As the seventh Samhain since their daughter’s death approaches, Klara and Hector Armstrong are struggling to live a normal life in the company of grief . . .
Hector
Sometimes a story begins with an image. A feeling. With The Silence of October, this was the case. A grey-haired man I saw one day crossing Nassau Street, preoccupied, giving the impression of being a little ill at ease with himself, had been haunting me for some time. He’d been heading towards Trinity, had the air of old money. I’d written the phrase ‘his coat flapping behind him like an acolyte’ into a notebook. His name, I’d decided (because writers are powerful in these things) was Hector. It felt sharp, angular. Not a man to mess with if he was in a mood, I decided. I doodled and ruminated and searched for the next sentence. I couldn’t find it. I closed the notebook. He continued to slide in and out of my mind occasionally over time. As though he should be significant, if only I could figure out why.
Lying in my bed one morning during a Covid lockdown, searching the dusty archives of my brain for a new story, I saw him lying in his bed. Staring at his ceiling, as I was staring at mine. His house was fancier than mine, but faded. A house which felt the weight of history. I gave him a small wave. He ignored me. Continued staring. I decided it wasn’t personal. I watched. I listened. I inhabited. The first thing across this Hector-man’s newly minted consciousness was the presence of a stain. Yellow-brown fronds creeping from the cornicing, disturbing his eyeline. Something sinister to it. Mine was metaphorical, but I felt this stain too. A gift of the virus perhaps. Neither of us could control these infringements on our peace. They manifested as a crushing stasis. The linger of some unnameable loss. Nameable loss.
Klara
Somewhere, in his kitchen, in mine, somebody was banging pots and pans. I wandered there. A different kitchen, full of age and odour. A woman called Klara, clear as an autumnal day, laden with expectation and duty, appeared. She was feeling it too, this loss. Sharply. It manifested in her body as an annoyance. A grubby dressing gown. Irritated movements. Something was being foisted upon her. Was suffocating her. Some truth she couldn’t own, could only outsource as anger, as blame.
It was clear something had happened.
Perhaps it was simply life.
Hector and Klara
On my bedside table at the time were two books – The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver, and Homo Deus: A Brief History Of Tomorrow, by Yuval Noah Harari. Fiction and non-fiction, these books are thematically aligned in terms of the consequences of humans living longer. With the long still days of the pandemic, time was an abundant commodity, it’s scarcity an unreliable memory. The hours moved slowly. A conundrum posited by Harari was gaining traction in my thoughts: if we live to one hundred and forty and get married at, say, even fifty, is it reasonable to expect a marriage to last almost a hundred years? How is it possible two people might change in sympatico over such a long period?
‘What do you think about that, lads?’ I asked my newly created humans.
(Yes. I have a God-complex. I’ll own it.)
The two side-eyed each other. Hector shrugged slowly. Klara shook her head. Sadly. They had not always existed in this way, I thought. This version of them now was not how they saw their true selves.
I needed to know more. I took them on long solitary Covid walks with my dogs. Asked them questions, general and specific. Lay listening to their chatter late into the night. They visited me during mundane moments. During inappropriate moments. Tapped me randomly on the shoulder with their truths and grievances. He said / she said. They fair had me withered with their hurts.
‘Whoa,’ I said. ‘I’m not a professional, lads. Just a curious writer. You loved each other once, no?’
‘We did,’ Hector said.
‘We really did,’ Klara said. ‘Before The Big Thing.’
Hector made a noise, a grunt or a groan, perhaps.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Tell me about The Big Thing.’
The Big Thing
Soon it became clear to me that, yes, there was The Big Thing, but also there were many Little Things. They had been married almost thirty years.
‘It’s a long time,’ Hector said.
‘Til death do us part,’ Klara said. Looking awkward.
Death. The Finale. The End.
Theirs was a story of huge grief. The death of a child. Also, small griefs. A thousand minor and major reductions of each other. The mutation of their expectations into something increasingly grotesque: resentment.
‘But first, there was love,’ they insisted.
Wide eyed. Sorrowful.
‘And what did that look like?’ I asked, gently.
Love, Grief, Happiness
Point Of View is important. Love … Grief … Happiness … these words look different depending on the eyes. We have individual bars, versions, notions. And Hector and Klara did indeed have different ideas of what love is and should look like, now in their fifties, but also before that. They had, of course, shared a feeling, that initial euphoria of finding, fancying somebody, thinking they might be a fit, but when we delved deeper, that too was something they experienced differently.
‘Guys, you do know love isn’t just a feeling,’ I told them. ‘It’s a choice. You need to keep showing up every day, to all the different versions of each other, to hold each other, through the hard stuff. Through the good stuff. Love is, as much as anything else, a decision.’
They looked puzzled.
‘Sorry,’ I sighed. ‘I keep forgetting we have different Instagram feeds.’
Hector and Klara and Diane
The theme of love grew. How they’d once loved each other. How they’d loved their tragically deceased daughter. The Big Thing. How they’d loved their parents and siblings, Hector’s continuing grief for his ailing mother, their passions, their love for the dog, how Klara loved her friend Diane, who arrived from left-field with much luggage for her own daughter’s wedding.
‘Why, hello …’ I said.
‘Well, now,’ she said. Pulling elegantly on her cigarette, blowing smoke in my face. Sitting regal on the most comfortable looking chair at the kitchen table. ‘If it’s a story you want, I can tell you a story.’
Her own unique Diane-take on love, which was as confused and battered and life-worn as Klara and Hector’s, but in different ways. A difficult divorce, shattered expectations of a future she thought was set. And again, that beast – resentment. Rage. Sadness she couldn’t wear, didn’t think was a fit. Needed a designer label.
The Catalyst
Diane became The Catalyst, exactly what Hector and Klara needed. And writer me started to have far too much fun, investigating different perspectives on another life-enhancing version of love – female friendship. Also subject to its own vagaries and changes over time.
I played with the three of them first in a short story, the short story got shelved, taken up again two years ago when I needed a novel. They have, of course, on theme, changed and morphed many more times now. The experiences I have given them have shaped them. And in the way maybe only other scribblers can understand, they have shaped me too, helped me understand my own story. A deeper understanding of what I mean when I use the words grief, happiness or love. They’ve taught me more of what it is to be human. I am going to miss them. I hope they visit occasionally. But like all parents, I’m mostly now curious to see how they get on in the world on their own.
(c) Sharon Guard
https://sharonguard.com/about/
Author photograph (c) Conor Horgan
About The Silence Of October by Sharon Guard:
As the seventh Samhain since their daughter’s death approaches, Klara and Hector Armstrong are struggling to live a normal life in the company of grief.
Klara, a former concert pianist, never wanted to be a mother, and is racked with a persistent guilt that she never loved her daughter in the way she should have.
Hector, an academic, tries to find solace in work, but his passion project biography of poet Garret O’Malley is echoing truths he’s spent his lifetime avoiding.
An invitation to the Samhain Handfasting of their goddaughter Alice brings her mother, Klara’s oldest friend Diane, back into their lives. Divorced and newly returned from New York, she arrives carrying secrets and with an agenda of her own.
As the anniversary – and the handfasting – approach, old wounds reopen, hidden truths emerge, and their three lives converge towards a reckoning with loss, change and the complexities of love.
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