched into a rose-coloured tunnel, at the other end of which Catherine, impossibly beautiful, lay waiting.

Finally Kelly said, ‘Do you want me to ask them to close it?’

Cardinal didn’t answer. He crossed the room with slow, tentative steps, as if the floor might give way at any moment.

Years previously, when Cardinal’s mother had been laid out in this same room, the figure in the coffin had scarcely resembled her. The disease that had consumed her had left no vestige of the chirpy, strong-willed woman who had loved him all his life. And his father too, minus his glasses and his combative manner, might have been a complete stranger.

But Catherine was Catherine: the wide brow, the full mouth with its tiny parentheses, the brown hair curling gracefully to her shoulders. How the Desmonds had repaired the damage inflicted by the fall, Cardinal didn’t want to know. The left cheekbone had been completely smashed, but now here was his wife, face whole, cheekbones intact.

The sight yanked him into yet another dimension of pain. Pain was not a big enough word for this country of agony, this Yukon of grief.

A bend in time, and he was huddled on one of the pink couches, exhausted and sighing. Kelly was beside him, clutching a soggy ball of Kleenex.

Someone was speaking to him. Cardinal rose unsteadily and shook hands with Mr and Mrs Walcott, neighbours on Madonna Road. They were retired schoolteachers who spent most of their time bickering. Today they had apparently agreed to a ceasefire and presented a united front that was formal and subdued.

‘Very sorry for your loss,’ Mr Walcott said.

Mrs Walcott took a nimble step forward. ‘Such a tragedy,’ she said. ‘At such a lovely time of year, too.’

‘Yes,’ Cardinal said. ‘Autumn was always Catherine’s favourite season.’

‘Did you get the casserole all right?’

Cardinal looked at Kelly, who nodded.

‘Yes, thank you. It’s very kind of you.’

‘You just have to reheat it. Twenty minutes at two-fifty ought to do it.’

Others were arriving. One at a time they went to stand by the coffin, some kneeling and crossing themselves. There were teachers from Northern University and the community college where Catherine had taught. Former students. There was white-haired Mr Fisk, for decades the proprietor of Fisk’s Camera Shop until it was put out of business, like half of Main Street, by the deadly munificence of Wal-Mart.

‘That’s a great picture of Catherine, with the cameras,’ Mr Fisk said. ‘She used to come into the store looking just like that. Always she’d be wearing that anorak or the fishing vest. Remember that fishing vest?’ Nervousness was manifesting itself in Mr Fisk as jauntiness, as if they were discussing an eccentric friend who had moved away.

‘Nice turnout,’ he added, looking around with approval.

Catherine’s students, middle-aged some of them, others young and teary-eyed, murmured kind words at Cardinal. No matter how conventional, they pierced Cardinal in a way that surprised him. Who would have thought mere words could be so powerful?